MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jacquesm | 2025-12-14 01:26:06+00:00
I would suggest you re-read your comment in a week or so to see if by then you are far enough away from writing it to see how others perceive it. If it wasn't your intention to be negative then maybe it is my non-native English capability that is the cause of this but even upon re-reading it that's how I perceive it.

- You start off with commenting that the author has a knack for self promotion and invention. My impression is that he's putting in a status report for a project that is underway.

- you follow this up with something that you can't possibly know and use that to put the project down, whilst at the same time positioning yourself as a higher grade authority because you are apparently able to see something that others do not, effectively doing that which you accuse the author of: self promotion.

- You then double down on this by showing that it was you who pointed out to the author that there was a bug in the software, which in the normal course of open source development is not usually enough to place yourself morally or technically above the authors.

- You then in your more or less official capacity of established critic warn others to hold off putting this project to the test until 'adults' have reviewed it.

- And then finally you suggest they do it anyway, with your permission this time (and of course now amply warned) with the implicit assumption that problems will turn up (most likely this will be the case) and that you hope 'there won't be too many false positives', strongly suggesting that there might be.

And in your comment prior to this reply you do that once again, making statements that put words in the mouth of the author.
by smackeyacky | 2025-12-14 01:26:20+00:00
Best 2nd hand TVs seem to be Panasonic Viera at least in my experience. You still need a set top box of some kind as they don’t understand H264 channels only mpeg (at least here in Australia). I like them because the back lighting is quite diffuse compared to other brands. Those plus a google TV streamer is more than good enough without laying out piles of cash or subjecting yourself to a smart TV.
by wg0 | 2025-12-14 01:26:38+00:00
Thanks. It was a stupid most idea for MOST shops. I think maybe it works for AWS, Google and Netflix but everywhere in my career, I saw 90% of the problem was due to microservices.

Diving system into composable parts is a very very difficult problem already and it is only foolish to introduce further network boundaries between them.

Next comeback I see is away from React and SPAs as view transitions become more common.
by GeneralMayhem | 2025-12-14 01:27:35+00:00
> if updating that shared library automatically updates everyone and isn’t backward compatible you’re doing it wrong that library should be published as a v2 or dependents should pin to a specific version

...but why? You're begging the question.

If you can automatically update everyone including running their tests and making any necessary changes to their code, then persisting two versions forever is a waste of time. If it's because you can't be certain from testing that it's actually a safe change, then fine, but note that that option is still available to you by copy/pasting to a v2/ or adding a feature flag. Going to a monorepo gives you strictly more options in how to deal with changes.

> You literally wouldn’t be able to keep track of your BOM in version control as it obtains a time component based on when you built the service

This is true regardless of deployment pattern. The artifact that you publish needs to have pointers back to all changes that went into it/what commit it was built at. Mono vs. multi-repo doesn't materially change that, although I would argue it's slightly easier with a monorepo since you can look at the single history of the repository, rather than having to go an extra hop to find out what version 1.0.837 of your dependency included.

> the version that was published in the registry

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're getting at, but monorepo dependencies typically don't have a registry - you just have the commit history. If a binary is built at commit X, then all commits before X across all dependencies are included. That's kind of the point.
by threethirtytwo | 2025-12-14 01:27:41+00:00
>IMO the fundamental point of disagreement here is that you believe it is effectively impossible to evolve APIs without breaking changes.

No certainly possible. You can evolve linux, macos and windows forever without any breaking changes and keep all apis backward compatible for all time. Keep going forever and ever and ever. But you see there's a huge downside to this right? This downside becomes more and more magnified as time goes on. In the early stages it's fine. And it's not like this growing problem will stop everything in it's tracks. I've seen organizations hobble along forever with increasing tech debt that keeps increasing for decades.

The downside won't kill an organization. I'm just saying there is a way that is better.

>I don't know what to tell you other than, I've seen it happen, at scale, in multiple organizations.

I have as well. It doesn't mean it doesn't work and can't be done. For example typescript is better than javascript. But you can still build a huge organization around javascript. What I'm saying here is one is intrinsically better than the other but that doesn't mean you can't build something on technology or architectures that are inferior.

And also I want to say I'm not saying monoliths are better than microservices. I'm saying for this one aspect monoliths are definitively better. There is no tradeoff for this aspect of the debate.

>I can't say that EC2 will never made a breaking change that causes RDS, lambda, auto-scaling to break, but if they do, it'll be front page news.

Didn't a break happen recently? Barring that... There's behavioral ways to mitigate this right? like what you mentioned... backward compatible apis always. But it's better to set up your system such that the problem just doesn't exist Period... rather then to set up ways to deal with the problem.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-12-14 01:28:06+00:00
> recently-written episodes of Star Trek coming out in the past few years (that seem to be much less popular than TNG, probably because the entire media environment around broadcast television has changed drastically since TNG was made)

That's probably part of it. But the larger part is that new Star Trek is very poorly written, so why is anyone going to bother watching it?
by bob1029 | 2025-12-14 01:28:07+00:00
Monolith is definitely what you want to start with.

Being able to ~instantly obtain a perfect list of all references to all symbols is an extraordinarily powerful capability. The stronger the type system, the more leverage you get. If you have only ever had experience with weak type systems or poor tooling, I could understand how the notion of putting everything into one compilation context seems pointless.
by basisword | 2025-12-14 01:28:08+00:00
He wrote honestly about a profession he worked at all levels. His travel/food programmes sampled the fanciest of foods as well as the greasy spoons, local cuisines, and all without arrogance or false humility. He was very relatable for many people.

I would recommend reading Kitchen Confidential. Alternatively watch any of his travel shows although I think understanding the man through the book first makes it easier to appreciate the shows.

Regarding this specific find I don't see anything particularly special but for many it's one final glimpse into the life of someone they admire.
by famouswaffles | 2025-12-14 01:30:15+00:00
>Sure many things can be modelled as Markov chains

Again, no they can't, unless you break the definition. K is not a variable. It's as simple as that. The state cannot be flexible.

1. The markov text model uses k tokens, not k tokens sometimes, n tokens other times and whatever you want it to be the rest of the time.

2. A markov model is explcitly described as 'assuming that future states depend only on the current state, not on the events that occurred before it'. Defining your 'state' such that every event imaginable can be captured inside it is a 'clever' workaround, but is ultimately describing something that is decidedly not a markov model.
by ChuckMcM | 2025-12-14 01:30:22+00:00
While I think that's a bit harsh :-) the sentiment of "if you have these problems, perhaps you don't understand systems architecture" is kind of spot on. I have heard people scoff at a bunch of "dead legacy code" in the Windows APIs (as an example) without understanding the challenge of moving millions of machines, each at different places in the evolution timeline, through to the next step in the timeline.

To use an example from the article, there was this statement: "The split to separate repos allowed us to isolate the destination test suites easily. This isolation allowed the development team to move quickly when maintaining destinations."

This is architecture bleed through. The format produced by Twilio "should" be the canonical form, which is submitted the adapter which mangles it to the "destination" form. Great, that transformation is expressible semantically in a language that takes the canonical form and spits out the special form. Changes to the transformation expression should not "bleed through" to other destinations, and changes to the canonical form should be backwards compatible to prevent bleed through of changes in the source from impacting the destination. At all times, if something worked before, it should continue to work without touching it because the architecture boundaries are robust.

Being able to work with a team that understood this was common "in the old days" when people were working on an operating system. The operating system would evolve (new features, new devices, new capabilities) but because there was a moat between the OS and applications, people understood that they had to architect things so that the OS changes would not cause applications that currently worked to stop working.

I don't judge Twilio for not doing robust architecture, I was astonished when I went to work of Google how lazy everyone got when the entire system is under their control (like there are no third party apps running in the fleet). The was a persistent theme of some bright person "deciding" to completely change some interface and Wham! every other group at Google had to stop what they were doing and move their code to the new thing. There was a particularly poor 'mandate' on a new version of their RPC while I was there. As Twilio notes, that can make things untenable.
by vkou | 2025-12-14 01:30:50+00:00
> but I'm not seeing our billionaires fall out a window or disappearing when they say the wrong thing.

This doesn't happen overnight. You need to thoroughly corrupt the judiciary (which has not yet been accomplished, even if SCOTUS and a number of lower court appointments and many of the federal prosecutors have been) first. [1]

Or, alternatively, just go full fucking might-makes-right police state, for which ICE's blatant disregard for the law and your rights is a trial run.

If the country is ever retaken from this, the guilty will have to be punished. Deprivation of rights under color of law is, incidentally, a capital crime.

---

[1] The end-game for this sort of thing is 'Punch a nazi -> Go to a camp'. 'Nazi punches you -> Pardon and a pat on the back'. Rule of law is anathema to these people, which is why they put so much effort into corrupting it.
by SilverElfin | 2025-12-14 01:31:12+00:00
Thanks for sharing the content. I really want to believe in this possibility of big innovative research and products coming out of IBM. But IBM is more of a software consultancy and service provider today. And I remember how much hype there was around Watson, which turned out to be nothing, and it looked a lot like this - signs of real research and progress that was in the end just a marketing tool for services. What makes this different? I’m asking that sincerely, in case there are specific aspects that make this more “real”.
by goo | 2025-12-14 01:31:15+00:00
it's really hard not to have at least one single point of failure. there's a case to be made that a single cloud account actually reduces the ways things can go wrong to just one point of failure, instead of a handful.

e.g. email on a custom domain. your domain registrar is now a spof AND your email provider for your domain is a spof. and that's just email.

There's obviously a middle ground and ways to have a strictly better personal data posture than before, but it's a multi faceted problem balancing usability, security, and resilience
by abernard1 | 2025-12-14 01:32:41+00:00
By all means use Segment. Segment was a great technology with an incredible technical vision for what they wanted to do. I was in conversations in that office on Market far beyond what they ended up doing post-acquisition.

But a company that can't stand on its own isn't a success in my opinion. Similar things can be said about companies that continue to need round after round of funding without an IPO.

My comment is of the "(2018)" variety. Old news that didn't age well like the people jumping on the "Uber: why we switched to MySQL from Postgres" post. (How many people would choose that decision today?)

People tend to divorce the actual results of a lot of these companies from the gripes of the developers of the tech blogs.
by bigyabai | 2025-12-14 01:32:43+00:00
Mr. Fart warned us about this: https://medium.com/@blakeross/mr-fart-s-favorite-colors-3177...

One day the engineers will try their best to fix things, but get stopped by management satisfied by high-nines logic. If anyone is falling through the cracks, it's bad customer support.

This bodes poorly indeed.
by mjr00 | 2025-12-14 01:32:55+00:00
> There is no one size fits all.

Totally agree. For what it's worth, based on the limited information in the article, I actually do think it was the right decision to pull all of the per-destination services back into one. The shared library problem can go both ways, after all: maybe the solution is to remove the library so your microservices are fully independent, or maybe they really should have never been independent in the first place and the solution is to put them back together.

I don't think either extreme of "every line of code in the company is deployed as one service" or "every function is an independent FaaS" really works in practice, it's all about finding the right balance, which is domain-specific every time.
by btown | 2025-12-14 01:33:26+00:00
I love how this import trick shows how hackable Python is - and it’s this very hackability that has led to so many of the advances we see in AI. Arguably without operator overloads we’d be 5 or more years behind.

https://github.com/amoffat/sh/blob/2a90b1f87a877e5e09da32fd4...
by sigbottle | 2025-12-14 01:33:26+00:00
The etymology of the "markov property" is that the current state does not depend on history.

And in classes, the very first trick you learn to skirt around history is to add Boolean variables to your "memory state". Your systems now model, "did it rain The previous N days?" The issue obviously being that this is exponential if you're not careful. Maybe you can get clever by just making your state a "sliding window history", then it's linear in the number of days you remember. Maybe mix the both. Maybe add even more information .Tradeoffs, tradeoffs.

I don't think LLMs embody the markov property at all, even if you can make everything eventually follow the markov property by just "considering every single possible state". Of which there are (size of token set)^(length) states at minimum because of the KV cache.
by perrygeo | 2025-12-14 01:33:44+00:00
The Gleam language, yes all of it, fits in a context window (https://tour.gleam.run/everything/)

I have similar concerns to you - how well a language works with LLMs is indeed an issue we have to consider. But why do you assume that it's the volume of training data that drives this advantage? Another assumption, equally if not more valid IMO, is that languages which have fewer, well-defined, simpler constructs are easier for LLMs to generate.

Languages with sprawling complexity, where edge cases dominate dev time, all but require PBs of training data to be feasible.

Languages that are simple (objectively), with a solid unwavering mental model, can match LLMs strengths - and completely leap-frog the competition in accurate code gen.
by Philpax | 2025-12-14 01:33:48+00:00
Hah! I usually allocate trampolines at runtime, as the article suggests, but reserving R/W space for them within the application's memory space is a cute trick.

Probably not useful for most of my use cases (I'm usually injecting a payload, so I'd still have the pointer-distance issue between the executable and my payload), but it's still potentially handy. Will have to keep that around!
by defrost | 2025-12-14 01:34:55+00:00
Don't discount better and better "I can't believe it's not human" aping behaviour of personal bot armies of HN accounts - there's clear and obvious spam green accounts, and a steady drip of bland comment, weird voting behaviour, biege textual tone accounts that evolve through green and into background noise.

The admins potter about classifying coarse behaviour and looking to reject spam, voting blocs, overly weird AI comments, etc. The creators make their bot accounts less obvious with random votes, etc.
by geezthatswhack | 2025-12-14 01:35:04+00:00
That’s only because they had no practical way of doing that since no computer was expected to be online 24/7.

Had they had the opportunity, they would 100% have taken it. Windows was never about serving a good experience to customers, it was always about serving the Microsoft-owned experience to customers—and these two things are very much mutually exclusive.
by esperent | 2025-12-14 01:35:11+00:00
Internally, it was Embrace, Extend, Innovate, used in an executive memo from 1994 [0].

But it doesn't matter where it originated or who first said it. The reason this phrase gained so much popularity is that outside observers could see that's their strategy was (and still is).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
by ruralfam | 2025-12-14 01:35:29+00:00
I get so frustrated with the damn "are you a human" checks for Google search. My default search tool from Brave. I had gotten in the habit of searching quickly for something while reading a web page, etc. Worked find for years. Now some days I get results directly. Many days, though, I am getting 2-3-4 prompts. Getting pretty used to jumping over to Edge to do my searches now. On Starlink in a rural spot. Not sure why Google has flagged me. Do not care I guess. Should probably set my Brave default to Bing, but I do find Google's AI summaries helpful. Just not enough to do a bunch of "find the bicycle" "find the bus" "find the traffic light" captchas. One less Google search customer is not a concern of theirs methinks.
Show HN: Libefaxx – A Microbenchmark for AWS EFA GPU/CPU RDMA Communication
by crazyguitar | 2025-12-14 01:35:34+00:00
I’m sharing Libefaxx, an open-source microbenchmark for AWS Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) focused on GPU/CPU RDMA communication.

Most existing benchmarks (e.g., nccl-tests, NVSHMEM) measure collective libraries, which makes it hard to isolate raw EFA transport performance. With growing interest in GPU-Initiated Networking (GIN) (e.g., Deep-EP), we wanted a way to directly measure EFA latency, bandwidth, and scaling behavior at a lower level.

Libefaxx complements existing tools by helping engineers and researchers better understand and optimize inter-node communication for large-scale distributed training on AWS.
by lossolo | 2025-12-14 01:36:22+00:00
That's a funny meta comment, where are you from? Are you consuming a lot of US based content? I ask because I mainly see Americans here writing about the "CCP" based on what they regularly hear from government officials and certain news outlets. It's rarely framed as "China" it's usually "the Chinese Communist Party" emphasizing "Communist" because that word carries negative connotations in the US given its history and in the EU. But maybe framing is similar in your country.

So just to clarify, I'm from the EU, and I'm not paid for anything I write here. Maybe your world model is influenced by propaganda? The world isn't black and white.

I also encourage people to read more about the history and culture of other countries, especially the ones they have strong opinions about, which they often haven't formed themselves (In my experience, this is often lacking in US education, people learn a lot about US history, but not as much about the rest of the world).

Reading more philosophy can also broaden your perspective. In particular, I recommend learning about Singapore, its history, Lee Kuan Yew, and why many highly educated people there willingly accept restrictions on individual freedom. If you understand that, you can then start reading about China, its culture, and its history.
by CommenterPerson | 2025-12-14 01:37:10+00:00
Firstly, Thank you to the entire DuckDuckGo team. DuckDuckGo is the browser I use most all the time. Any product that stops or reduces tracking and surveillance capitalism, I am happy to use and support.

Do you have plans to build an email service without the tracking? Would love to hear thoughts about this. There may be users willing to pay a small monthly fee for this.
by kccqzy | 2025-12-14 01:37:41+00:00
> The only way errors or issues never happened with any of the teams you worked with is if the services they were building NEVER needed to make a breaking change to the communication channel, or they never needed to communicate.

This is correct.

> Neither of these scenarios is practical.

This is not. When you choose appropriate tools (protobuf being an example), it is extremely easy to make a non-breaking change to the communication channel, and it is also extremely easy to prevent breaking changes from being made ever.
by rat87 | 2025-12-14 01:37:49+00:00
It's not splitting hairs it gets to the point when people falsely accuse them of every single thing in the book. Weapons have always been imprecise but things that don't have any benefit to the war effort and target innocent civilian deaths are war crimes. You may ask how much the difference matters morally(it still does matter a lot intent it rule based vs consequences based morality systems I'd argue for somewhere in between) but yes targeting matters when it comes to usually false claims of crimes

They do care about not killing civilians the question is how much? And is that enough? There will almost never be any operation near cities without civilian casualties.

This particular operation was an extremely Targeted operation that included tricking Hezbollah into selling pagers meant for Hezbollah internal military use and only deploying small explosions minimizing any unnecessary casualties.

It's not a very good piece of rhetoric asking about nukes because Israel actually has nukes. They didn't use them.

They have carried out other heavier strikes on Lebanon that had worse ratios but were justified by military targets such as Hezbollah leader Nasrallah.

Your suggestion also seems to totally not understand how Israelis view Lebanon. Until recently and still Lebanon does not control violence within it's borders. Hezbollah (a militia/terrorist group that takes orders from Iran) was more powerful then the Lebanese army and decided what happened on the ground. Iran which had a countdown clock counting down to the destruction of Israel. Of course they were supposed to be disarmed after the Lebanese but unsurprisingly the UN resolution didn't have any effect so when they attacked and threatened to invade Israel did what they could to take them out. Israel would love to have peace with Lebanon but that's not likely if Iran and Hezbollah have anything to do with it.