MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by arter45 | 2026-01-23 21:15:00+00:00
I've had to read the RCA a couple of times to (probably) get what happened, even if I'm reasonably familiar with BGP.

Basically, my understanding (simplified) is:

- they originally had a Miami router advertise Bogota prefixes (=subnets) to Cloudflare's peers. Essentially, Miami was handling Bogota's subnets. This is not an issue.

- because you don't normally advertise arbitrary prefixes via BGP, policies were used. These policies are essentially if/then statements, carrying out certain actions (advertise or not, add some tags or remove them,...) if some conditions are matched. This is completely normal.

- Juniper router configuration for this kind of policy is (simplifying):

set <BGP POLICY NAME> from <CONDITION1>

set <BGP POLICY NAME> from <CONDITION2>

set <BGP POLICY NAME> then <ACTION1>

set <BGP POLICY NAME> then <ACTION2>

...

- prior to the incident, CF changed its network so that Miami didn't have to handle Bogota subnets (maybe Bogota does it on its own, maybe there's another router somewhere else)

- the change aimed at removing the configurations on Miami which were advertising Bogota subnets

- the change implementation essentially removed all lines from all policies containing "from IP in the list of Bogota prefixes". This is somewhat reasonable, because you could have the same policy handling both Bogota and, say, Quito prefixes, so you just want to remove the Bogota part.

HOWEVER, there was at least one policy like this:

(Before)

set <BGP POLICY NAME> from is_internal(prefix) == True

set <BGP POLICY NAME> from prefix in bogota_prefix_list

set <BGP POLICY NAME> then advertise

(After)

set <BGP POLICY NAME> from is_internal(prefix) == True

set <BGP POLICY NAME> then advertise

Which basically means: if you have an internal prefix advertise it

- an "internal prefix" is any prefix that was not received by another BGP entity (autonomous system)

- BGP routers in Cloudflare exchange routes to one another. This is again pretty normal.

- As a result of this change, all routes received by Miami through some other Cloudflare router were readvertised by Miami

- the result is CF telling the Internet (more accurately, its peers) "hey, you know that subnet? Go ask my Miami router!"

- obviously, this increases bandwidth utilization and latency for traffic crossing the Miami router.
by keithgroves | 2026-01-23 21:15:01+00:00
Cool! I built with https://enact.tools and can see several other competitors here.

I think this really has a future. Skills are going to be the way forward for portable ai tools. I think the skills standard needs to adapt to allow forward slashes so we can name things @vercel/somecategory/sometool. I've already brought it up in the agentskills GitHub.

posted last month:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46435383
by MBCook | 2026-01-23 21:15:42+00:00
Some lane keeping systems purposefully ping-pong between the lines to prevent you from relying on it by making it somewhat annoying.

If you’re using it the way you’re supposed to and giving real steering input then it helps you stay within the lines. So it’s less effort for you and it helps mitigate large wind gusts and such.

But basically lane keeping is absolutely not meant to steer for you.
by autoexec | 2026-01-23 21:16:01+00:00
If that were the case Claude would have come up with the idea to grow corn and it would have reached out to Seth and be giving Seth prompts. That's clearly not what happened though so it's pretty obvious who is leveraging which tool here.

It also doesn't help that Claude is incapable of coming up with an idea, incapable of wanting corn, and has no actual understanding of what corn is.
by square_usual | 2026-01-23 21:16:08+00:00
Isn't that fun though? We get paid to fuck around. People say AI is putting devs out of jobs, I say we're getting paid to play with them and see if there's any value there. This is no different from the dev tools boom of the ZIRP era: I remember having several sprints worth of work just integrating the latest dev tool whose sales team won our execs over.

This is only partly tongue in cheek :P
by 9dev | 2026-01-23 21:16:15+00:00
> the plausible, strange, not-too-distant future in which AI models are autonomously running things in the real economy.

A plot line in Ray Naylers great book The Mountain in the Sea that plays in a plausible, strange, not-too-distant future, is that giant fish trawler fleet are run by AI connected to the global markets, fully autonomously. They relentlessly rip every last fish from the ocean, driven entirely by the goal of maximising profits at any cost.

The world is coming along just nicely.
by gruturo | 2026-01-23 21:16:59+00:00
> I can't really fault the 8086 designers for their decisions, since they made sense at the time. But if you could go back in a time machine, one could certainly give them a lot of advice!

Thanks for capturing my feeling very precisely! I was indeed thinking what they could have done better with the same approximate number of transistor and the benefit of a time traveler :) And yes the constraints you mention (8080 compatibility, etc) indeed limit their leeway so maybe we'd have to point the time machine at a few years earlier and influence the 8080 first
by TurkTurkleton | 2026-01-23 21:17:20+00:00
Let me guess, you think GOG was perfectly justified in unilaterally taking away nake89's copy of--excuse me, I meant unilaterally revoking nake89's license to play Cyberpunk 2077--when they judged the gift transaction to be fraudulent, just because it could have been a conspiracy between nake89 and their wife to defraud GOG of the princely sum of eighty United States dollars[0]?

I don't dispute that GOG has the right, from a strictly legal standpoint, to revoke a license for any reason their terms of service allow, and that someone continuing to play a game after their license was revoked would be in breach of contract. What I do dispute is that this is a correct, fair, or desirable state of affairs, especially when the license in question was received as a gift and believed in good faith by the recipient to have been acquired non-fraudulently.

And in particular, if GOG wants the absolute and irrevocable right to prevent consumers from using products for which GOG has decided to revoke the licenses, they shouldn't advertise themselves as a DRM-free platform, nor claim that "Here, you won't be locked out of titles you paid for, or constantly asked to prove you own them - this is DRM-free gaming." -- advertising copy may not have the force of law, but courts tend to take a dim view of ad claims that are provably false.

[0]: the list price of the Cyberpunk 2077 Ultimate Edition on GOG as of this writing (though it is currently on sale for 38% off)
by xp84 | 2026-01-23 21:17:29+00:00
Elsewhere in this thread, you assert that perhaps Apple simply reversed all this out of the kindness of their heart without regard for the social media blowup that this lucky victim was able to create.

This is cognitive dissonance. If Apple reversed it due to their conscience, it's because they are pretty convinced this user is honest and Apple PR isn't (or didn't need to be) involved.

If on the other hand, Apple has proof the user is not honest, then Apple PR took a huge hit for nothing by forcing Apple Support to unban them, when they could have said "Because we have documented proof the user couldn't have bought this from a legitimate reseller, we cannot unban them."
by hackthemack | 2026-01-23 21:17:51+00:00
Similar thoughts.

One thing I notice in enterprise java software that I have to reed through and update, is that too many times, every developer just wraps everything in an exception. I do not have vast insight into all java code, everywhere, but in my little corner of the world, it sure looks like laziness when I have to dig through some ancient java code base.
by WorldMaker | 2026-01-23 21:18:54+00:00
Also as someone else pointed out the same complaints that JSON Schema "isn't in the standard, it's a separate standard" apply to XSD. It is still a different standard even though during the height of XML mania it sometimes seemed like XSD was inseperable. XML did have DTD baked in, and maybe the author meant DTD in that section, but that was even worse than XSD (and again both were why RELAX NG happened).
by jvanderbot | 2026-01-23 21:19:28+00:00
Try claude. It's basically the cli agent everyone is catching up to.

Start prompting it for annoying shit "Set up a project layout for X", then write things yourself inside that - the fun stuff or stuff you care about.

Then use it for refactors or extrapolation "I wrote this thing that works, but this old file is still in old format, do what I did there"

It's very good for helping with design of just above layperson knowledge. "I have this problem organizing xyz, what's a good pattern for this?"

or just "I want to do a project that does xyz, but dont know where to start, let's chat about it"

Some of these 'chatty' queries can be done in web, but having it on CLI is great b/c it'll just say "Can I do this for you" and you can easily delegate parts of the plan.

Give it a shot. That's pretty low level agentic use, and yes, it will demolish procrastination and startup inertia.
by palata | 2026-01-23 21:19:52+00:00
> You would be shocked at how well certain nationalities like the Dutch and Swedes speak English.

Totally. All Northern countries to be fair. And then in my experience at least some Eastern countries (like Slovenia).

Really it seems like the South of Europe is a bit weaker in English, my guess being that their native languages are latin and not germanic (so it's further away from English).
by spankalee | 2026-01-23 21:20:12+00:00
Does anyone know of a great write up on exceptions vs union or either typed returns?

I'm building a new language, somewhat similar to TypeScript in some ways, and so far I have exceptions and try/catch expressions, but also Optional<T> and Result<T, E> types.

I'm familiar and used to exceptions, so I included them so at least near-fatal errors (ie, actually exceptional) could be caught at high levels in the stack. But I'm unsure if there's a strong argument that resonates with me yet that the language shouldn't have exceptions at all. Arguments that exceptions are untyped can be solved with things like checked exceptions, and I do find Go-style code to be quite verbose.

What's the best current reading on this?
by FridgeSeal | 2026-01-23 21:20:38+00:00
On one hand, it’s extremely tiring having to put up with that section of our industry.

On the other, if a large portion of the industry goes all in, and it _doesn’t_ pay off and craters them, maybe the overhyping will move onto something else and we can go back to having an interesting, actually-nice-to-be-in-industry!
by jaredcwhite | 2026-01-23 21:20:41+00:00
I don't understand why an interesting demo is buried here inside of some of the most ridiculous propaganda I've ever read on the topic of genAI.

It really makes me not have any interest in the actual thing you're showing.

Imagine if Wendy Carlos wrote an article about how it's cool she could use this new piece of technology called a Moog Modular synthesizer to create a recording of Bach, and now harpsichords are dead, acoustic instruments suck, and all Baroque music will be made on modular synthesizers forever more.

Unfortunately with AI it's much worse because it's more like if Wendy Carlos has slurped up all Baroque music ever recorded by everyone and then somehow regurgitated that back out as slop with some algorithmic modifications.

I'm sorry, I'm unable to accept that's where we're at now.
by Lio | 2026-01-23 21:21:23+00:00
What ammuses me is that the little Korg Volcas synced up in the demo can be found really cheaply if you look around. They were low cost units to begin with and are now old enough to be considered classic equipment so there are loads on the market.

The Volca Drum being used is excellent at making all kinds or resonant, spriny noises with its wave guide effects if that's what you're looking for. It's a very distinct, unique sounding little box.

Volcas in general are an affordable way to get started with electronic music making. Cheap enough and easy enough to sell if you change your mind.

(I still really want a Phase 8 though :P )
by bnjms | 2026-01-23 21:21:39+00:00
People arguably cannot have integrity unless all other companies they compete with also have integrity. The answer is legislation. We have no reason to allow our government to use “private” companies to do what they cannot then turn over the results to government agencies. Especially when willfully incompetence.

The same can be said of using “allies” to mutually snoop on citizens then turning over data.
by downsplat | 2026-01-23 21:21:53+00:00
> XML grew from SGML (like HTML did), and it brought from it a bunch of things that are useless outside a markup language. Attributes were a bad idea.

That's exactly what I wanted to say. The author talks as if XML was well designed to represent structured data, but it was not, it grew out of the idea of marking up text, which is a completely different problem. The hilarious part is that he doesn't recognize the problem when he gives his example of "or with attributes".

The other thing, is that the JSON model doesn't just give you a free parser/serializer in JavaScript. It actually maps to the basic data model of the entire generation of dynamic languages that the Web grew on: perl, Python, JS, PHP and Ruby. Arrays and maps are the basic way to represent structured data in these languages, and JSON just serializes that. Which means that getting data in and out of your language is just a single line.

The author seems to think that XML maps a proper conceptual model and JSON doesn't, but the model of "nodes with attributes and content" is a worse match for structured data than JSON's model of "arrays and maps of values".

Other than that, it's really a question of how much tooling you want to use. Both JSON and XML grew entire ecosystems of it, and nowadays if you want to read your JSON according to a schema into typed objects, you can, and for any good-sized project, you probably should.

Also:
> There are cases where other formats are appropriate: small data transfers between cooperating services and scenarios where schema validation would be overkill.

That's actually most of the cases for your average web dev!
by toraway | 2026-01-23 21:22:07+00:00
You’ll likely have the same issue relying on CLAUDE.md instructions to test/lint/etc, mine get ignored constantly to the point of uselessness.

I’m trying to redesign my setup to use hooks now instead because poor adherence to rules files across all the agentic CLIs is exhausting to workaround.

(and no, Opus 4.5 didn’t magically solve this problem to preemptively respond to that reply)
by direwolf20 | 2026-01-23 21:23:15+00:00
GOG may have the right to revoke a sale, but since it lets you download the game without DRM, it doesn't have the ability. Unless you delete your copy of the game and then try to download it again.

If you buy milk from the supermarket and they reverse the transaction 2 days later claiming you used a fraudulent card, but you didn't use a fraudulent card, you have the right to keep the milk and the loss of money is the store's problem.
by dghlsakjg | 2026-01-23 21:23:17+00:00
A quick search of actual data shows that farmland suitable for row crops sells for ~$11k per acre so a 5 acre area would be around $55k. If the market rate for that type of land was $1,370 per month, that comes to a rate of return near 30% yearly (assuming leases are yearly, not seasonal)![0]

I dug a little deeper and found this study showing cash rental rates per acre per year ranging from $215 to $295.[1] So it actually looks like Claude got this one right.

Of course I know nothing about renting farmland, but if you ask to rent 5 acres the average farm size is in 300+ acre region, the land owners might tell you to get lost or pony up. A little bit like asking Amazon to give you enterprise rates for a single small EC2 instance.

[0] https://farmland.card.iastate.edu/overview
[1] https://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/wholefarm/pdf/c2-10.p...
by cryptonector | 2026-01-23 21:23:20+00:00
In the pre-banking era you could get robbed, killed, taxed to death, made to fight in a war, etc. That's all still true, but now most of your resources (savings) will be stuck in a place where there is no need for violence to cause you to lose all of it.

The way we normally deal with all these problems as a society is to apply force (via police, courts) to ensure that everyone has certain 'rights'.

The problem today is that while you have certain rights, like fairly strong rights to private property interests in real estate and such, we generally have very weak private property rights in financial properties. This is a problem world-wide. We need to fix this in our countries.
by cpuguy83 | 2026-01-23 21:23:41+00:00
I made no comment about RedHat's offerings.

I don't feel like RedHat had to do anything to sell support contracts in this case, because that was already their business.
All they had to do was say they'll include container support as part of their contracts.

What they did do, AIUI based on feedback in the oss docker repos, is those contracts stipulated that you must run RHEL in the container and the host, and use systemd in the container in order to be "in support".
So that's kind of a self-feeding thing.
by MBCook | 2026-01-23 21:23:49+00:00
Sorry but the LAST thing I want is people being able to YOLO code onto their cars to drive on public roads.

That was my original main complaint with Tesla and why I distrusted them so much before Elon publicly lost the plot.

Even with Autopilot it was clear to me they were far more willing to force the risks of their systems on all other drivers on the road then the legacy auto makers who were much more cautious about testing things extremely thoroughly first. All those early videos of people climbing in the backs of their cars while they were driving down the highway? To me that was proof they couldn’t be trusted with public safety.
by Spivak | 2026-01-23 21:24:01+00:00
This is such a lazy take and ignores that this is the only system that has the property of not losing data when users forget their passwords and lose (or likely never write down) their recovery key.

That's it. That's the whole thing. Whatever "secure system" you build will not have this property and users will lose their data, be mad at you, and eventually you'll have to turn it off by default leaving everyone's data in plaintext. It's a compromise that improves security for people who previously left their disk unencrypted. It changes nothing for people who previously did their own key management.

You won't be able to turn the first group into the second group. That's HN's "Average Familiarity" fallacy. The fact that basically every 2FA system has a means of recovering your account by removing it should tell you that even technical people are shit at key management.
by dang | 2026-01-23 21:25:55+00:00
Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Mental Models: The Best Way to Make Intelligent Decisions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24527003 - Sept 2020 (35 comments)

Mental Models: The Best Way to Make Intelligent Decisions (113 Models Explained) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17121145 - May 2018 (36 comments)
by ericd | 2026-01-23 21:26:03+00:00
That says 14-18% of global GHG emissions is due to cattle, the person I was responding to said "the biggest impact you can have is by eating way less meat, cattle in particular". That doesn't seem like the biggest impact possible. For Americans, their entire diet is attributable to about "5.14 kg CO 2 eq. per person per day" https://habitsofwaste.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/2020-CS... (UMich Center for Sustainable Systems). For a family of 2.5, that equates to about 4.5 tons CO2e/year. The average American family footprint is about 48 tons CO2e/year. So slightly less than 10% for their entire diet. Of that, maybe a bit more than half is attributable to cattle, or 5% total.

By comparison, driving a pair of gasoline cars their average of 10k miles/yr is something like 16% of the average American family's yearly emissions, or 3x the beef.

Switching from heating with natural gas to a heat pump would also make a bigger dent for the average American family, let alone if they're living somewhere that gets properly cold, like New England. Or just spending $2,000 on air sealing and a layer of fiberglass, for those living in a leaky house - more impactful than not eating beef.

Looking into it a bit for Italian families, it looks like cattle might a larger proportion, partly because their overall carbon footprint is lower. But it's still a relatively small proportion (<15%).

Pretty sure if landowners weren't raising cattle, the alternative isn't going to be letting it return to nature and lowering the value of their land, without big government programs that essentially pay them to do that, so that whole thing seems kind of moot.
by measurablefunc | 2026-01-23 21:26:16+00:00
Amodei is on the record about completely automating AI research in 6-12 months. He thinks it's an "exponential" loop & Anthropic is going to be the first to get there. That's not esoteric knowledge, that's the CEO saying so in public at the same time that their consumer facing tool is failing & their automated abuse detection is banning users for legitimate use cases.
by palata | 2026-01-23 21:26:19+00:00
> why you are looking for an EU alternative

I think recently it has been made obvious by the US that relying on US technology is a risk, because it can be used to bully entire countries.

So I think there is a movement right now of "non-US alternatives", but of course if you are in the EU and got burned by relying too much on the US, maybe it is wise to try to fix that by having some kind of digital sovereignty in the EU.

But I'm pretty sure many companies would switch to a Canada-based product if it allowed them to reduce their dependency on the US.
by 627467 | 2026-01-23 21:27:00+00:00
plenty of software business rely on contractors dont they? im sure even pre-acquisition vimeo likely used contractors on many roles some even in "engineering" roles.

the idea that software is never done is a double edge sword: yes, its great to have a long term vision that keeps evolving and motivating people to continue to push boundaries. but it also creates this idea that "done" state is not possible or even desirable.

plenty of human (economic) activity is just operating, or maintaining. maybe some people who built products are happy to continue operating and operating it. not everyone, and certainly it would be hard to expecy society to guarantee employment under any circunstances.

i have never seen labor laws that prohibits lay off under any circunstances. some make it more onerous and/or more beneficial conditiona to employees than others. but certainly is it possible (and likely) that vimeo lay offs have been lawfull and even beneficial for many employees. i certainly know plenty of people who explicitly stick around "mature" organizations waiting for the fat check of layoff
by caconym_ | 2026-01-23 21:27:22+00:00
Both my late model Japanese cars have two systems capable of steering the car toward the middle of the lane. One is an always-on (unless disabled) passive safety system that only kicks in when you actually appear to be drifting off the road, and the other is a system that actively tries to keep the car in the middle of the lane. The latter system has to be toggled on and off and is meant to be complementary with adaptive cruise.

What you're describing sounds like the former system, while the latter one is what should be compared to Tesla's "autopilot" or "FSD" or whatever the fuck. It works very well on both my cars and is a game changer for longer drives.

I consider good implementations of this and adaptive cruise to be basic equipment now, and asking $99/month for them is absolutely wild, especially since what you're getting isn't the "full self driving" we were promised. You still have to be fully engaged with what the car is doing and ready to take over in a fraction of a second.