MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Quothling | 2025-12-05 10:03:14+00:00
I agree with the author in regards to it being different career paths, but I think your take is better and more nuanced. I've done both. I started my career being a spotlight engineer, quickly advancing the ranks and being sent on a educational path for leadership. I didn't like it though. Don't get me wrong. I basked in the glory for the first year, but then when it got to be just a regular day, I really started to miss solving what I see as interesting problems. Which is often working on stability and safety, building tools and infrastructure which makes it easier for other people to serve the business.

Maybe it's because I've done the spotlight thing, but I don't really care about praise from management anymore. In fact I suspect that most of my direct managers have never really known what I did, but since they've seen the impact for other people, it's not really been an issue in regards to my reviews or pay. I don't get a lot of credit and I don't get a lot of praise. I don't necessarily see someone who's build a great product with the tools I've made as stealing my credit either. That's sort of the point of what I do.

I completely agree with you that this is not just Big Tech, or Enterprise or even in organisations that are focused on Tech. I also agree that it's not about ignoring the business, you're still going to want to build things that are useful. You're still going to do change management from the ground up to make sure people know the tools are useful and how to use them. You're still going to network and be friendly with your co-workers.

What you can skip is a lot of the corporate politics and frankly most of the "financial" information. I don't even think the price is very high, you don't get the publicity, but it's not like spotlight engineers necessarily get better pay or better career paths unless they want to go into management.
by koakuma-chan | 2025-12-05 10:03:49+00:00
I am not a C# guy, but I wrote a lot of Java back in the day, and I can authoritatively tell you that it has so-called "checked exceptions" that the compiler forces you to handle. However, it also has "runtime exceptions" that you are not forced to handle, and they can happen any where and any time. Conceptually, it is the same as error versus panic in Rust. One such runtime exception is the notorious `java.lang.NullPointerException` a/k/a the billion-dollar mistake. So even software in "managed" languages can and does crash, and it is way more likely to do so than software written in Rust, because "managed" languages do not have all the safety features Rust has.
by Mountain_Skies | 2025-12-05 10:04:12+00:00
Employers have some insight, perhaps not perfect, into which existing employees are good but for some reason there's a pathological need to treat existing employees as undesirables, leading to a constant need for hiring new employees, whose abilities are unknown. Stop trying to save a couple percent on compensation by letting employees leave when they want more of their true value recognized financially. Stop expecting employees to adjust to constantly changing business fads on their own time and dime. Stop letting toxic management run off employees for non-business reasons.

Or continue to be in one of the most labor rich markets of all times while starving to death from not being able to be nourished by any of it. Make use of the employees you know instead of having an extreme preference for the potential employees who are a complete mystery.
by jabl | 2025-12-05 10:06:11+00:00
> As a lifelong Toyota fan, I agree they are miserable to work on, especially the electronics.

I had a Toyota Yaris a couple of decades ago. Very reliable, very few issues. But some routine things like replacing headlights were completely bonkers. You had to wiggle your hand between some sharp metal parts to unscrew the back end of the armature. Sheesh, would it have been that prohibitive to add a few cm of extra space there?
by amluto | 2025-12-05 10:06:40+00:00
To be somewhat fair, the quality of their management tools for their switches and routers has increased somewhat, and some of their wired routers are actually decent on the price/performance spectrum these days.

Meanwhile, the quality of their competitors’ tools for managing multiple switches without manually configuring each one, individually, over SSH or via a graphical tool is not necessarily amazing.

For example, it’s been a while since I used Ruckus Unleashed (the low-end management tool from an very upmarket vendor), but I think UniFi Network (the management tool) is a good amount better than Unleashed.

I really wish the people who put so much effort into software like OpenWRT would put some of that effort into managing multiple devices in a nice, unified manner. The tooling could be so much better.
by gaigalas | 2025-12-05 10:07:34+00:00
My interpretation of psychohistory is simple: it's science fiction about what science fiction itself would look like if it turned into a real science.

It has all the things science fiction does (attempts to predict the future, large scale social dynamics scenarios, etc), plus a hint of what science used to look like in the public perception at that time.

It's kind of provocative. That line of thinking implies science fiction authors need to be more science and less fantasy (exactly what Asimov himself did by starting to more textbooks and less characters).

Of course it will never exist.
by jacquesm | 2025-12-05 10:08:03+00:00
I think the people that replace fuses are aware of the potential issues around them. The article - which I'm sure you've read so don't take this as commentary on your comment - details that in other electric vehicles, for instance Tesla this is handled quite differently:

"While Tesla’s pyrofuse costs €11 and the BMS reset is around 50€, allowing the car to be safely restored, BMW’s approach borders on illogical engineering, with no benefit to safety, no benefit to anti-theft protection — the only outcome is the generation of billable labour hours and massive amounts of needless electronic/lithium waste."

It's not a choice between 'ridiculously inaccessible with the potential to create more damage than your car is worth' and 'push to reset'. There are many options in between, some of which would be a happy medium between the two that protect both safety, the environment and the customers' wallet. Which BMW's solution clearly isn't.
by sschueller | 2025-12-05 10:09:37+00:00
I just did the update to 2025-Q2 (I use the quarterly stream build).

Initially I thought this is going to be a huge pain. I have many interfaces and also pass-through hardware like the SFP28 card. I made a copy of my primary router vm and added fake interfaces with the same MAC addresses. I then went through the update procedure which was very simple.

in vyos vm:

wget https://community-downloads.vyos.dev/stream/1.5-stream-2025-Q2/vyos-1.5-stream-2025-Q2-generic-amd64.iso -o vyos-1.5-stream-2025-Q2.iso add system image /mnt/iso/vyos-1.5-stream-2025-Q2.iso # follow prompts reboot # boot screen will offer two version now, old and new

That was it and it worked. So from now on I know I can just take a snapshot of my vm and do it directly on the main vm without making a copy.

You do loose any custom configs you may have. In my case it was fstab changes and my cron entries.
by seec | 2025-12-05 10:09:49+00:00
As someone who bought and used various MP3 players before getting an iPod I disagree.

They were not technically first at creating a portable music player that relied on digital compressed format and digital storage, that's true. However before the iPod, you had either very low storage capacity, reliance on expensive memory cards that you would need to swap or hard drive based players that were unpractical to carry around.

Those solutions also had generally terrible user interface that made things like browsing the library or seeking in a track a pain in the ass. It was a moderate improvement on already existing solutions. It wasn't that much better than a MP3 CD player (especially after they figured out buffering to avoid skipping because of movement). I had a mini-disc player in parallel to the MP3s and it was generally a better solution: cheaper for managing a big library and it had compression. Physical media management was still a problem but that was also a requirement for MP3 player of practical size that used memory cards (and those were awfully expensive).

Then Apple came in with a solution using the newer 1,8 inch hard drive format with a starting capacity of 5GB, which would be bumped to 10GB shortly. It changed everything, it was practical in portability/pocketability, storage capacity and user interface. My brother bought an Archos player released around the same time and it was just a joke compared to the iPod (he got it because it was on sale for much cheaper).

So yeah, technically Apple was not the first to commercialize an MP3 player. But they trailed the earliest entrant in the market only by a few years (about 3) and they basically defined the market. Before the iPod, MP3 players were mostly a waste of money and a curiosity at best. The experience they would offer for the price was ridiculous. The iPod was expensive but it was a major improvement in every way, it made the Portable Media Player not only a possibility but something very desirable because it was useful and competent. The iPhone is basically the same story and before that the Mac (for DTP) and even before that the Apple II (for general computing access to individuals).

I feel that when people argue about Apple being late on innovation they are arguing in bad faith to justify current mismanagement (because they make a shit ton of money regardless). But it's basically splitting hairs. Yes Apple was never strictly first on purely technical grounds but they were always the first at creating a consumer product that would actually be able to achieve the purpose it was supposed to in a satisfactory manner.
by treetalker | 2025-12-05 10:10:14+00:00
Bingo.

It's also convenient cover as

- Hegseth has been found to have surreptitiously installed a system to control his personal cell phone while in his otherwise locked-down Pentagon office;

- Hegseth's OP SEC bumblings and other violations have put the lives of military personnel at risk;

- Hegseth plausibly committed war crimes in the bombing of vessels off the coast of South America;

- Trump just pardoned a convicted drug kingpin;

- etc.
by luastoned | 2025-12-05 10:10:25+00:00
From the incident page:

A change made to how Cloudflare's Web Application Firewall parses requests caused Cloudflare's network to be unavailable for several minutes this morning. This was not an attack; the change was deployed by our team to help mitigate the industry-wide vulnerability disclosed this week in React Server Components. We will share more information as we have it today.

https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/incidents/lfrm31y6sw9q
by input_sh | 2025-12-05 10:10:41+00:00
Okay, let me be even more clear then: it is required to fill out every social media handle and every phone number you've used for the past 5 years as a part of the DS-160 form (AKA online non-migratory visa application for countries not covered by ESTA).

That's been the case since 2019. Before that, asking to hand that info out even voluntarily was widely seen as an overreach. Now, it's required for countries not covered by ESTA and still voluntary for ESTA countries.
by iso1631 | 2025-12-05 10:11:42+00:00
CxOs want to be dependent on someone else, specifically suppliers with pieces of paper saying "we are great, here's a 1% discount on next years renewal"

If the in house tech team breaks something and fixes it, that's great from an engineer point of view - we like to be useful, but the person at the top is blamed.

If an outsourced supplier (one which the consultants recommend, look at Gartner Quadrants etc) fails, then the person at the top is not blamed, even though they are powerless and the outage is 10 times longer and 10 times as frequent.

Outsourcing is not about outcome, it's about accountability, and specifically avoiding it.
by DrewADesign | 2025-12-05 10:11:46+00:00
Their job was specifically managing server resource allocation— as an IT role and not a dev role— in a completely standardized environment. Most applications were given a standard allotment of resources, and they only got involved if something was running out of ram, disk access was too slow, or something just seemed to be taking a lot longer than usual. If it seemed to be a network problem, or just a program crash, for example, they were never involved unless troubleshooting indicated it involved them. More often than not, I’d get a phone call telling me the system I was working on seemed to be heavy on the disk access or something, and they had already allotted it more to keep it stable, but I should check to make sure we weren’t doing something stupid.

Now that I think of it, I’ll bet a lot of companies have a system similar to this for their infrastructure… they just outsource it to AWS, Azure, Google, etc. and comparatively fly by the seat of their pants on the dev side. You could only scale that system down so much, I imagine.
by intended | 2025-12-05 10:11:59+00:00
While the point made on unnatural communication is undefined, these three positions are in conflict.

- The updated visa instructions

- we have had this conversation

- Moderation beyond strictly legal content is acceptable.

I will say this shows the conversation hasn’t been had.

Moderation is most often achieved by the use of censorial powers on private platforms.

That this was private censorship is no longer acceptable to the current regime, and people who were enforcing private rules are now in a category of applicants that I assume includes criminals and enemies of the state.

If it is an acceptable role, then it must be done well.

If it is an unacceptable criminal role, then it must be prohibited well.

Either way - people have to make that call and build a consensus on it.
by kotaKat | 2025-12-05 10:14:53+00:00
German TUV thinks Teslas are horrible because apparently nobody is servicing their brakes on a regular enough interval so every time Teslas get pulled in for their 2 year inspections after 3 years of ownership they keep failing out on brakes and suspension, but VWs are the pinnacle of perfection because they slam 10K service intervals in your face.

(Of note: I drive a hybrid vehicle, and over 125,000+ miles of ownership I have replaced my front brakes once and my rear brakes three times now in five years.)
by inferiorhuman | 2025-12-05 10:15:34+00:00
A quick google turned up an Akamai outage in July that took Linode down and two in 2021. At that scale nobody's going to come up smelling like roses. I mostly dealt with Amazon crap at megacorp, but nobody that had to deal with our Akamai stuff had anything kind to say about them as a vendor.

At first blush it's getting harder to "defend" use of Cloudflare, but I'll wait until we get some idea of what actually broke. For the time being I'll save my outrage for the AI scrapers that drove everyone into Cloudflare's arms.
by flohofwoe | 2025-12-05 10:15:45+00:00
Sure, as a search engine replacement it's totally fine and works reasonably well, but this is also because Google as search engine has regressed dramatically since it's aggressively pushing products at the top of the search results instead of answering questions.

But "a slightly better search engine" sounds much less interesting to investors than "will completely transform human civilization" ;)
by jasonvorhe | 2025-12-05 10:15:51+00:00
causality, causation, yadda yadda. They already explained that it was some react server component update. sure, could've also been done with some ai assist but we don't know.

These companies also don't vibe code (which would involve just prompting without editing code yourself, at least that's the most common definition).

I really hope news like these won't be followed by comments like these (not criticism of you personally) until the AI hype dies down a bit. It's getting really tiresome to always read the same oversimplified takes every time there's some outage involving centralized entities such as cloudflare instead of talking about the elephant in the room, which is their attempt of doing MITM on the majority of internet users.
by input_sh | 2025-12-05 10:16:07+00:00
> It directs consular officers to "thoroughly explore" the work histories of applicants, both new and returning, by reviewing their resumes, LinkedIn profiles, and appearances in media articles for activities including combatting misinformation, disinformation or false narratives, fact-checking, content moderation, compliance, and trust and safety.

Not only are they targeted, but so are many more.
by rsynnott | 2025-12-05 10:16:09+00:00
> Just like Microsoft continues to push out software, that, compared to competitors, is unstable, insecure, frustrating to use, lacks features, etc, without it harming their reputation or even bottomlines too much.

Eh.... This is _kind_ of a counterfactual, tho. Like, we are not living in the world where MS did not do that. You could argue that MS was in a good place to be the dominant server and mobile OS vendor, and simply screwed both up through poor planning, poor execution, and (particularly in the case of server stuff) a complete disregard for quality as a concept.

I think someone who'd been in a coma since 1999 waking up today would be baffled at how diminished MS is, tbh. In the late 90s, Microsoft practically _was_ computers, with only a bunch of mostly-dying UNIX vendors for competition. And one reasonable lens through which to interpret its current position is that it's basically due to incompetence on Microsoft's part.
by Tade0 | 2025-12-05 10:16:39+00:00
> Long term this will be to the great detriment of marginalized groups because societal support for these accommodations will erode. It's really frustrating to watch.

Where I'm from there are hardly any accommodations offered for those who are marginalized yet they're stigmatized for using the little help that there is. Also it's usually a loud minority that's against it, as I haven't seen any majority form to abolish it via voting.

Aside from that those who are tasked with executing these policies broadly agree that going after every bad actor is not worth the false positive rate.

I know a couple who became parents young and are now going through college as a family. When they applied for scholarships in their respective universities, one institution accepted immediately, the other is still dragging out the process because for some insane reason there's both an upper and lower income limit for those who apply.

Someone somewhere figured this would somehow deter bad actors so now those who genuinely need help need to jump through additional hoops.
by inglor_cz | 2025-12-05 10:16:48+00:00
"Definitely weird to be "happy" that the government is cracking down on people who help prevent the propagation of fraud, scams, and CSAM."

Such self-descriptions are not necessarily accurate and honest.

We have had quite a few debates around Chat Control here. It is sold as a tool to prevent propagation of CSAM as well.
by tuetuopay | 2025-12-05 10:17:22+00:00
Networking only uses bits/s. Nobody in the networking world talks in bytes/s, and pretty much nobody in the data transfer world does.

The only industry that talks in bytes/s is parts of the storage space, because they relate to files, that are measured in bytes/s. And even them use both: the data link is in bits/s (e.g. SATA 6 is 6Gbps, NVMe uses the same bits/s than PCIe (1)) while the drive is usually in bytes/s (µSD cards, NVMe SSDs, etc).

When you look at the industry at large, throughput is virtually always measured in bits/s. HDMI is in bits/s. Video codecs measures bitrates in bits/s. Audio codecs measures bitrates in bits/s. PCIe is in bits/s (1). Ethernet is measured in bits/s. Wifi is measured in bits/s. You get the picture.

The good thing about keeping it consistent is that values are relatable. Streaming services naturally talk in bitrate for the video quality, and your ISP also talks in bits/s. You can compare the two numbers. Bytes/s is only really useful for on the spot jobs that you do once, like transferring photos from an SD card to your computer. Otherwise, it's just a unit.

(1): ackhstually pcie measures speeds in transfers/s because they include the 8b10b/64b66b encoding overhead and TLP overhead but I digress.
by LinXitoW | 2025-12-05 10:18:00+00:00
Again, this has nothing to do with the point at hand, which is that "in any language, a developer can choose the crash the problem if a unrecoverable state happens". That's it.

Tell me about how these supposed magical groups have anything at all to do with language features. What language can magically conjure triple the memory from thin air because the upstream query returned 200+ entries instead of the 60-ish you're required to support?
by mort96 | 2025-12-05 10:18:05+00:00
> So now that h.264, h.265, and AV1 seem to be the three major codecs with hardware support, I wonder what will be the next one?

Hopefully, we can just stay on AV1 for a long while. I don't feel any need to obsolete all the hardware that's now finally getting hardware decoding support for AV1.
by testdelacc1 | 2025-12-05 10:18:31+00:00
Something doesn’t quite add up to me. The post says “AV1 powers approximately 30% of all Netflix viewing”. Impressive, but I’m wondering why it isn’t higher? I’m guessing most devices should support AV1 software decoders. 88% of devices in certified in the last 4 years support AV1, all browsers support AV1 software decoding, Netflix apps on Android (since 2021) and iOS (since 2023) obviously do.

So why isn’t it AV1 higher? The post doesn’t say, so we can only speculate. It feels like they’re preferring hardware decoding to software decoding, even if it’s an older codec. If this is true, it would make sense - it’s better for the client’s power and battery consumption.

But then why start work on AV2 before AV1 has even reached a majority of devices? I’m sure they have the answer but they’re not sharing here.
by lima | 2025-12-05 10:19:32+00:00
Ceph is quite expensive in terms of resource usage, but it is robust and battle-tested. RustFS is very new, very much a work in progress[1], and will probably eat your data.

If you're looking for something that won't eat your data in edge cases, Ceph (and perhaps Garage) are your only options.

[1]https://github.com/rustfs/rustfs/issues/829
by the_gipsy | 2025-12-05 10:19:38+00:00
Okay let's dissect that.

"Easily" doesn't mean "it happens all the time" in this context (e.g. PHP, at least in the olden days).

"Easily" here means that WHEN it happens, it is not usually obvious. That is my experience as a daily go user. It's not the result of copy-pasting, it's just the result of editing code. Real-life code is not a beautiful succession of `op1, op2, op3...`. You have conditions in between, you have for loops that you don't want to exit in some cases (but aggregate errors), you have times where handling an error means not returning it but doing something else, you have retries...

I don't use rust at work, but enough in hobby/OSS work to say that when an error is not handled, it sticks out much more. To get back on topic of succinctness: you can obviously swallow errors in rust, but then you need to be juggling error vars, so this immediately catches the eye. In go, you are juggling error vars all the time, so you need to sift through the whole thing every goddamn time.
by andrepd | 2025-12-05 10:20:49+00:00
But to be honest, isn't this also true of the basic Hollywood or Netflix fare?.

I've been watching season 5 of Stranger Things. It has a budget of approximately 1 gazillion dollars. The writing is utterly basic predictable, boring, cliché, it's either a marvel-tier quip or a hollywood trope. Most Netflix shovelware isn't better than this.

So I don't think it's unique to video games :)