MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Pyrolol | 2025-12-13 22:05:17+00:00
The speed of light provides a limit on distance for a given RTT, and taking the examples in the article which are less than 0.5ms and considering the speed of light (300km/ms) the measured exit countries must be accurate.

The speed of light in fiber which probably covers most of the distance is also even slower due to refraction (about 2/3).
by alephnerd | 2025-12-13 22:05:42+00:00
> It must be really really really good for the HR decision makers though

Data Integration.

Workday is extremely good at integrating various different data sources and providing support to build integrations if they are not offered by them.

A private research university like WUSTL is a conglomeration of around 10 colleges all of which all have their own internal operations, a couple organizations dedicated to facilities maintenance, an entire community medical network dedicated to STL metro, a major sports program, housing for students and faculty, procurement, insurance, etc.

All of these are entire business units or functionally independent organizations. And in this complexity arises multiple different organically developed data stores, schemas, and practices. At that kind of scale, liability grows exponentially and you as an organization need a way to better understand what is happening.

That is why products like Workday are beloved by enterprises.
by crazygringo | 2025-12-13 22:05:48+00:00
Is there any real-life situation in which this matters, though?

If you're picking a country so you can access a Netflix show that geolimits to that country, but Netflix is also using this same faulty list... then you still get to watch your show.

If you're picking a country for latency reasons, you're still getting a real location "close enough". Plus latency is affected by tons of things such as VPN server saturation, so exact geography isn't always what matters most anyways.

And if your main interest is privacy from your ISP or local WiFi network, then any location will do.

I'm trying to think if there's ever a legal reason why e.g. a political dissident would need to control the precise country their traffic exited from, but I'm struggling. If you need to make sure a particular government can't de-anonymize your traffic, it seems like the legal domicile of the VPN provider is what matters most, and whether the government you're worried about has subpoena power over them. Not where the exit node is.

Am I missing anything?

I mean, obviously truth in advertising is important. I'm just wondering if there's any actual harm here, or if this is ultimately nothing more than a curiosity.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-12-13 22:06:58+00:00
> At what point did the university so lose its organizational competence that the filing system (that's what a database is) ate the budget?

Federal taxpayers underwrite unlimited amounts of money to the university’s customers. Why would the university’s leaders not take advantage of this and enlarge their kingdoms as much as possible? The bigger the budget, the bigger the university employees’ cut (incl the board).
by simlevesque | 2025-12-13 22:07:50+00:00
> I would easily pay €30 a month for a VPN in my home country that uses a residential IP and isn't noticeable. I am aware that those exist, but 99% of them are shady.

For residential IPs you can't even pay per month like normal VPNs, normally they charge per GB, usually over $2 usd per GB.
by yearolinuxdsktp | 2025-12-13 22:07:57+00:00
I would caution that microservices should be architected with technical concerns first—-being able to deploy independently is a valid technical concern too.

Doing it for organizational scaling can lead to insular vision with turf defensive attitude, as teams are rewarded on the individual service’s performance and not the complete product’s performance. Also refactoring services now means organizational refactoring, so the friction to refactor is massively increased.

I agree that patterns should be used where most appropriate, instead of blindly.

What pains me is that a language like “Cloud-Native” has been usurped to mean microservices. Did Twilio just stop having a “Cloud-Native” product due to shipping a monolith? According to CNCF, yes. According to reason, no.
by 3rodents | 2025-12-13 22:08:55+00:00
Yes, you’re describing a distributed monolith. Microservices are independent, with nothing shared. They define a public interface and that’s it, that’s the entire exposed surface area. You will need to do major version bumps sometimes, when there are backwards incompatible changes to make, but these are rare.

The logical problem you’re running into is exactly why microservices are such a bad idea for most businesses. How many businesses can have entirely independent system components?

Almost all “microservice” systems in production are distributed monoliths. Real microservices are incredibly rare.

A mental model for true microservices is something akin to depending on the APIs of Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max and YouTube. They’ll have their own data models, their own versioning cycles and all that you consume is the public interface.
by macbr | 2025-12-13 22:08:56+00:00
I record my travels using travelynx and this is how Deutsche Bahn has been faring:

- 2022: 15512 km travelled, spent 150:23 in trains, timetable: 148:42

- 2023: 9818 km travelled, spent 121:01 in trains, timetable: 118:39

- 2024: 11614 km travelled, spent 129:28 in trains, timetable: 127:48

- 2025: 10636 km travelled, spent 116:21 in trains, timetable: 109:58

This year was skewed upwards by a 3 hour delay because some teenagers managed to get into a railway tunnel causing a track closure for multiple hours...

A lot of times the time you save by going for high speed rail is still worth it.
by techblueberry | 2025-12-13 22:08:58+00:00
I’ve been doing this twenty years, and to be honest, I’m loving it more now than I ever have before. It’s been a flywheel for me, the more experience I get, the more confident I get, the harder problems I get to work on, and accomplish them better. There are challenges sure, but what is disillusioning you?

I don’t know if this is a distinction worth making, but I’ve never really thought of my relationship as to the industry, it’s to the work, and I’ve always loved the work.
by mpweiher | 2025-12-13 22:09:01+00:00
> [UK quadrupling target] That was the 2050 target from the last government.

Yes. The only criticism the new labor government had of the previous government's nuclear policy was them not getting enough done:

"Starmer hits out at Tories’ ‘shambolic’ failure to open nuclear power plants"

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/b/starmer-targets-to...

> In terms of actual commitments the only planned plant after Hinkley C is currently Sizewell C.

Well sure, they only got those commitments through this summer. At around the same time as they were getting the commitments for Sizewell-C (and pre-construction work has commenced), they also designated the next site.

And, yes, they also selected the winner of the SMR competition.

Here current statements from the government:

"Starmer pledges to ‘build, baby, build’ as green groups criticise nuclear plans"

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/feb/06/starmer-...
by seszett | 2025-12-13 22:09:10+00:00
They don't have to assume that traffic is efficiently routed, on the contrary if they can have a <1ms RTT from London to a server, the speed of light guarantees that that server is not in Mauritius EVEN if the traffic was efficiently routed.

It just can't be outside England, just one 0.4ms RTT as seen here is enough to be certain that the server is less then 120 km away from London (or wherever their probe was, they don't actually say, just the UK).

RTT from a known vantage point gives an absolute maximum distance, and if that maximum distance is too short then that absolutely is enough to ascertain that a server is not in the country it claims to be.
by mikert89 | 2025-12-13 22:09:20+00:00
"Microservices is the software industry’s most successful confidence scam. It convinces small teams that they are “thinking big” while systematically destroying their ability to move at all. It flatters ambition by weaponizing insecurity: if you’re not running a constellation of services, are you even a real company? Never mind that this architecture was invented to cope with organizational dysfunction at planetary scale. Now it’s being prescribed to teams that still share a Slack channel and a lunch table.

Small teams run on shared context. That is their superpower. Everyone can reason end-to-end. Everyone can change anything. Microservices vaporize that advantage on contact. They replace shared understanding with distributed ignorance. No one owns the whole anymore. Everyone owns a shard. The system becomes something that merely happens to the team, rather than something the team actively understands. This isn’t sophistication. It’s abdication.

Then comes the operational farce. Each service demands its own pipeline, secrets, alerts, metrics, dashboards, permissions, backups, and rituals of appeasement. You don’t “deploy” anymore—you synchronize a fleet. One bug now requires a multi-service autopsy. A feature release becomes a coordination exercise across artificial borders you invented for no reason. You didn’t simplify your system. You shattered it and called the debris “architecture.”

Microservices also lock incompetence in amber. You are forced to define APIs before you understand your own business. Guesses become contracts. Bad ideas become permanent dependencies. Every early mistake metastasizes through the network. In a monolith, wrong thinking is corrected with a refactor. In microservices, wrong thinking becomes infrastructure. You don’t just regret it—you host it, version it, and monitor it.

The claim that monoliths don’t scale is one of the dumbest lies in modern engineering folklore. What doesn’t scale is chaos. What doesn’t scale is process cosplay. What doesn’t scale is pretending you’re Netflix while shipping a glorified CRUD app. Monoliths scale just fine when teams have discipline, tests, and restraint. But restraint isn’t fashionable, and boring doesn’t make conference talks.

Microservices for small teams is not a technical mistake—it is a philosophical failure. It announces, loudly, that the team does not trust itself to understand its own system. It replaces accountability with protocol and momentum with middleware. You don’t get “future proofing.” You get permanent drag. And by the time you finally earn the scale that might justify this circus, your speed, your clarity, and your product instincts will already be gone."

-DHH
by hxtk | 2025-12-13 22:09:24+00:00
But you have to get money into your crypto wallet somehow, which makes it relatively easy to deanonymize for most users (serious crypto privacy enthusiasts could of course pay cash for their crypto or perhaps mine it themselves) if they're looking at your traffic specifically, but hard if you're only worried about bulk collection.

IMO the coolest privacy option they have is to literally mail them an envelope full of cash with just your account's cash payment ID.
by spockz | 2025-12-13 22:09:28+00:00
For us it is relatively straightforward. Every release gets one single post. It always gets a title highlighting the most important change highlighting why people want to upgrade. This is followed by a short summary of which usecase is now supported by a change we did (either added feature or some enhancement). This is again followed by a detailed story on the items above and finally a granular list of security, interface changes, etc., pointing at the relevant ticket number containing for each change the full reasoning and history.

Mostly this is a manual effort on the textual bit. A PR is required to indicate whether something is worthy to be specifically mentioned in the release notes. The list of concrete changes is automated.
by Esophagus4 | 2025-12-13 22:09:54+00:00
I've always thought it would be interesting to be the guy called in to clean up these messes. That's where I'd love my career to go... being called in to turn around a sinking ship.

Technology projects have a habit of going wildly off the rails, especially if you're not at ${bigTechCo} with a really mature software factory pumping out large projects consistently, so it seems like there'd be no shortage of mess to clean up around the industry.

The idea of building something greenfield isn't as interesting as fixing a badly broken machine to me. Call it a fixer complex :)
by tasty_freeze | 2025-12-13 22:10:05+00:00
I read (30 years ago) the book "Microprocessor Design" by Nick Tredennick. He was the architect and wrote the microcode for both the 68K and the S/370. The S/370 was based on his recent design experience with the 68K, but it wasn't just a microcode swap. In the book he describes his process where he would write the ucode for each instruction on a 3"x5" card (or was a 4"x7"). At times he'd find sequences that were too clunky and then go back to the circuit design folks and ask for them to add some extra logic for that corner case to make the ucode more efficient.

The book also had a glossary section in the back and a number of the entries were funny. One I recall was his definition for "methodology", which was something like "A word people use when 99% of the time they mean 'method'."
by Ninjasaan | 2025-12-13 22:10:10+00:00
I am having the exact same issue. Absolutely nothing can be done without taking photos of all angles of my face to be submitted to Persona Identities, with no other options available. I can log into accounts on any other website as normal, but Substack mow demands biometrics to even enter profile settings, which is the only way to unsubscribe or delete an account.
by PaulHoule | 2025-12-13 22:10:15+00:00
That's definitely true, but I do think production rules have some uses that are less obvious.

For instance, XSLT is not "an overcomplicated Jinja 2" but rather it is based on production rules but hardly anybody seems to know that, they just think it's a Jinja 2 that doesn't do what they want.

Production rules are remarkably effective at dealing with deep asynchrony, say a process that involves some steps done by people or some steps done by humans, like a loan application being processed by a bank that has to be looked at by a loan officer. They could be an answer to the async comm problems in the web browser. See also complex events processing.

Production rules could be a more disciplined way to address the issues addressed by stored procedures in databases.

I've written systems where production rules are used in the control plane to set up and tear down data pipelines with multiple phases in a way that can exploit the opportunistic parallelism that can be found in sprawling commercial batch jobs. (The Jena folks told me what I was doing wasn't supported but I'd spent a lot of time with the source code and there was no problem.)
by MontyCarloHall | 2025-12-13 22:10:23+00:00
Good question. Why hasn't there been a profusion of new game-changing software, fixes to long-standing issues in open-source software, any nontrivial shipped product at all? Heck, why isn't there a cornucopia of new apps, even trivial ones? Where is all the shovelware [0]? Previous HN discussion here [1].

Don't get me wrong, AI is at least as game-changing for programming as StackOverflow and Google were back in the day. I use it every day, and it's saved me hours of work for certain specific tasks [2]. But it's simply not a massive 10x force multiplier that some might lead you to believe.

I'll start believing when maintainers of complex, actively developed, and widely used open-source projects (e.g. ffmpeg, curl, openssh, sqlite) start raving about a massive uptick in positive contributions, pointing to a concrete influx of high-quality AI-assisted commits.

[0] https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45120517

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45511128
by jleyank | 2025-12-13 22:10:46+00:00
I didn't think there's a surplus of doctors, nurses and other medical professionals in the US (or any country). Partially due to the expense of training and partially due to resistance from the (self-)licensing organization unwilling to kill their future income. I'm also not sure there's a surplus of PhD's in the chemistry or biology areas to feed places like biotech, pharm, academia and related startups. To satisfy such positions, people are looking at 12 + 5 + 2 post HS education.

And then there's the scut work nobody seems to want to do - somebody has to pick in the fields, shred those chickens, ... And Connor and Maddie never seem to be interested in jobs at this level.

Will the governments step in to prevent companies from offshoring? Will people pay more at Walmart?
by varenc | 2025-12-13 22:10:56+00:00
Interesting to learn you can identify the real country/area of origin using probe latency. Though could this be simulated? Like what if the VPN IP just added 100ms-300ms of latency to all of its outgoing traffic? Ideally vary the latency based on the requesting IP's location. And also just ignore typical probe requests like ICMP (ping). And ideally all the IPs near the end of the traceroute would do all this too.

To use an example, 74.118.126.204 claims to be a Somalian IP address, but ipinfo.io identifies it as being from London based on latency. Compare `curl ipinfo.io/74.118.126.204/json` vs `curl ipwhois.app/json/74.118.126.204` to see. If that IP ignored pings and added latency to all outgoing packets, I wonder if that would stymie ipinfo's ability to identify its true origin.
by IshKebab | 2025-12-13 22:11:11+00:00
> I would figure it out pretty quickly it this was not genuine, except if the geo-block protection would be fooled too.

It would (unless the blockers use this company's database I guess):

> The IP registry data also says “Country X” — because the provider self-declared it that way.

That could be good or bad depending on what you're using the VPN for. E.g. if you only care about evading stupid local laws like the UK's recent Think of the Children Act, then it's actually great because you can convince websites you're in Mauritius while actually getting London data centre speeds.

But if you want to legally be sending your traffic from another country then it's less great because you actually aren't. To be honest I can't really think of many situations where this would really make a difference since the exit point of your network traffic doesn't really matter legally. E.g. if a Chinese person insults their dear leader from a VPN exit node in the UK, the Chinese authorities are going to sentence them to just as much slavery as if they did it from a local exit point.
by skissane | 2025-12-13 22:11:30+00:00
> ServiceNow is so terrible I genuinely wonder how it is ever deployed anywhere. Seriously, do the purchasers never look at it?

When I first saw ServiceNow, I was impressed - because my point of comparison (I worked for a university at the time) was BMC Remedy, which was terrible. And some years later I did some consulting for a major bank which was using some 3270-based IBM solution (Tivoli something… I believe it has finally been discontinued) and ServiceNow is light years ahead of that too.
by shsush | 2025-12-13 22:11:42+00:00
> it should be as concise as possible

What’s more concise than code? From my experience, by the time I’ve gotten an English with code description accurate enough for an agent I could have done it myself. Typing isn’t a hard part.

LLMs/agents have many other uses, but if you’re not offloading your thinking you’re not really going any faster wrt letting them write code via a prompt.
by jasonwatkinspdx | 2025-12-13 22:11:54+00:00
I worked for a CRM reseller for a bit when I was younger.

At the time the industry wisdom was that basically 80% of CRM projects fail to return value. And the customers knew that plainly, but the alternative was trying to keep some COBOL era system limping along. So even though they knew they were likely going to burn a huge pile of money, it felt like a necessity.

So a sort of stockholm syndrome mentality takes root where they just hope they can limit the bleeding as much as possible.

Also just HIPAA being in the mix adds non trivial complexities.
by OutOfHere | 2025-12-13 22:12:08+00:00
Actually a microwave or steamer or cooker works fine for me for things that can cook so simply, but not everything can.

Some things require a fryer. The point is that there is a 1:1 correspondence between what can cook in an oil fryer versus what can cook in an air fryer, and the result is 85% as crisp.

In fact I hold the oil against the restaurant because the oil is a multi-faceted health hazard.
by iainmerrick | 2025-12-13 22:12:12+00:00
I think it’s worth distinguishing “difficult to perform” and “difficult to listen to”. Something like hard rock or metal with lots of flashy solos can be technically impressive, but it’s not difficult to “get” -- when done properly it just gets you in the gut.

The accusation usually levelled at cutting-edge jazz (fairly or unfairly) is that it’s so niche that it is difficult to get; that it’s left behind any pretence at being popular music. Many listeners would even go further and sneer “they’re just playing notes at random!” or “you’re just pretending to like it!”

I do wonder whether good-sounding, easy-to-get music is purely a matter of fashion (being just different enough to be interesting, but conventional enough to be accessible), or if to some degree there’s another axis of skill/difficulty in great pop music, of making it catchy and universal.
by coppsilgold | 2025-12-13 22:12:16+00:00
As VPN usage proliferates such discrimination starts hurting sites more. For example, a VPN may be left on by a user for whatever reason and when the site they visit doesn't work or makes them jump through hoops they are less likely to visit the site in the future or view it with contempt and abandon it a soon as they are made aware of an alternative.

It takes time for sites to realize the danger, especially with mobile users where fiddling with a VPN is often more hassle than its worth and its just left always on. It's often a good idea to impersonate a mobile user agent for this reason as some sites (or perhaps cloudflare?) started treating them differently. The impersonation needs to be done well (SSL and HTTP fingerprints should also match mobile).

Usually, the more expensive the VPN offering the better the reputation of their IP's. Avoid VPNs that have any kind of free tier like the plague.
by maxdo | 2025-12-13 22:12:34+00:00
Both approaches can fail. Especially in environments like Node.js or Python, there's a clear limit to how much code an event loop can handle before performance seriously degrades.

I managed a product where a team of 6–8 people handles 200+ microservices. I've also managed other teams at the same time on another product where 80+ people managed a monolith.

What i learned? Both approaches have pros and cons.

With microservices, it's much easier to push isolated changes with just one or two people. At the same time, global changes become significantly harder.

That's the trade-off, and your mental model needs to align with your business logic. If your software solves a tightly connected business problem, microservices probably aren't the right fit.

On the other hand, if you have a multitude of integrations with different lifecycles but a stable internal protocol, microservices can be a lifesaver.

If someone tries to tell you one approach is universally better, they're being dogmatic/religious rather than rational.

Ultimately, it's not about architecture, it's about how you build abstractions and approach testing and decoupling.
by enraged_camel | 2025-12-13 22:12:42+00:00
>> I am willing to support substantial economic impairment to the US economy

Okay, but people who hold these types of sentiments are usually financially secure and/or have relatively strong job prospects. You do realize, I hope, that the type of economic downturn that would result from a complete cessation of immigrant labor would greatly hurt the very people whose interests you want to protect and improve.