MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by theptip | 2025-12-05 15:49:50+00:00
It takes guts to say “this 1 month feature would be done in a couple days by a competent competitor using modern technology and techniques”, and the legendary “I reimplemented it in <framework> over the weekend” is often not well received.

But - sometimes drastic measures and hurt feeling are needed to break out of a bad attractor. Just be sure you’re OK with leaving the company/org if your play does not succeed.

And know that as the OP describes, it’s a lot about politics. If you convince management that there is a problem, you have severely undermined your technical leadership. Game out how that could unfold! In a small company maybe you can be the new TL, but probably don’t try to unseat the founder/CTO. In a big company you are unlikely to overturn many layers above you of technical leadership.
by detritus | 2025-12-05 15:50:04+00:00
eh, I was a Smartphone ‘it's gotta have a keyboard!’ hold-out too, but I've long-since embraced the Swype or whatever it's called, style of input. It's fine enough for 90% of my engagement with the internet via a phone. Anything more in depth I'm on a computer with a physical keyboard anyway.

But yes, the N900 was pre-slidey-smartphone peak brilliance.
by fidotron | 2025-12-05 15:50:32+00:00
> This change was being rolled out using our gradual deployment system, and, as part of this rollout, we identified an increase in errors in one of our internal tools which we use to test and improve new WAF rules. As this was an internal tool, and the fix being rolled out was a security improvement, we decided to disable the tool for the time being as it was not required to serve or protect customer traffic.

Come on.

This PM raises more questions than it answers, such as why exactly China would have been immune.
by estearum | 2025-12-05 15:50:40+00:00
But the results weren't the opposite.

One of the upsides of being evidence-driven is it's harder to paint yourself into a corner and put yourself at high risk of having your entire worldview flipped upside down by run of the mill, predictable scientific results.

By and large, consensus views are correct. Only a true idiot would make an identity out of disagreeing with consensus by virtue of it being consensus.
by kmoser | 2025-12-05 15:50:42+00:00
Some questionable assumptions here:

> The code was calcified because the developers were also. Personality types who dislike change tend not to design their code with future change in mind.

Reasons vary widely. Code can also get calcified because people lack the vision, tech skills, or time/budget to update it. On the opposite side of the spectrum, personality types who do like change sometimes rip out everything out and start from scratch, effectively destroying well written code, which is no better.

> Why does technical debt exist? Because requirements weren't properly clarified before work began.

Not necessarily: it can also exist because code wasn't well written to begin with, libraries weren't updated to work with OS updates, feature-creep, etc.

> In my opinion, anyone above senior engineer level needs to know how to collaborate cross-functionally, regardless of whether they choose a technical or management track.

Collaboration is a skill everyone needs, and the ability to explain things to people at other levels shouldn't be limited to senior engineers. Even junior devs would do well to be able to explain things to higher-ups.
by iteria | 2025-12-05 15:50:50+00:00
I do have kids. I still blame parents. I see so many parents who can't even do the lazy thing of turning on the parental controls for the devices they give their kids. Because they don't want to or can't deal with their kod whining and being obnoxious about having boundaries. I see adults who will create adult accounts for their kids even when they have to lie about their age because it's too annoying to them to either set up or deal with all the notifications and approvals of a kid account.

They want to protect their kid while being lazy. It's why my aunt bought my cousin an M rated game. That said on the box is was violent and everything else and then presented her ID so she could prove she was an adult in order to buy the videogame. Then she she was upset because that game wasn't for kids. It shouldn't be allowed for kids.

It wasn't. She just didn't pay any attention. And that's how I think of all parents of these lazy initiatives. They want to deny and inconvenience adults because they can't be bothered.
by tim333 | 2025-12-05 15:51:01+00:00
I'm not sure about deep technicalities but backtesting is a useful thing to see how some strategy would have performed at some times in the past but there are quite a lot of limitations to it. Two of the big ones are the market reacting to you and maybe more so a kind of hindsight bias where you devise some strategy that would have worked great on past markets but the real time ones do something different.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management was kind of an example of both of those. They based their predictions on past behaviour which proved incorrect. Also if other market participants figure a large player is in trouble and going to have to sell a load of bonds they all drop their bids to take advantage of that.

A lot of deviations from efficient market theory are like that - not deeply technical but about human foolishness.
by ericmay | 2025-12-05 15:51:11+00:00
Yes, but it would depend on the results.

The problem is that most people are bad at risk assessment. If COVID-19 vaccine increased their risk of premature death by .0000001% they point to that and say sure not taking my risk! Despite the fact that they'd be at much more risk of dying by getting the disease, or just hopping in their car and driving down the street to get a loaf of bread of whatever.

If you showed say, a 1% uptick in mortality that you could attribute to the vaccine, yea that would be a different story. But guess what? We wouldn't* release such a vaccine.

* I add an asterisk here because if it was a 1% uptick in mortality you can think of scenarios like a disease which kills you 50% of the time or something around that range as being a worthwhile trade off for a 1% rate.
by nout | 2025-12-05 15:51:33+00:00
I know I'll get hated for this on Hacker News, but this has been solved quite well on the bitcoin & Nostr side of things. It's easy to tip couple cents or whatever amounts and there are many apps / websites that support that.

The main difference is that using the legacy dollar rails is super annoying for small amounts, since there are multiple banks/companies on the path between you and the author you are trying to tip. And each of these intermediators needs their $$$ from you.
by oscillonoscope | 2025-12-05 15:51:58+00:00
I more or less use the method described [here](https://steveklabnik.github.io/jujutsu-tutorial/advanced/sim...) for branches. One thing I do change is that I set the bookmark to an empty commit that serves as the head of each branch. When I am satisfied with a commit on head and want to move it to a branch I just `jj rebase -r @ -B branch`. When I want to create a new branch it's just `jj new -A main -B head` and `jj bookmark set branch_name -r @`
by jabr | 2025-12-05 15:51:58+00:00
> In fact could you not just cron the cli deployment command on the nodes and get an effective poor man's declarative layer

In the project discord, a user recently experimented with a custom setup that sounds very similar to what you describe.

In fact, a big part of uncloud’s appeal to me is that it also provides powerful building blocks for more complex, custom systems like this, not just the streamlined workflow for simpler, standard cases.
by jandrese | 2025-12-05 15:52:02+00:00
I have to admit I checked the author on this paper. No surprise it is from outside of the US. It's hard to imagine a US institution releasing a scientific study that directly contradicts the administration's viewpoints out of fear of reprisal via loss of funding or even shakedowns.

I just hope this doesn't elicit some unhinged Truth Social post about evil Frenchmen trying to poison our bodies.
by duxup | 2025-12-05 15:52:15+00:00
Filling out paperwork for a security clearance long ago had two questions about "have you ever been a member of a group dedicated to the overthrow of the us government, if yes explain". The next question was about being an officer in such a group.

I always enjoyed that question in that there was a two line explanation field :)

I assume that was similar in that it's there to catch a lie (possibly just after the fact / legal leverage) ... not really find anything out with that question at that moment.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-12-05 15:52:42+00:00
Exactly. One shouldn't confuse the spotlight with communication. This is just a matter of letting the appropriate people know the things you want them to know or they need to know. We're social animals. We communicate. If someone doesn't know what you're doing, then, as the Captain says, we have a failure to communicate. Being able to communicate is a core life skill and part of what it means to be a functioning adult.

(I'm also willing to bet that the very same people who pout about not being "appreciated" would be the first to complain about someone "hovering" or "spying" on them, because that's what it would take for someone to know what you're up to in such cases. Like, make up your mind, bruh.)

And if you take a moment to think about it, those who expect others to just know what they've done are displaying the very narcissistic behavior they often claim to be avoiding. After all, why you? Why should anyone know what you, of all people, are doing? Do you know what others are doing? No, you don't. Not until they tell you or someone who has been told knows. You may think you know, but there is plenty that you don't know, and to be fair, perhaps don't need to know. The world does not revolve around you. Like you (I would hope), people have their own lives and tasks and concerns.

Think of something as everyday as a PR. Even if your manager looks at every PR, he doesn't know what you did to get there unless you communicate that to him. Unless you write it down and share it or tell him that you've experimented with three different approaches before settling on the chosen one, or done some kind of detailed analysis based on which you drew up your design, how the hell is he going to know?

And even if a manager should know certain things, it is pointless to make that appeal. So what if he should? Aren't there things you should be doing but aren't, like, say, communicating with clarity and coherence? "Shoulding" doesn't make things so. You have to deal with the world as it is, not as you would like it to be. Every manager is different. If your manager requires a huge banner and a neon sign to get the message, then that's what it takes to make him know things. Behave accordingly.
by antiloper | 2025-12-05 15:52:43+00:00
Make faster websites:

> we started rolling out an increase to our buffer size to 1MB, the default limit allowed by Next.js applications.

Why is the Next.js limit 1 MB? It's not enough for uploading user generated content (photographs, scanned invoices), but a 1 MB request body for even multiple JSON API calls is ridiculous. There frameworks need to at least provide some pushback to unoptimized development, even if it's just a lower default request body limit. Otherwise all web applications will become as slow as the MS office suite or reddit.
by basscomm | 2025-12-05 15:52:47+00:00
> over 100k emails to go through in one lifetime isn't worth the trouble

Unless you're on a bunch of mailing lists, I can't even fathom having that much email, much less that much unread email. I'm fanatical about making sure that I'm at inbox zero as much as possible because the 'unread' counter is the enemy. It takes some effort to set up and adjust filters and actually unsubscribe from stuff, but it's completely worth it to have a mailbox that's actually usable.
by jsnell | 2025-12-05 15:53:12+00:00
That's a bizarre takeaway for them to suggest, when they had exactly the same kind of bug with Rust like three weeks ago. (In both cases they had code implicitly expecting results to be available. When the results weren't available, they terminated processing of the request with an exception-like mechanism. And then they had the upstream services fail closed, despite the failing requests being to optional sidecars rather than on the critical query path.)
by snickerbockers | 2025-12-05 15:53:27+00:00
IDK; at the time i was using gentoo, in which it's natural not to have more modules than necessary because part of the installation process involves generating your own kernel configuration.

Even though it's not the normal way to install debian there ought to be some sort of way to build your own custom kernels and modules without interferance from the package manager (or you can just run it all manually and hope that you dont end up in a conflict with apt). Gentoo is the only distro where it's mandatory but im pretty sure this is supported on just about every distribution since it would be necessary for maintainers.
by rzerowan | 2025-12-05 15:53:34+00:00
Seems they still havent figured out a business model for their OS. Hardware at low volumes wont move ala kickstarter.

Would have thought after their ups and downs they would have landedon a sustainable businesss model. The market oppurtunity is there and the timing is favourable. All thats needed to stick the landing and have a viable alt to the ios/android duoploly.

Personally would recommend they work with an established OEM to customize/port drivers to existing hardware and market to a specific vertical rather than a general purpose for normies device.
by denysvitali | 2025-12-05 15:53:49+00:00
Ironically, this time around the issue was in the proxy they're going to phase out (and replace with the Rust one).

I truly believe they're really going to make resilience their #1 priority now, and acknowledging the release process errors that they didn't acknowledge for a while (according to other HN comments) is the first step towards this.

HugOps. Although bad for reputation, I think these incidents will help them shape (and prioritize!) resilience efforts more than ever.

At the same time, I can't think of a company more transparent than CloudFlare when it comes to these kind of things. I also understand the urgency behind this change: CloudFlare acted (too) fast to mitigate the React vulnerability and this is the result.

Say what you want, but I'd prefer to trust CloudFlare who admits and act upon their fuckups, rather than trying to cover them up or downplaying them like some other major cloud providers.

@eastdakota: ignore the negative comments here, transparency is a very good strategy and this article shows a good plan to avoid further problems
by reeredfdfdf | 2025-12-05 15:54:02+00:00
I can understand the use in agriculture, but I've never understood why anyone would use the stuff on their own lawn. Who cares if there are some weeds growing, when you can cut them down with lawnmower anyway?

Heck, my relatives in the countryside don't even have lawn, they just let the dandelions and other natural plants grow, and only use lawnmower in areas where they need to walk. Much better for the environment, and even looks pretty nice. Of course areas where they grow food or fancier flowers require some digging to keep weeds away.
by bwfan123 | 2025-12-05 15:54:16+00:00
LLM is the fad of the day, and these sort of articles provoke the natural get-rich-quick-greed inherent in all of us, especially the young tech-types. As such they are clickbait, and also a barometer of the silliness that is widespread.

I am curious why re-reading incerto sharpens your bullshit sense. I have read a few in that series, but didnt see it as sharpening my bullshit sensor.
by azemetre | 2025-12-05 15:54:22+00:00
Keep fighting the good fight. Asking for evidence should be the bar in conversations and too many people are willing to bend the truth to push their narratives (that the rich elites deserve everything, you were born a serf).

David Graeber wrote a great book called "Dawn of Everything" that really explains how newer techniques in anthropology have upended what we believe about modern humans.

There were 10,000+ people settlements found 30,000 years ago. The idea that humans have only developed "civilization" the last 5,000 years goes against what it means to be human. I mean we still have the same brains we did 200,000 years ago. People have always been smart, and more importantly, the book argues that humans have resisted nobility + kings since creation.

It's never cut and dry as it seems.
by jandrese | 2025-12-05 15:54:45+00:00
If the results were that getting the COVID vaccine was going to give you a 70% increased chance of death from COVID I would be outraged, and also quite confused as the real life evidence definitely doesn't point in that direction.

That's the problem with conspiracy theories, as the evidence piles up against them the counterfactual becomes increasingly ridiculous until you're out in the cold with a bunch of nutjobs.
by digital_sawzall | 2025-12-05 15:55:31+00:00
'growing evidence that blockchain will soon..." is basically the line we've heard for the last 15 years.

I'm more open than most to crypto, I worked at Coinbase during IPO and Avalanche for a short contract after that. But yes, I alternate between it's a total scam and it's a technology waiting for a use case.
by hannob | 2025-12-05 15:55:45+00:00
I found the intro very confusing, tbh.

Particularly the "no increased risk of all-cause mortality". I mean, if we assume the vaccines worked, we'd certainly expect a decreased risk of all-case mortality (because "all-case mortality" certainly includes "covid mortality"). Reading "no increase" seems to imply "it doesn't change anything". Yeah, technically, the sentence does not say that ("no increase" can mean "no decrease" or "no change").

You have to read further below to get what should be the real message on all-cause-mortality: "Vaccinated individuals had [...] a 25% lower risk of all-cause mortality". I think that should've been in the first 1-2 sentences.
by lapcat | 2025-12-05 15:55:53+00:00
> This is a straightforward error in the code, which had existed undetected for many years. This type of code error is prevented by languages with strong type systems. In our replacement for this code in our new FL2 proxy, which is written in Rust, the error did not occur.

Cloudflare deployed code that was literally never tested, not even once, neither manually nor by unit test, otherwise the straightforward error would have been detected immediately, and their implied solution seems to be not testing their code when written, or even adding 100% code coverage after the fact, but rather relying on a programming language to bail them out and cover up their failure to test.
by cge | 2025-12-05 15:56:08+00:00
That device is bafflingly LTE cat20 with 2Gbps downlink, and then has LAN connectivity only through a single 1Gbps ethernet port.

Actually, it seems one of the advantages of the new Ubiquiti devices over Teltonika/Mikrotik/Gl.iNet is that they actually have 10 Gbps SFP+ and 2.5 Gbps ethernet ports.
by enragedcacti | 2025-12-05 15:56:22+00:00
> The entire premise depends on him being a monster, not some sort of misunderstood, sympathetic EMO.

This is a misconception on a similar level to thinking the monster's name is Frankenstein: "As depicted by Shelley, the creature is a sensitive, emotional person whose only aim is to share his life with another sentient being like himself."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein%27s_monster#Perso...
by Maxatar | 2025-12-05 15:56:24+00:00
>Your order can legally be “front run” by the lead or designated market maker who receives priority trade matching, bypassing the normal FIFO queue. Not all exchanges do this.

Unless you're thinking of some obscure exchange in a tiny market, this is just untrue in the U.S., Europe, Canada, and APAC. There are no exchanges where market makers get any kind of priority to bypass the FIFO queue.
by wavemode | 2025-12-05 15:56:33+00:00
There's nothing preventing this for floats and ints in principle. e.g. the machine representation could be float, but the type in the eyes of the compiler could be `float | nan` until you check it for nan (at which point it becomes `float`). Then any operation which can return nan would return `float | nan` instead.

tbh this system (assuming it works that way) would be more strict at compile-time than the vast majority of languages.
by paradite | 2025-12-05 15:56:37+00:00
The deployment pattern from Cloudflare looks insane to me.

I've worked at one of the top fintech firms, whenever we do a config change or deployment, we are supposed to have rollback plan ready and monitor key dashboards for 15-30 minutes.

The dashboards need to be prepared beforehand on systems and key business metrics that would be affected by the deployment and reviewed by teammates.

I've never seen a downtime longer than 1 minute while I was there, because you get a spike on the dashboard immediately when something goes wrong.

For the entire system to be down for 10+ minutes due to a bad config change or deployment is just beyond me.
by estearum | 2025-12-05 15:56:44+00:00
No not really, since there are other studies that answer the question of vaccine safety and effectiveness in the more emergency scenario of <= Nov 1 2021.

Spoiler: They were also extremely safe and extremely effective then, too.

You can see it unambiguously in county-level excess mortality metrics split by political affiliation in the US. The anti-science right wing political sphere gave us a natural experiment that produced very clear results: lots of people dying before vaccines, then across the board death reduction after vaccines, then a red-blue bifurcation later on, after vaccines were politicized.
by snickerbockers | 2025-12-05 15:56:49+00:00
maybe not on an SSD but it definitely helps a lot on HDD by virtue of having far less disk traffic. The kernel's method for figuring out which modules to load is effectively to load every single module that might be compatible with a given device in series and then ask the module for its opinion before unloading it, and then once it has a list of all (self-reported) compatible modules for a given device it picks one and reloads it.
by laichzeit0 | 2025-12-05 15:57:05+00:00
Unfortunately, this is an observational study and when you get to the confounding part, they kind of shrug their shoulders and say “well, we included a bunch of covariates that should reduce make the bias go away”, but there’s no causal diagram so we have no idea how they reasoned about this. If you’ve read even something layman friendly like Pearl’s Book of Why you should be feeling nervous about this.
by dotancohen | 2025-12-05 15:57:23+00:00
I don't know if this is applicable to hybrids, but taxis attain high mileage with relatively few engine cold starts. Engine cold starts are what kills main and conrod bearings and piston walls. Taxis' bodies may be beat to garbage, the interior might be trash, but the engine and likely the transmission too will be representative of a vehicle with an order of magnitude less kilometers driven. Because they go an order of magnitude further between cold engine starts.

All this assumes proper maintenance, especially oil changes.
by jhhh | 2025-12-05 15:57:28+00:00
It's not a trick or workaround. It's a very straightforward use of a command flag on one of the most used git commands. It's even conceptually very simple, you're just rebasing a subset of commits of a branch onto a different parent. Anyone who has ever rebased already has a working mental model of this operation. Framing this issue where knowing a single flag on a command every git user uses every day to perform an operation they already broadly understand as some arcane knowledge and 'nonsense' is ridiculous.