MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jtrn | 2025-12-05 12:53:43+00:00
I have a tentative take, and I kind of feel stupid for even claiming this, since I don't work in Cloud-ops, or whatever, but it's fun to try to participate, and I spent some time articulating what i think is a good perspective on Cloudflare now a days, and as psychologist, I am primary interested in the psychology of things.

Basically, my take is: It’s not a technical monoculture; it’s a billing psychology + inertia culture.

I dont think the internet is fragile simply because Cloudflare is so ubiquitous, because that view ignores the economic factor of why people choose them. The situation is really a perfect bi-modal distribution: at the low end, you have hobbyists and personal sites who use Cloudflare because it is the only viable free option, and at the extreme high end, you have massive enterprises that truly need that specific global capacity to scrub terabits of attack traffic.

However, I think the following perspective is important: For the vast middle ground of the internet—most standard businesses and SaaS platforms—Cloudflare could be viewed as redundant. If you are hosting on AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure, you are already sitting behind world-class infrastructure protection that rivals anything Cloudflare offers. The reason this feels like a dangerous monoculture isn't because Google or Amazon can't protect you, but rather because Cloudflare wins on the psychology of billing. They sell a flat-rate insurance policy against attacks, whereas the cloud giants charge for usage, which scares people.

Ultimately, the internet isn't suffering from a lack of technical alternatives to DDoS protection, nor is Cloudflare a NECESSARY single point of failure; it is just suffering from a market preference for predictable invoices over technical redundancy, and inertia, leading to an extremely high usage of Cloudflare. So basically: Even though we are currently relying a lot on Cloudflare, we are far from vendor lock-in, and there is a clear path to live without them, given that there are many alternatives.

Maybe we could view this as a good thing, since basically medium to large-scale enterprises efficiently subsidize small and hobby-level actors? So to summerize: The 2018-era "just use Cloudflare for everything" advice is outdated, and the following is a better philosopy: If you're tiny: Cloudflare free tier is still a no-brainer. If you're huge and actually get attacked: pay for Cloudflare Enterprise or equivalent.

If you're anywhere in between: seriously consider whether you need it at all. The hyperscalers are good enough, and removing Cloudflare can actually improve your availability (fewer moving parts).

I think Cloudflare thinks this way too, which is why they've been pushing Zero Trust, Workers, WARP, Access, and Magic Transit, to become the default network stack for companies, not just the default firewall.

/wall-of-text
by nephihaha | 2025-12-05 12:54:08+00:00
I remember going to Rotterdam as a small child in the 1980s and seeing VHS tapes on open display in a shop window promoting bestiality and incest. In fact, well into the 1990s, bestiality was legal and the Dutch age of consent was only twelve, so they had no qualms about public display of such things. I'm aware this has since changed within the last generation... When sex has to be between consenting adult humans (preferably not closely related.)

It doesn't sound like right wing Christians are dictating your way of life much even in areas which are downright questionable and unhygienic.
Show HN: Sunrise Calendar: custom printed calendar with sun and moon info
by elijahparker | 2025-12-05 12:54:10+00:00
Edit: link: https://sunrisecal.com/

This is a personal project that I've been working on very slowly now on the side for the past 5 years (yes, ridiculously long), using it for myself for a while and now finally have it ready to share to a wider audience. It's a web app for building printed wall calendars that include sun and moon info for each day, specific to the location you choose.

Rather than using accounts, each calendar gets its own unique URL by which it can be accessed. This way there are no accounts, no logging in, no tracking, etc. Everything is deleted 7 days after the last access, or if ordered, 18 months after the last access. There's no email list, no collecting/saving of email, etc. It's for creating and printing calendars; nothing else. This makes it free to try without worrying about getting harassed by remarketing...

I built it with nodejs and pdfkit for creating the calendar PDF that gets sent to the printer (lulu.com). I'm just using file storage of json documents to start with -- I know this is not ideal, but I started simple and lightweight and will fix things if/when needed. In the past I've been overly obsessed with using all the right tools and frameworks, but that can sometimes distract from the simple core goal, so for this I've intentionally taken a different approach (specifically since this is more of a "just for fun" project).

But I don't know -- adoption has been slow so far. Does anyone use printed calendars anymore?
by Snuupy | 2025-12-05 12:55:04+00:00
My sweet spot is the Wooking X16 - 7840HS/8845HS from taobao in China for ~500usd

bad trackpad, bad touchpad (bring your own for both), great thermals/performance, good screen, bad speakers, unbeatable value

no usb4 (but has 1x usbc)

I refused to get another thinkpad ever since the T14 AMD gen1 firmware debacle where plugging in a Dell usbc dock would cause the entire device to hard reboot

their firmware garbage is off-putting

I considered framework but the $2k+ price point to me was unreasonable

it's literally cheaper for me to carry around the X16 + kb + mouse/trackpad than to buy a framework 16 (I know that's not the point, but still)

https://4pda.to/forum/index.php?showtopic=1076401
by wolvesechoes | 2025-12-05 12:55:06+00:00
I think similar remarks can be made in regard to Jupyter notebooks and their popularity among scientist, engineers and data people. Yes, they are still more in the conventional programming realm, where the code is in the foreground, yet to some extent they bring more immediacy. The fact that you can look and investigate at the data you are dealing with at every step (print the table, make a plot etc) is powerful.

Another thing would be of course powerful REPL environments.

And there are also visual environments like Matlab's Simulink and Modelica. Can you write control algorithm or a bunch of differential equations in any language? Yes. But control engineer can just take a quick look at screenshot of a Simulink model and already have a good idea on what is going on there. This cannot be said about the code.

This may be rather unpopular among hackers, where TTY clones and vi emulation rules everything, but computers and software seem to me most powerful and enabling outside the usual coding context of putting streams of characters into the source file using a keyboard.
by jeroenhd | 2025-12-05 12:55:06+00:00
Fair enough; the Linux kernel is arguably missing the API, but only for kTLS.

However, GNU/Linux does lack such an API. There is no standard API for listing certificates and private keys. All GNU/Linux provides is a list of files that may or may not contain one or more certificates and/or private keys that may or may not be related to each other. You have to go beyond the basic GNU parts to get to things like keychains.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-05 12:55:08+00:00
> And there are also elements like my city, where some of the more notable local business owners and developers are all _way too cozy_ with the City Council and Planning/Zoning Boards (like not just rubbing shoulders at community events, fundraisers, but in the "our families rent AirBnBs together and go on vacation together) which gives them greater influence.

But now you're just condemning the zoning board and their cronies as it should be, as opposed to someone else who can't pay higher wages just because real estate got more expensive since it got more expensive for them too.

> Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.

Which is basically useless in this context because when costs increase you could apply it equally to not raising the minimum wage (the individual has to suck it up) or raising the minimum wage (the small business owner has to suck it up). Meanwhile neither of them should have to suck it up because we should instead be getting the costs back down.
by intended | 2025-12-05 12:55:13+00:00
You get that by dealing with the absolute capture of the news and media ecosystem, something that has been lumbering along since the 1960s.

People voted based on the information they had. The information system they had has been mapped out. If this were gaming, the “meta” is known. One group played the meta to the hilt. Others lament the failure of the spirit.

I get that people may be hesitant to leave the familiarity of known territory for what looks like malignant chaos. But there is a fight to be had, rules to be learnt and ways to counteract the tendencies you are concerned about.

I am sadly not at the point where I can both raise the issue, and point you to sources of information that are pertinent to the stage of your journey.

There’s actual work on misinformation propagation, efficacy of moderation, the mechanics of how the media environment is being used. Or there are places where you can contribute code and labor to learn/build as you go.
by throwawayqqq11 | 2025-12-05 12:55:25+00:00
To me, religious people, simple racist and libertarians all suffer from a identity-based cognitive bias. "Our groups or my well being is the ideal to project onto the nation/world." (Neocons dont fit in here, i have to admit. Maybe its abuse of power pleasing the monkey brain, but resulting wealth certainly too.)

I think self-withdrawal is more frequent in left leaning individuals for this exact, more unbiased/intelligent/educated reason.

But you are correct again. There is a lot of complexity on the right, if you look deep enough. But this depth does not cause as much infighting compared to the left, because, again: tribalism taking over higher order reasoning.
by petercooper | 2025-12-05 12:55:26+00:00
Very nice! I was following Notch during that LD and had no ideas of my own so I ported it on the fly to Ruby using JRuby. Performance was hideous compared to Java but it was a fun learning experience and I was surprised just how good JRuby was at working with all the same libraries as Java: https://github.com/peterc/potc-jruby

I imagine TypeScript was a bit more of a challenge as I could mostly translate line for line as JRuby is JVM-based and I could use all the same dependencies.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-05 12:55:54+00:00
It was shocking the first time I showed a lisp program to a (particularly "annoyed by everything") non-lisp developer who never apparently saw s-expressions before. Lots of knee-jerk reactions of "Oh my god so many parenthesis" and "How could anyone program like this?" while they sat there smug with their TypeScript codebase having more special characters, syntax and the same amount of parenthesizes, only because the opening parenthesis is one symbol to the left, instead of in the middle of the calls...
by JosephjackJR | 2025-12-05 12:56:08+00:00
We’ve been experimenting with real-time AI memory systems and kept running into the same limitations: RAM-bound graphs, multi-millisecond access patterns, durability issues, and unpredictable behaviour under load.

We tried approaching the problem from a different angle and ended up with a small engine that does:

• sub-microsecond hot-path lookups • 50M persistent nodes on an 8GB Jetson • ACID durability (survives hard power cuts) • mmap-streamed cold storage • a Redis-compatible proxy

This isn’t an LLM or vector DB; it’s a lower-level substrate for structured + semantic memory in real-time environments.

Still early. Posting this mainly to understand whether others here have tried similar approaches, or see obvious architectural issues we should be thinking about.

Very open to critique, contact through ryjoxdemo .com!
by 7bit | 2025-12-05 12:56:15+00:00
If Windows would not have the amazing backwards compatibility it has, then would Quake still run on Proton, if it would not run on Windows today? And if so, how much effort would have the Proton team had to invest to make that happen?

My guess is, an impossibly high effort that would benefit Quake, but perhaps not other games of that era.

Microsoft is the reason Quake works on Proton still today.
by 1718627440 | 2025-12-05 12:56:51+00:00
> The actual failures of the Western economies lie in naive assumptions about dealing with mercantalist countries and NIMBYism, but given this forum is against the solutions to both it is more politically acceptable to blame everything on "neoliberalism".

And turning themself more into mercantalist countries, which is meant by 'blame everything on "neoliberalism"'.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-05 12:57:27+00:00
> All these started with pure declarative DSL then incrementally created a nightmarish imperative monstrosity.

"Huh?" I asked myself when you mentioned that Terraform is now imperative somehow. Took a look at the website again, and seems to still be HCL, and still be declarative. Am I missing something? How exactly is Terraform today a "imperative monstrosity"?
by reactordev | 2025-12-05 12:57:32+00:00
>”Once soft and flexible, but since hardened, this ancient “space gum” consists of polymer-like materials extremely rich in nitrogen and oxygen. Such complex molecules could have provided some of the chemical precursors that helped trigger life on Earth”

That would be some stale big league chew if that were the case. By orders of billions of years. Making it the oldest wad of big league chew we know of in existence. ;)
by hu3 | 2025-12-05 12:57:46+00:00
Global mutable state is like a rite of passage for devs.

Novices start slapping global variables everywhere because it makes things easy and it works, until it doesn't and some behaviour breaks because... I don't even know what broke it.

On a smaller scale, mutable date handling libraries also provide some memorable WTF debugging moments until one learns (hopefully) that adding 10 days to a date should probably return a new date instance in most cases.
by kakacik | 2025-12-05 12:57:49+00:00
This is all false, I guess you've never been to Soviet Union nor russia (that country doesn't deserve capital R). Central planning is dysfunctional at its core, ignoring subtleties of smaller parts. Also, it was historically always done in eastern Europe hand in hand with corruption, nepotism and incompetence where apparatchiks held most power due to going deepest in ass kissing and other rectal speleology hobbies, not because they were competent.

I come from one such country. After WWII, there was Austria and there was eastern bloc to compare. Austria was severely damaged and had much lower GDP than us. It took mere 40 years of open market vs centrally planned economy to see absolutely massive differences when borders reopened and people weren't shot anymore for trying to escape - we didn't have proper food in the shops ffs. Exotic fruits came few times a year, rotten or unripe. Even stuff grown in our country was often lacking completely. Any product ie electric ones, or cars were vastly subpar to western ones while massively more costly (and often design was plain stolen from the western companies).

Society as a whole made it because almost everybody had a big garden to complement everything basic missing in shops. The little meat you could buy was of worst quality, ladden with amount of toxic chemistry that wouldn't be acceptable in Bangladesh.
by veunes | 2025-12-05 12:58:05+00:00
This is the inevitable evil of the man in the middle. OpenRouter by definition decrypts your traffic to route it to the provider (OpenAI, Anthropic). Technically, they can read everything The problem is that for the Enterprise segment, this is a showstopper. No bank or hospital will route data through an aggregator that openly states it classifies prompts via Google API (even sampled ones). This confirms that OpenRouter remains a tool for indie hackers and researchers, not for serious B2B
by michaelcampbell | 2025-12-05 12:58:40+00:00
> No doubt about the last part, but how does merging two giants create "More Choice"?

This is performative marketing for the regulators to allow the merger. No one (including the regulators) believes this, and it won't come to pass. ("More choice" won't, I mean, the merger will and a lot of regulators and politicians involved will end up with new cars, boats, and kids' college tuitions paid.)
by 1718627440 | 2025-12-05 12:59:21+00:00
> Markets are the expression of an unfree society because they concentrate power in the hands of the few.

The idea of markets is that both sides are unable to influence the price. What you describe is a problem, but it isn't a healthy/free/working market anymore. I agree that the current economy is suboptimal, but the problem isn't capitalism and and free markets. It's rather a lack of the latter.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-12-05 12:59:23+00:00
Pollution is as much their problem as it is ours. More so in the case of Bangladesh because rising sea levels have some very real consequences for them as they are already dealing with floods a lot.

China is doing a lot about climate and is actually leading on what you might regard as contributing to solutions rather than making the problem worse.

The obvious ones are their technical contributions (electrifying transport, clean energy generations, batteries, etc.). But they are also very active with massive projects to tackle large scale engineering projects to undo the effects of desertification, soil erosion, etc.

You are right to point out that we are a bit naive in the west to consider problems solved simply by moving them outside of our borders.

We don't have to buy sneakers that were artisanally glued together in some sweat shop in Vietnam. And when the brand name on those sneakers says Nike, or Adidas, we can sort of hold those companies accountable to what they are doing and how they are sourcing their product. And it's not the government that should do that but us.

I'm more pragmatic here and I think we should balance sustainability with our willingness to pay for it. Also there are minor problems and really big problems. We tend to zoom in on the negative and forget about the positive when it comes to issues like this. Just look at China. Very poor country five decades ago. Now, it has a huge middle class. Us buying their cheap labor has pulled that country out of poverty. And now they are a climate tech leader and taking their responsibility on a lot of fronts. In some ways, we should be following their lead. Not the other way around.

There are other countries, like Vietnam, Pakistan, Nigeria, etc. that are currently seeing a lot of economic growth and rapid improvement in work, social, economic, and environmental conditions. Some of those countries are electrifying much more rapidly than we do in the west. Not all of it is perfect of course. But we do hold power over them via our buying power. Especially when it comes to companies active inside our borders maybe cutting a few corners when it comes to their suppliers and choosing cheap over sustainable. Ultimately that's on us. If we consumers don't care, our governments won't act, and companies won't address this, and so on.

A lot of this stuff starts with people caring enough. And it seems a lot of us like buying cheap stuff. I'm not any better here of course. I don't actually know who made my socks, underwear, and t-shirts, for example. I ordered that from Amazon, so I'm expecting there might be an issue or two with sustainability and environmental impact.
by nutjob2 | 2025-12-05 12:59:38+00:00
Like everything else it's just a negotiated figure. Arguments to and fro would include the likelihood of breakup (such as regulatory risk, unforeseen events), how disruptive the whole process is and also simply how desperate the buyer or seller is.

There's no modeling, it's a punishment or incentive. The intention is to inflict financial pain.
by jmkd | 2025-12-05 12:59:58+00:00
This deal is an indicator of huge changes in global film & TV production.

Hollywood's struggles amplified after the writer's strike with a perfect storm of issues around unionisation, technology, fragmenting audiences, new formats, asset liabilities and enormous competition to the east.

Now LA soundstages are empty while production centres in Europe, UK, India, China, Nigeria are booming and vast new studios cropping up in the Middle East.

Proposed tariffs will do little to stem this tide as the money has moved on already.

In addition, traditional production methods are unsustainable and decision-making is opaque in an era where sustainability, transparency and democratisation are taking over.

The main benefit to Netflix is of course the IP, but the traditional studio assets of WB have their days numbered.
by ben_w | 2025-12-05 13:00:27+00:00
> You need A LOT of electricity to have coal free steel production.

Yes. And?

All that matters here is the cost. Is the cost of the energy (+equipment wear etc.) needed per ton of coal-free steel higher or lower than the cost per ton of whatever the current best coal-based method is?

That's not constant by time or place, so I can easily believe that the Scandinavian Peninsula does this with a bunch of cheap hydro, that Iceland does it with a bunch of cheap geothermal, that Denmark and Germany lose whatever steel industry they might have, that the UK does with cheap wind, that Spain does it with cheap sun, that France does it with state-subsidised "cheap" nuclear.

> Its not green but typical greenwashing - you don't emit CO2, but you import energy made from coal etc.

Or nuclear, or renewables.

Here's Sweden's power mix over the last few decades. Note it's a net exporter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Electricity_production_in...
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-05 13:00:55+00:00
> WB content is not globally available, Netflix content is.

Neither are "globally available" as "globally" includes countries that are currently under US embargo, and both those companies are US companies who (supposedly) follow US law.

What you're welcoming isn't "I didn't have access before, now I do!" but rather "I could give Company A money to see this, now I can give company B money to see the same!" which I guess you're happy about, but other's obviously see it for what it is, no practical change except for shareholders.
by solatic | 2025-12-05 13:01:02+00:00
> it used to cost a bit to print text that looked nice

More than a bit. Before print-on-demand technology was developed that made it feasible to conduct small (<1000) print runs, publishing required engaging the services of not just the printer but also a professional typesetter, hardcover designer, etc. There were very real minimum costs involved that meant that any book printed needed to sell thousands of not tens of thousands of copies to even have a chance of profitability. This meant also requiring the services of marketers and distributors, who took their own cut, thus needing books with potential to sell even more copies.

The result of needing so many people involved in publishing and needing to sell so many copies is that the Overton window was very small and in a narrow center. The sheer volume was what gave printed media its credibility.

There were indeed smaller crackpot publishers, but at either much reduced quality, or with any premise of profitability rejected as irrelevant.

Print-on-demand drastically reduced the number of people required to get a work to print, and that made it easier for more marginal voices to get printed.