MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by doubled112 | 2025-12-06 01:26:44+00:00
Do you mean average person around here? Or average person in general?

Too many unknowns and moving parts.

Have you ever worked with the general public and computers?

The average person was wondering why their wireless router needed cables. They did not update their computers for the entire time they owned them. Somebody else ignores big red text saying this will delete everything and hits next anyway, then wonders where their photo collection has gone.

I cannot believe the average person would be capable of registering a domain and configuring their DNS to point at this simple mail server they’re running.

If somebody else is taking care of all of these parts, I am not sure they’re really hosting it themselves.

Maybe we need a new protocol and we can replace all of this? How do we get everybody on board?
by rossjudson | 2025-12-06 01:26:57+00:00
Let's say you have 10 million servers. No matter what you are deploying, some of those servers are going to be in a bad state. Some are going to be in hw ops/repair. Some are going to be mid-deployment for something else. A regional issue may be happening. You may have inconsistencies in network performance. Bad workloads somewhere/anywhere can be causing a constant level of error traffic.

At scale there's no such thing as "instant". There is distribution of progress over time.

The failure is an event. Collection of events takes times (at scale, going through store and forward layers). Your "monitorable failure rate" is over an interval. You must measure for that interval. And then you are going to emit another event.

Global config systems are a tradeoff. They're not inherently bad; they have both strengths and weaknesses. Really bad: non-zero possibility for system collapse. Bad: Can progress very quickly to towards global outages. Good: Faults are detected quickly, response decision making is easy, and mitigation is fast.

Hyperscale is not just "a very large number of small simple systems".

Denoising alerts is a fact of life for SRE...and is a survival skill.
by zenethian | 2025-12-06 01:27:47+00:00
That’s nonsense. Firefox has telemetry built in, it’s just that you can opt out of it. Your answer doesn’t explain why at all but instead just takes a wild guess at what might have happened. You don’t know if this was discovered in Chrome or in some other use of V8. Or maybe it was always fast in Chrome! What a weird non-answer.
by krackers | 2025-12-06 01:27:53+00:00
>It used to rightfully be something we looked forward to

Science fiction has always been mixed. In Star Trek the cool technology and AGI like computer is accompanied by a post-scarcity society where fundamental needs are taken care of. There are countless other stories where technology and AI is used as a tool to enrich some at the expense of others.

>We let pearl-clutching loom smashers hijack the narrative to the point where a computer making a drawing based on natural language is "slop" and you're a bad person if you like it

I don't strongly hold one opinion or the other, but I think fundamentally the roots of people's backlash is that it is something that jeopardizes their livelihood. Not in some abstract "now the beauty and humanity of art is lost" sort of way, but much more concretely, in that because of LLM adoption (or at least hype), they are out of a job and cannot make money—which hurts their quality of life much more than the increase in quality of life from access to LLMs. Then those people see the "easy money" pouring into this bubble, and it would be hard not to get demoralized. You can claim that people just need to find a different job, but that's ignoring the reality that the over the past century the skill-floor has basically risen and the ladder pulled up; and perhaps even worse, trying to reach for that higher bar still results in one "treading water" without any commensurate growth in earnings.
by pornel | 2025-12-06 01:28:32+00:00
> So at least those are a subset of Go's concurrency model.

That's why the article about structured concurrency compared it to goto. Everything is a subset of goto. It can do everything that structured programming can do, and more! With goto you can implement your own conditions, switches, loops, and everything else.

The problem is not the lack of power, but lack of enforced structure. You can implement fork-join, but an idiomatic golang implementation won't stop you from forking and forgetting to join.

Another aspect of it is not really technical, but conventions that fell out of what the language offers. It's just way more common to DIY something custom from a couple of channels, even if it could be done with some pre-defined standard pattern. To me, this makes understanding behavior of golang programs harder, because instead of seeing something I already know, like list.par_iter().map().collect(), I need to recognize such behavior across a larger block of code, and think twice whether each channel-goroutine dance properly handles cancellations, thread pool limits, recursive dependencies, is everything is correctly read-only/atomic/locked, and so on.
by Moto7451 | 2025-12-06 01:28:50+00:00
What you’re suggesting is not trivial. Otherwise we wouldn’t use various CDNs. To do what Cloudflare does your starting point is “be multiple region/multiple cloud from launch” which is non-trivial especially when you’re finding product-market fit. A better poor man’s CDN is object storage through your cloud of choice serving HTTP traffic. Cloudflare also offers layers of security and other creature comforts. Ignoring the extras they offer, if you build what they offer you have effectively made a startup within a startup.

Cloudflare isn’t the only game in town either. Akamai, Google, AWS, etc all have good solutions. I’ve used all of these at jobs I’ve worked at and the only poor choice has been to not use one at all.
by Saline9515 | 2025-12-06 01:29:26+00:00
Noam Chomsky: 'If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.'

Also, your solution doesn't solve your problem: your colleague won't stop to hold ideas that you don't like, nor his blog will disappear. If it's just a blog, he didn't harmed anybody, whereas you got him fired.
by Nextgrid | 2025-12-06 01:29:43+00:00
> If an individual site took on the infra challenges themselves, would they achieve better? I don’t think so.

I disagree; most people need only a subset of Cloudflare's features. Operating just that subset avoids the risk of the other moving parts (that you don't need anyway) ruining your day.

Cloudflare is also a business and has its own priorities like releasing new features; this is detrimental to you because you won't benefit from said feature if you don't need it, yet still incur the risk of the deployment going wrong like we saw today. Operating your own stack would minimize such changes and allow you to schedule them to a maintenance window to limit the impact should it go wrong.

The only feature Cloudflare (or its competitors) offers that can't be done cost-effectively yourself is volumetric DDoS protection where an attacker just fills your pipe with junk traffic - there's no way out of this beyond just having a bigger pipe, which isn't reasonable for any business short of an ISP or infrastructure provider.
by Terr_ | 2025-12-06 01:30:03+00:00
> who was the Prime Minister

> how much does milk cost

> the count of black people shot by the police

Whoah, hold up: One of these things is not like the others. (♫ One of those things just doesn't belong.♫)

The Prime Minister's name shows up regularly in news stories, and the price of milk is literally in front of you as you buy it...

So why are you expecting anybody to be decent at "estimating" even the easier version of "all people shot by police this year"? It's not like there's a daily figure shared after the weather-report.
by runarberg | 2025-12-06 01:30:08+00:00
Even so, that doesn’t take away from my point. Traditional specialized models can do these things already, for much cheaper and without expensive optimization. What traditional models cannot do is the toy aspect of LLM, and that is the only usecase I see for this technology going forward.

Lets say you are right and these things will be optimized, and in, say, 5 years, most models from the big players will be able do things like reading small text in an obscure image, draw a picture of a glass of wine filled to the brim, draw a path through a maze, count the legs of a 5 footed dog, etc. And in doing so finished their last venture capital subsidies (bringing the actual cost of these to their customers). Why would people use LLMs for these when a traditional specialized model can do it for much cheaper?
by maxerickson | 2025-12-06 01:31:11+00:00
Modern process controls allow us to hit intended outcomes consistently at lower costs. But that doesn't mean the intended outcomes are always better that what you would aim for with less capability.

There are real customers that want cost reductions that lead to reduced lifetimes, because they have no intention of using the thing they are buying for decades. It isn't just manufacturers looking to make money through planned obsolescence.
by tobyjsullivan | 2025-12-06 01:31:52+00:00
What do you think Cloudflare’s core business is? Because I think it’s two things:

1. DDoS protection

2. Plug n’ Play DNS and TLS (termination)

Neither of those make sense for self-hosted.

Edit: If it’s unclear, #2 doesn’t make sense because if you self-host, it’s no longer plug n’ play. The existing alternatives already serve that case equally well (even better!).
by dnautics | 2025-12-06 01:32:03+00:00
clarifying: It's just an experiment for zig PL, not affiliated with zsf:

http://github.com/ityonemo/clr

was where i got last year. this december im doing a "prototype" which means its going to be done in zig and im going to clear sone difficult hurdles i couldn't do last year.... also accepting sponsors, details on page.

also disclaimer, im using heavy amounts of ai assistance (as implied in the preview video)
by dmix | 2025-12-06 01:32:54+00:00
On paper it can sound rational. In reality you look at stuff like cars, for only so long people will tolerate buying a car for $60k when other countries, whom you are also competing with, get buy similar cars for $10-20k from China. Those same vehicles are used to boost productivity in your own domestic industries.

There is always a ton of risk involved with protectionism. Primarily whether your taxpayer-subsidized domestic jobs and hypothetical national security risk significantly outweighs all the very real economic costs.
by adgjlsfhk1 | 2025-12-06 01:32:55+00:00
It wouldn't shock me if this is actually just market manipulation. OpenAI in the past year seems to be operating more and more like a pump and dump machine. Their recent AMD deal seems to have been AMD giving them a bunch of stock for free in exchange for them announcing that they would use AMD GPUs for training, and OpenAI doesn't have any fab equipment so the only thing they can do with 40% of the global dram supply is sell it to someone else.
by arjie | 2025-12-06 01:33:04+00:00
I don't think you can have a "free and global market" when countries participate in large-scale state industrial policy. Given those constraints, you have to either enforce a zero-subsidy environment (the US has no power to do this) or you have to accept that trade control is one arm of your foreign policy goals and surrendering it entirely is unlikely to help your aims.

For the most part, free and open trade is beneficial to the Western world order. But I think it's quite straightforward to imagine conditions under which it is not, many of which are currently in effect.

US control of EUV technology is probably the most obvious present one, but limitations on nuclear proliferation are an obvious case where there is no free market. Even selling civilian nuclear technology is controlled.

You may think of it analogously to Free Speech. The dream is complete and total expression. The reality is that if you allow convincing enough liars, your society starts to falter. Consequently, certain kinds of expression are not permitted - notably defamation. Think of it as more a North Star navigation ideal constrained by the trade winds (I suppose the Westerlies would be more relevant, but I couldn't resist the pun).

If you want a couple of reads, I enjoyed A Splendid Exchange about the history of trade, which I followed by the resurgent-though-once-dismissed Zeihan's Disunited Nations (which is more a hypothesis book than a history book).
by roenxi | 2025-12-06 01:33:14+00:00
As in producers not over-producing RAM should be illegal? A presumably short-term price spike in RAM of all things is a non-issue. It is a luxury good that only a very small number of people care about and there is no reason to think this blip is going to last. Apple did stuff like this all the time at their high point in the late 2000s and early 2010s, and it would happen often in other markets. The world is not static and sometimes the situation changes and lots of supply is soaked up.
by hu3 | 2025-12-06 01:33:16+00:00
Yes it did.

At the very least, something that brings the application down when the dev assumption fails should be called a much more dangerous word than "unwrap".

So yes, the language has failed there.

"You're holding it wrong" doesn't uphold when one of the language's touted characteristics is having a bitchy compiler designed to save devs from their own stupidity.
Show HN: A Web UI Generator for Rust CLI Projects
by wb14123 | 2025-12-06 01:33:55+00:00
Hi HN,

Everyone loves CLI! I recently started to use Rust write CLI tools and I really enjoy it. But sometimes it's convenient to also have the tool available in a browser so that I can share it to other non tech savvy people, and also for myself to use on mobile phones. So I write a tool to automatically generate a web UI for Rust CLI projects if it's using Clap (https://docs.rs/clap/latest/clap/) to parse the cli args. It reads the Clap command and generate HTML input elements for it. Everything runs in the browser through WASM without a need of backend.

Here is the project: https://github.com/wb14123/clap-web-gen . Any feedback is welcome!
by neilv | 2025-12-06 01:34:13+00:00
Do you think they could be trying to open up the TV firmware, like when the WRT54G settlement launched what became OpenWrt and other open firmware projects?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linksys_WRT54G_series#Third-pa...

That kind of thing is both a deterrent to commercial violation of licenses (unplanned open sourcing), and moves open source forward.

Though I also like the idea of monetary penalties large enough to be a deterrent.
by theendisney | 2025-12-06 01:34:30+00:00
It probably doesnt work anymore (i hope) as it was long ago. One of my domains pointing at a static website for years vanished from the index after someone flooded usenet with a list of urls. These ended up in google groups and found their way into the search index. Typing the domain into the search box (to my annoyance) produced countless such results. Then everything vanished leaving only nonsensical results. When asked they couldn't say why but put it back.
by jascha_eng | 2025-12-06 01:34:30+00:00
I'm curious how OpenAI has the funds to pay for 40% of the worlds ram production? Sure they are big and have a few billions but I kind of assumed that 40% for a year or whatever they are buying is easily double digit billions? That has to hurt even them, especially because they cant buy anything else?

Also what are these contracts? Surely Samsung could decide to cancel the contract by paying a large fee but is that fee truly so large that getting their ram back when prices are now 4x of what they used to be is not worth it?
by nrhrjrjrjtntbt | 2025-12-06 01:34:34+00:00
Feels like beauracracy but a DACI or RFC etc. can help if the culture supports this sort of decision making.

You list the options, e.g. A combine codebases, B leave as is. Get comments and look at it logically and come to agreed decision.

You have the reason and tradeoffs documented.

The discussion may prompt other wider discussions etc. More senior people may spot patterns. E.g. lets not pay down tech debt X because Y is coming.

Culturally though if no one cares and most people are happy to manually work through the bugs and hate even discussing it then it may be a bad fit for a developer who cant stand working like that.
by RealityVoid | 2025-12-06 01:34:35+00:00
The way you have those loopholes and you have to watch out for them else you're on the hook for thousands of dollars is nuts. I mean, sure, you _might_ get a good deal or you might get completely screwed. This is absolutely not normal or fair. A society of gotcha's induces a lot of inefficiency. And as much as the US sometimes rails against inefficiency, it seems it's only a problem when you're not used to it.
by seanwilson | 2025-12-06 01:35:23+00:00
> As for the divide between HTML and CSS: to me HTML is 99% semantic. That means I describe the information as it should be described and the rest is done in CSS.

How? Check the code of this first hero header:

https://tailwindcss.com/plus/ui-blocks/marketing/sections/he...

How do you visually group and align elements in designs like this one by only using semantic elements? I agree there's a few things in there that could be ol/ul/li tags but there's a lot of divs that are just flex containers or flex items. I don't see what useful semantics they could all have when they're mostly for cosmetic reasons.
by hodgehog11 | 2025-12-06 01:36:08+00:00
I don't buy it. It's easier to make this argument for companies that are building their own hardware, since they know it can be immediately used. OpenAI's move is tantamount to hoarding for the sake of strangling competition. There was plenty of supply to allow for their plans without this move (especially since they will probably go bankrupt at this rate).
by djtriptych | 2025-12-06 01:36:34+00:00
I worked in the IAC NYC HQ for a while (as Dir Engineering for The Daily Beast).

It was really nice walking into that space. Always been influenced by architecture in my engineering career and it was really nice to have that pedigree infused into my workspace just a little bit. It's just a little dose of delight every day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAC_Building
by JuniperMesos | 2025-12-06 01:37:00+00:00
> In Guillou's daily life, this means that he is excluded from digital life and much of what is considered standard today, he told the French newspaper Le Monde. All his accounts with US companies such as Amazon, Airbnb, or PayPal were immediately closed by the providers. Online bookings, such as through Expedia, are immediately canceled, even if they concern hotels in France. Participation in e-commerce is also practically no longer possible for him, as US companies always play a role in one way or another, and they are strictly forbidden to enter into any trade relationship with sanctioned individuals.

> He also describes the impact on participating in banking as drastic. Payment systems are blocked for him, as US companies like American Express, Visa, and Mastercard have a virtual monopoly in Europe. He also describes the rest of banking as severely restricted. For example, accounts with non-US banks have also been partially closed. Transactions in US dollars or via dollar conversions are forbidden to him.

I view this as a failure of the cryptocurrency industry to build products that allow people to effectively transact with ordinary businesses in violation of US law, and without using payment processors ultimately subject to US law. Because of course US law includes this detail about being able to sanction people, and people who are sanctioned by US law because they have become an enemy of someone in the US government ought to be able to make monetary transactions in ordinary life too.

I don't have a great solution for Amazon unfortunately, they really do just sell a lot of stuff and they're one gigantic corporation and they're based in the US and subject to US law. Buy from AliBaba I guess? Or for that matter French hotels using Expedia even when doing business in French with other French citizens.

To be clear, I don't think it is good that the US Treasury Department sanctioned this judge. But the US has sanctioned lots of foreigners for their local political decisions as well as many other things, and I don't necessarily trust that all of those people necessarily did anything wrong, or deserve to be cut off from payment rails across the US aligned world.
by rossjudson | 2025-12-06 01:38:11+00:00
"Scrape" intervals (and the plumbing through to analysis intervals) are chosen precisely because of the denoising function aggregation provides.

Most scaled analysis systems provide precise control over the type of aggregation used within the analyzed time slices. There are many possibilities, and different purposes for each.

High frequency events are often collected into distributions and the individual timestamps are thrown away.
by jjmarr | 2025-12-06 01:38:46+00:00
In hard real-time software, you have a performance budget otherwise the missile fails.

It might be more maintainable to have leaks instead of elaborate destruction routines, because then you only have to consider the costs of allocations.

Java has a null garbage collector (Sigma GC) for the same reason. If your financial application really needs good performance at any cost and you don't want to rewrite it, you can throw money at the problem to make it go away.
by runarberg | 2025-12-06 01:38:49+00:00
Hallucination are not generalization beyond the training data but interpolations gone wrong.

LLMs are in fact good at generalizing beyond their training set, if they wouldn’t generalize at all we would call that over-fitting, and that is not good either. What we are talking about here is simply a bias and I suspect biases like these are simply a limitation of the technology. Some of them we can get rid of, but—like almost all statistical modelling—some biases will always remain.
by ccakes | 2025-12-06 01:38:59+00:00
> If an individual site took on the infra challenges themselves, would they achieve better? I don’t think so.

The point is that it doesn’t matter. A single site going down has a very small chance of impacting a large number of users. Cloudflare going down breaks an appreciable portion of the internet.

If Jim’s Big Blog only maintains 95% uptime, most people won’t care. If BofA were at 95%.. actually same. Most of the world aren’t BofA customers.

If Cloudflare is at 99.95% then the world suffers
by am17an | 2025-12-06 01:40:10+00:00
It's bad for consumers period. A deal that hampers 40% of global supply shouldn't be a thing, it's predatory. I know DRAM is not a necessity, but considering that PCs are going to be affected means this affects real things like schools and hospitals. There's being smart while making a deal and there's knee-capping the market with your leveraged to the tits business
by terminalshort | 2025-12-06 01:40:23+00:00
It's not as simple as that. What will result in more downtime, dependency on a single centralized service or not being behind Cloudflare? Clearly it's the latter or companies wouldn't be behind Cloudflare. Sure, the outages are more widespread now than they used to be, but for any given service the total downtime is typically much lower than before centralization towards major cloud providers and CDNs.
by fn-mote | 2025-12-06 01:41:55+00:00
A "goodbye" post after only 3.5 years. Hard to relate.

In my world it's hard to imagine an impact after that short of a time. And in fact, reading the list of accomplishments ("interviewed by the Wall Street Journal") makes it clear it's a good PR piece.

I'm perfectly willing to believe he's fabulous, but this didn't move the needle for me.