MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Nextgrid | 2025-12-21 20:12:58+00:00
> monitoring

Most monitoring solutions support Postgres and don't actually care where your DB is hosted. Of course this only applies if someone was actually looking at the metrics to begin with.

> backups

Plenty of options to choose from depending on your recovery time objective. From scheduled pg_dumps to WAL shipping to disk snapshots and a combination of them at any schedule you desire. Just ship them to your favorite blob storage provider and call it a day.

> scaling

That's the main reason I favor bare-metal infrastructure. There is no way anything on the cloud (at a price you can afford) can rival the performance of even a mid-range server that scaling is effectively never an issue; if you're outgrowing that, the conversation we're having is not about getting a big DB but using multiple DBs and sharding at the application layer.

> failover still needs to happen

Yes, get another server and use Patroni/etc. Or just accept the occasional downtime and up to 15 mins of data loss if the machine never comes back up. You'd be surprised how many businesses are perfectly fine with this. Case in point: two major clouds had hour-long downtimes recently and everyone basically forgot about it a week later.

> If you bring that expertise in house

Infrastructure should not require continuous upkeep/repair. You wouldn't buy a car that requires you to have a full-time mechanic in the passenger seat at all times. If your infrastructure requires this, you should ask for a refund and buy from someone who sells more reliable infra.

A server will run forever once set up unless hardware fails (and some hardware can be redundant with spares provisioned ahead of time to automatically take over and delay maintenance operations). You should spend a couple hours a month max on routine maintenance which can be outsourced and still beats the cloud price.

I think you're underestimating the amount of tech that is essentially nix machines all around you that somehow just... work* despite having zero upkeep or maintenance. Modern hardware is surprisingly reliable and most outages are caused by operator error when people are (potentially unnecessarily) messing with stuff rather than the hardware failing.
by mannicken | 2025-12-21 20:13:00+00:00
>As you might imagine, dating can be a quagmire of liabilities and bear traps.

I did not imagine that at all. In fact, I, like I imagine many other young men, thought that becoming famous would certainly solve their dating problems forever.

That certainty has disappeared. Thanks for sharing this.

>The point is this: you don’t need to do anything wrong to get death threats, rape threats, etc. You just need a big enough audience.

Jesus fucking christ, that is a very believable and plausible thought. Even in these 93 comments I'm already seeing people who most likely don't know this dude and somehow decided to dislike him.
by visarga | 2025-12-21 20:13:14+00:00
Every error is a signal you need better tests. You can let the LLM create tests for every error it stumbles into, besides all the regular tests it can write on its own. Add all test scenarios you can think of, since you are not implementing them by hand. A bad test is invalidated by code, and a bad code invalidated by the test, so between them the AI agent can become reliable.
by pteraspidomorph | 2025-12-21 20:13:36+00:00
I'm happy Airvpn is rarely mentioned in mainstream vpn lists and don't typically mention them myself (sorry airvpn folks, but here's my apology) because I suspect its relative obscurity is in great part the reason it works so well. Not only reputation - it's technologically good too, supports all the payment methods, good prices, lots of exit points, no nonsense. I've been using them continuously for several years.
by Christopgr | 2025-12-21 20:14:17+00:00
Also resonates with me. I helped my previous company scale and get acquired and then helped scale the new team some more. Then decided I wanted to go into a high-caliber start-up because I was kind of burned-out and after a year I did. I work with brilliant people, building a product that democratizes investing in my small EU country and seeing a company grow again is fun. The problem is we lack excitedness and the feedback loop is bad so my motivation hasn't picked-up. What helped me is a new hire that brought some emotions and excitedness to the team.

I have also been thinking of giving my notice for a while now, but I'm also struggling with finding a purpose so that part also hit me hard. I'm actually scared of leaving my job in case I find out it was the one thing that gave me purpose and I won't be able to find something better.

Congrats on doing it, and please do send a message if you do find something that gives you more purpose, it will greatly help me.
by lnsru | 2025-12-21 20:14:35+00:00
I am hardware developer and certified electrician as a hobby. I have regularly clients that are buying time while I do really simple things on the property. It’s really cringe to be asked to vacuum their dirt for couple hours. I am paid premium while the clients watch Netflix and later whine about running out of money. I tried politely ask to do rudimentary things by themselves, but it never worked out. I grew in poverty and have hard time understanding this.

My parents buy groceries delivery what is really useful and time saving on other hand. House cleaner is difficult topic, they do seldom a good job even when offered more money. Typical example: there is dirt under edges of carpet after vacuuming.
by coldstartops | 2025-12-21 20:14:40+00:00
Sorry for continuing on this thread, but now I got more questions:

How do you monitor and enforce your uptime SLA? You state 99.9%, which is less than 9 hours downtime per year; what happens if you breach this guarantee?

Any other types of SLA's? What happens if you get breached/ your networks gets breached, or hardware failure, and my "anonymous" data is lost.

Besides that you make some claims, but are they real, or are they vaporwave?

like: "All our datacenters maintain the highest security standards with 24/7 on-site security, biometric access controls, and CCTV surveillance.

Each facility features N+1 power redundancy with UPS systems and diesel generators, ensuring your services remain online even during extended power outages."

Are you sure the above is true, because I am not.
by yboris | 2025-12-21 20:15:31+00:00
I once commented on HN how my favorite Sci Fi novel is Accelerando and the author, Charles Stross, replied to it suggesting I try his The Rapture of the Nerds he co-wrote with Cory Doctorow; I loved it when I read it too.

I love HN - it's basically the only website I visit these days (aside checking mail, watching YouTube, and gardening my GitHub repositories).
by to11mtm | 2025-12-21 20:15:55+00:00
I don't know numbers but I at least remember my paintball physics;

As far as the storage vessel, CO2 has much lower pressure demands than something like, say, hydrogen. On something like a paintball marker the burst disc (i.e. emergency blow off valve) for a CO2 tank is in the range of of 1500-1800PSI [0].

A compressed air tank that has a 62cubic inch, 3000PSI capacity, will have a circumference of 29cm and a length close to 32.7cm, compared to a 20oz CO2 tank that has a circumfrence of 25.5cm and a length of around 26.5cm [1]. The 20oz tank also weighs about as much 'filled' as the Compressed air tank does empty (although compressed air doesn't weigh much, just being through here).

And FWIW, that 62/3000 compressed air vs 20oz CO2 comparison... the 20oz of CO2 will almost certainly give you more 'work' for a full tank. When I was in the sport you needed more like a 68/4500 tank to get the same amount of use between fills.

Due to CO2's lower pressures and overall behavior, it's way cheaper and easier to handle parts of this; I'm willing to bet the blowoff valve setup could in fact even direct back to the 'bag' in this case, since the bag can be designed pessimistically for the pressure of CO2 under the thermal conditions. [2]

I think the biggest 'losses' will be in the energy around re-liquifying the CO2, but if the system is closed loop that's not gonna be that bad IMO. CO2's honestly a relatively easy and as long as working in open area or with a fume hood relatively safe gas to work with, so long as you understand thermal rules around liquid state [also 2] and use proper safety equipment (i.e. BOVs/burst discs/etc.)

[0] - I know there are 3k PSI burst discs out there but I've never seen one that high on a paintball CO2 tank...

[1] - I used the chart on this page as a reference: https://www.hkarmy.com/products/20oz-aluminum-co2-paintball-...

[2] - Liquid CO2 does not like rapid thermal changes or sustained extreme heat; This is when burst discs tend to go off. But it also does not work nearly as well in cold weather, especially below freezing. Where this becomes an issue is when for one reason or another liquid CO2 gets into the system. This can be handled in an industrial scenario with proper design I think tho.
by randallsquared | 2025-12-21 20:16:10+00:00
I think this is, in part, what the article is arguing. Community, and multi-generational culture and tradition, were a technology which helped populations thrive in what we now consider abject poverty. As the world gets wealthier, due to more recent technologies like widespread markets, staying in the same place and interacting with only the same 100-500 people for one's whole life is no longer something that almost everyone has to do, which explodes the basis for those earlier techs.

With TFR rapidly falling, current and future children are much less likely to even have any family other than parents, which cuts out another pillar supporting community and tradition, too.

I don't have a pat answer or know where this is going, but--assuming humanity survives--unless we want to turn into Asimov's Spacers, we'll have to find something to care about.
by saghm | 2025-12-21 20:16:30+00:00
At least in the US, each person has a lot more than one representative they vote for, with multiple levels of government with different intended scopes. As much as that doesn't completely eliminate the problems you describe, I'd argue that that focus on only the first election listed in the ballot at the expense of the others is one of the (many) causes of how we ended in the state we are today. It's a lot easier for someone to be elected to represent you while ignoring your interests if you don't even know or care about the fact that they're running. If people cared more about local elections (and even federal elections other than for president), there would be at least some increase in pressure for legislative bodies to respond to the will of the people. Without that, the issue isn't even that they're going the opposite of what the people who voted for them want, but the the number of people who voted for them (or even for the candidates they're running against) aren't anywhere close to representative proportion of the population. We don't really know if representative democracy would approximate actual democracy because the people they're representing aren't the full population, but the small segment of politically active ones.
by stevenjgarner | 2025-12-21 20:16:45+00:00
I disagree. I think his intention was to maximize shareholder value which he has done dramatically by making the user the product being sold. Microsoft stock has soared even at the expense of Microsoft shedding users. Satya has realized the true value of Windows as a revenue platform. It never was a competitive operating system.

From my earlier comment to another Windows post:

Windows 11 has transitioned from a standalone tool into a digital storefront that prioritizes recurring revenue through aggressive prompts for Microsoft 365 and OneDrive subscriptions. By mandating cloud-based Microsoft Accounts, the OS effectively anchors your identity to a marketing ID, allowing the company to track behavior and monetize your data. The interface now functions as an advertising platform, injecting "recommended" apps and sponsored content directly into the Start menu and search results. Ultimately, this shift means users are no longer just customers of a product, but recurring assets whose attention and telemetry are sold to sustain Microsoft’s ecosystem and maximize shareholder value.
by cogman10 | 2025-12-21 20:17:01+00:00
Well, I'd say it's almost the reverse of how it is with windows.

In windows, the bloat is built in by default. You don't get to chose how the start menu works, you get the windows default start menu and you better like the ads in it. It takes work to pull that garbage out.

In linux most stuff is opt in.

The other part of linux is most stuff isn't simply there running in the background by default. Firefox eats a decent amount of memory, but it's not doing that when I don't have my browser open.
by chuankl | 2025-12-21 20:17:26+00:00
Probability Theory: The Logic of Science by ET Jaynes was the book that made statistics and probability theory finally make sense to me. Before reading this book, I was already familiar with Bayesian probability, having finished (among other books) The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, but Jaynes took everything to a whole new level. Probability is not an objective measure of likelihood—it is a subjective measure of incomplete information. This seems like a small shift in perspective, but it is much more profound than that, and you have to read the book to understand it.

The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Eliyahu M Goldratt opened my eyes to process optimization. It is nominally about process optimization in a manufacturing plant, but so many of the lessons can be applied to other domains, such as software development. (And also about life in general, how to think about what matters and what doesn't.) It is a bit dated now; for example The Principles of Product Development Flow offers a much more systematic treatment of the topic. But I think The Goal remains the best intro to process and systems thinking.
by otterley | 2025-12-21 20:17:37+00:00
Are you assuming they're all stored identically? If so, that's not necessarily the case.

Once the logs have entered the ingestion endpoint, they can take the most optimal path for their use case. Metrics can be extracted and sent off to a time-series metric database, while logs can be multiplexed to different destinations, including stored raw in cheap archival storage, or matched to schemas, indexed, stored in purpose-built search engines like OpenSearch, and stored "cooked" in Apache Iceberg+Parquet tables for rapid querying with Spark, Trino, or other analytical engines.

Have you ever taken, say, VPC flow logs, saved them in Parquet format, and queried them with DuckDB? I just experimented with this the other day and it was mind-blowingly awesome--and fast. I, for one, am glad the days of writing parsers and report generators myself are over.
by II2II | 2025-12-21 20:19:22+00:00
I get what you're saying, but OS vendors could prevent themselves from running arbitrary code, even from themselves, without the user's authorization if they really wanted to. I'm not sure it is in anyone's best interest since it would affect everything from security updates to automatically installing device drivers (e.g. people would be left with insecure systems or would claim Windows is broken since most would not understand the prompts). It would also be difficult to prevent Microsoft's marketing department from sneaking a trojan horse into things like security update.
by QuantumNomad_ | 2025-12-21 20:19:40+00:00
It has wrong author.

The author and book cover it is showing is for a comic book adaptation by John Carnell.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41725880

Instead of showing the author and book cover for the original text book by Douglas Adams.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11.The_Hitchhiker_s_Guid...
by SoftTalker | 2025-12-21 20:20:02+00:00
You're also assuming your log infrastructure is a lot more durable than most are. Generally, logging is not a guaranteed action. Writing a log message is not normally something where you wait for a disk sync before proceeding. Dropping a log message here or there is not a fatal error. Logs get rotated and deleted automatically. They are designed for retroactive use and best effort event recording, not assumed to be a flawless record of everything the system did.
by ewoodrich | 2025-12-21 20:20:15+00:00
Any VBA? I help out with an extremely complex 15+ yr old Excel workbook designed for managing school debate tournaments that's still in active use in the PNW debate world but the complexity is 90% from VBA.

It does inject Excel formulas when creating worksheets but also heavily uses UI controls/dialogs made with the VB6 era WYSIWYG designer built into Excel, plus some COM extensions for SMTP emails, with spreadsheets used both as a pseudo database mostly hidden from the user and as the output for rendering data but the actual logic is mostly VBA.

Excel's VBA IDE feels like a time capsule from 2002, and not in a good way (with some of the most comically unhelpful error messages I've ever seen and extremely aggressive syntax checking that constantly interrupts typing in code). Microsoft increasingly makes it very clear they don't want people using VBA but it still works fine in the latest PC versions from O365 after turning off a few security features/approving some prompts.
by mastazi | 2025-12-21 20:20:40+00:00
For many types of users, Windows is no longer viable. I have friends who work at a .NET shop and most of that team now uses Macs. Unthinkable just a few years ago. Meanwhile, I checked ProtonDB and now 90% of my Steam library is Platinum or Native. So I finally switched my gaming PC to Linux. Microsoft's priorities are elsewhere, Windows doesn't have a bright future.
by otterley | 2025-12-21 20:21:01+00:00
> If you have insufficient ingestion rate

I would rather fix this problem than every other problem. If I'm seeing backpressure, I'd prefer to buffer locally on disk until the ingestion system can get caught up. If I need to prioritize signal delivery once the backpressure has resolved itself, I can do that locally as well by separating streams (i.e. priority queueing). It doesn't change the fundamental nature of the system, though.
by quotemstr | 2025-12-21 20:21:07+00:00
Universities may have cured us of some forms of indoctrination but exposed us to others: for example, nuclear power was demonized for decades is academia and our avoiding it has set us back as a civilization.

The "answer" here isn't education per se. A would-be censor might look at the spread of an inconvenient idea and conclude the education isn't working and therefore harder measures are justified.

The answer is epistemic humility and historical literacy. A good education instills both. They teach us that one can be wrong without shame, that testing ideas makes us stronger, and that no good has come out of boost ideas beyond what their merits can support.

Specifically, I want universities to do a much better job of teaching people to argue a perspective with which they disagree. A well-educated person can hold the best version of his opponent's idea in mind and argue it persuasively enough that his opponent agrees that he's been fairly heard. If people can't do that at scale, they're tempted to reach for censorship instead of truth seeking.

Another thing I want from universities (and all schools) is for them to inculcate the idea that the popularity of an idea has nothing to do with its merits. The irrational primate brain up-weights ideas it sees more often. The censor (if we're steelmanning) believes that coordinated influence campaigns can hijack the popularity heuristic and make people believe things they wouldn't if those ideas diffused organically through the information ecosystem.

This idea is internally consistent, sure, but 1) the censorship "cure" is always worse than the disease, and 2) we can invest in bolstering epistemics instead of in beefing up censorship.

We are rational primates. We can override popularity heuristics. Doing so is a skill we must be taught, however, and one of the highest ROI things we can do in education right now is teach it.
by bayarearefugee | 2025-12-21 20:21:08+00:00
Glad you brought up your friend in the 2nd bit there as it seems to have become relatively common for some people to make food delivery services a very regular part of their lifestyle without really paying attention to the staggering amount of saturated fat they are ingesting even from the majority of "healthy" options available on these services (nevermind the even worse fast food options)

Of course this has always been a thing with prepared restaurant food (just listen to various comments Anthony Bourdain made over the years about restaurants and butter use) but I'm somewhat convinced the friction removal of having these foods delivered at nearly any time of the day is going to cause an uptick in middle age heart disease in a group of people who are going overboard in trading money for time without thinking of the long term consequences.
by mrandish | 2025-12-21 20:21:37+00:00
The site's text is medium blue on a gray background with a font-weight of 300. I'm all for a bit of visual variety and personal expressiveness but this is pushing the boundaries of accessible legibility on some systems and screens.

(Yes, I realize there are various browser accessibility tools, reader modes and even custom CSS overrides, but I'd prefer not being forced to force those things on for all sites - because it means that "bit of visual variety and personal expressiveness" no longer exists for increasing numbers of visitors.)
by RHSeeger | 2025-12-21 20:21:38+00:00
> Here’s a thought experiment: someone puts two paintings in a photocopier and makes a single sheet of paper with both paintings. Did that person create art?

Yeah, it gets really murky there. For that specific thought experiment, I would say it depends on if it's something that people will see and think about and talk about, etc. For example, a collection of pairs of images of people that were assassinated over the years and an image of their assassin would certain get people talking (some in a good way, some bad).

When it comes to effort, I think that's only a factor, too; and not even necessarily a good one. There's art out there like

- Someone taped a banana to a wall (and included instructions for taping another banana to replace it)

- Someone (literally) threw a few cans of paint at a canvas and created something chaotic looking

Both of those things are "low effort" at first glance. But someone spent time thinking about it, and what they wanted to do, and what people might think of it. And, without a doubt, there's people that would refer to both as art.
by schmuckonwheels | 2025-12-21 20:23:03+00:00
I believe Stallman's doctorate is honorary. Courtesy of Wikipedia:

>With regard to the use of this honorific, the policies of institutions of higher education generally ask that recipients "refrain from adopting the misleading title" and that a recipient of an honorary doctorate should restrict the use of the title "Dr" before their name to any engagement with the institution of higher education in question and not within the broader community.

This, however, does not overshadow his contribution to computing and I must say that as of 2025, he has been right about most things (with the possible exception of secure boot).