MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: EZThrottle – Coordinated retries and region racing for APIs Gleam/BEAM
by rjpruitt16 | 2026-01-29 01:36:35+00:00
Hi HN,

I built EZThrottle because I was tired of copy-pasting exponential backoff into every codebase.

The core idea:
retries shouldn't be independent. When thousands of machines all hit a 429 and retry independently, you get retry storms that cascade into outages. EZThrottle coordinates failure in one place.

What it does:
- Rate limiting per destination (default 2 RPS – conservative on purpose)
- Region racing: send to multiple regions, accept first success, cancel the rest. If one
region goes down, your request still completes with just a latency bump instead of a full outage
- Adds event-driven architecture to your stack via webhooks – fire and forget, get results delivered

Current scale (setting expectations):
Running 4 machines across 2 US regions (Dallas + Washington DC) on Fly.io. Not massive yet –
we'll expand to more regions with demand. Early days.

SDKs:
- Python: https://github.com/rjpruitt16/ezthrottle-python
- Node: https://github.com/rjpruitt16/ezthrottle-node
- Go: https://github.com/rjpruitt16/ezthrottle-go

Written in Gleam, runs on the BEAM. This is part of a larger vision (L8-OS – local-first AI stack), but EZThrottle works standalone.

Blog post with architecture diagrams:
https://ezthrottle.network/blog/making-failure-boring-again

Free tier:
1M requests/month. Happy to answer questions.

@RahmiPruitt on Twitter
by pixl97 | 2026-01-29 01:36:41+00:00
Here's the thing with AI, especially as it becomes more AGI like, it will encompass all human behaviors. This will lead to the bad behaviors becoming especially noticeable since bad actors quickly realized this is a force multiplication factor for them.

This is something everyone needs to think about when discussing AI safety. Even ANI applications carry a lot of potential societal risks and they may not be immediately evident. I know with the information superhighway few expected it to turn into a dopamine drip feed for advertising dollars, yet here we are.
by copperx | 2026-01-29 01:36:52+00:00
I believe OP is saying that while QoL is great in the Netherlands, it has an upper bound. I suppose that he has access to resources that could provide an ever higher QoL in other countries. For example, in the USA, QoL can be good if you're a millionaire and gets better as you acquire more resources.

Unfortunately, there's no QoL lower bound in the USA, either.
by VariousPrograms | 2026-01-29 01:37:41+00:00
I know this is nothing new, but it's insane that we need policies like "When talking to us you have to use human words, not copy pasted LLM output" and "You must understand the code you're committing."

When I was young, I used to think I'd be open minded to changing times and never be curmudgeonly, but I get into one "conversation" where someone responds with ChatGPT, and I am officially a curmudgeon.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2026-01-29 01:38:22+00:00
It's a fine line. Humans don't always fuck shit up.

But human systems that don't fuck shit up are short-lived, rare, and fragile, and they've only become a potential - not a reality - in the last century or so.

The rest of history is mostly just endless horrors, with occasional tentative moments of useful insight.
by Izkata | 2026-01-29 01:39:25+00:00
Either way the end result is a single file in migrations/ that describes the change, though you do have to write it with Django's API if you want further migrations to work without issues (so no raw SQL, but this low-level API is things like CreateTable() and AddColumn() - and is what Django generates automatically from the models, so the auto-generated migrations are easily inspectable and won't change).
by llsf | 2026-01-29 01:39:28+00:00
The fact that you do not have to pull a card or even your phone could make the transaction faster. And it would link to my Prime account so I could get my discounts/points. All with just me showing my palm.

Using your palm print (and actually blood vessels network) could be also more secure than tapping a card (NFC contactless).

I enjoyed using the technology. I did test other biometric payments like with face at the Intuit Dome in LA. But it felt more creepy and far less secure... as I was walking by some gates would open and some random person could enter as me... and possibly charge my linked payment. Using the hand with Amazon Go felt safer.

Wondering if Amazon would be willing to sell the technology, as I could see being deployed in lots of retail stores. The fact that it was made by Amazon, likely prevented to sell the technology to other retailers. Someone like Verifone, Ingenico or even a POS like Micros should go after the technology...
by jayers | 2026-01-29 01:39:45+00:00
This is the crux of it. The digital world doesn't produce value except when it eases the production of real goods. Software Development as a field is strange: it can only produce value when it is used to make production of real goods more efficient. We can use AI to cut out bureaucratic work, which then means that all that is left is real work: craftsmanship, relationship building, design, leadership.

There are plenty of "human in the loop" jobs still left. I certainly don't want furniture designed by AI, because there is no possible way for an AI to understand my particular fleshly requirements (AI simply doesn't have the wetware required to understand human tactile needs). But the bureaucratic jobs will mostly be automated away, and good riddance. They were killing the human spirit.
by autoexec | 2026-01-29 01:39:56+00:00
It doesn't need an import at all. It's just a normal part of the language's syntax and can be used just about anywhere:

$foo =~ /regex/
$result = $foo =~ /regex/
if ($foo =~ /regex/) {whatever;}
while (/regex/) {whatever;}

The captures ($1, $2, etc.) are global and usable wherever you need them.

In this particular case the default is that $ matches the end of a string without a newline but you can include it anytime you need to:

$foo =~ /regex$/ # end of string without newline
$foo =~ /regex$/m # end of string with newline
by pickleRick243 | 2026-01-29 01:40:05+00:00
> And if there's no chance of a conviction, there's no benefit to anybody from reopening the investigation.

It's probably true that without a chance of conviction, standard protocol dictates that public resources should not be expended on reopening the investigation. But I was also heavily distracted while reading the article, scanning optimistically for the happy (under the circumstances) ending where justice is served. I certainly don't think there is "no benefit to anybody".
by maest | 2026-01-29 01:40:12+00:00
> 403 ERROR

> The request could not be satisfied.
Request blocked. We can't connect to the server for this app or website at this time. There might be too much traffic or a configuration error. Try again later, or contact the app or website owner.
If you provide content to customers through CloudFront, you can find steps to troubleshoot and help prevent this error by reviewing the CloudFront documentation.

> Generated by cloudfront (CloudFront)
Request ID: UoLb14OXMP21NeXt-jvgxvRHVY7LFDkZcFJU6hbH1xEsm4qqaOwD6g==

Lol
by evandrofisico | 2026-01-29 01:41:39+00:00
It is happening already, recently Brazilian woman living in Italy was scammed thinking she was having an online relationship with Brazilian tiktoker, the scammers created a fake profile and were sending her audio messages with the voice of said tiktoker cloned via AI. She sent the scammers a lot of money for the wedding but when she arrived in Brazil discovered the con.
by rayiner | 2026-01-29 01:41:59+00:00
I know you're just saying that because you've never met my parents, lol. But consider that my dad packed us all up, left a country where we were rich, and moved us to the most stereotypical 1950s-style red-state suburb he could find.[1] But no, I'm sure it was Twitter...

Joking aside, we are on opposite sides of a sociological debate. Is Bangladesh a crappy country because of external factors, or because of the culture and choices of the people who live there? It's not crazy to ask that question, and stop pretending that it is. What's ironic is that most Bangladeshis (not the ones raised in the west) fall in the "culture" camp. My family is particularly negative on Bangladeshi culture--especially my mom (growing up as a woman in a Muslim country will do that)--but none of my views are remarkable in my extended family. Or even in Asia more generally. One of the greatest success stories in third world development is Singapore. Lee Kuan Yew adamantly believed that "culture is destiny" and that principle guided the incredible results he achieved in Singapore: https://paulbacon.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/z....

[1] I was at a cousin's wedding a few years ago, and I complained that I couldn't find anyone on Facebook because in our culture we don't have family names. Everyone has two given names, but goes by a nickname which is completely unrelated to either given name. My dad responded, "Bangladeshis don't know how to name their children." I reflexively tried to say, "no, they just do it differently." Then I stopped myself, because why the fuck should I whitesplain the merits of naming conventions to my father.
by JCattheATM | 2026-01-29 01:42:56+00:00
To what extent does this watermarking survive transcoding? Would not transcoding multiple times possibly affect it?

> They also use a traitor tracing scheme (Tardos codes) such that if multiple pirates get together to try and remove the watermark they will fail, you would need an unreasonably large number of pirates to succeed for some length of time.

Why?
by pixl97 | 2026-01-29 01:42:59+00:00
I do mean this is a pretty piss poor example.

Email, by number of emails attempted to send is owned by spammers 10 to 100 fold over legitimate emails. You typically don't see this because of a massive effort by any number of companies to ensure that spam dies before it shows up in your mailbox.

To go back one step farther porn was one of the first successful businesses on the internet, that is more than enough motivation for our more conservative congress members to ban the internet in the first place.
by pickleRick243 | 2026-01-29 01:43:04+00:00
Are you Koren? Did we read the same article? The one that calls into question anything Koren says or claims?

From the article I read:

"A twelve-day-old infant cannot crawl. It cannot grab, and it cannot put something into its own mouth. “It also cannot swallow a Tylenol-3 pill,” Juurlink told me. “I don’t know what happened in that house, on that night, but I do know that someone gave this baby crushed Tylenol-3,” likely mixed in breast milk or formula. “That’s the only way these numbers make sense.”"
by johnnyanmac | 2026-01-29 01:43:35+00:00
Like it or not, we're in an attention economy. We've seen that if we aren't loud and brash about it that the adminsitration will happily be loud (and sometimes lie) to push their narrative.

Maybe if we ever return to normal times and also don't let the other 90% of corruption stay where it's been for the past 40 years we can start to ease off the noise.
by int_19h | 2026-01-29 01:43:36+00:00
The alternative is indeed UBI, and the obvious way to fund it is to tax automation so that it actually scales to however many people end up without jobs.

But for all the talk about UBI in techbro circles, it seems to never actually translate to any meaningful political moves. Microsoft, Amazon etc are pretty happy to throw millions of dollars at politicians to ensure that they can keep building their data centers, but UBI just gets lip service.
Ask HN: Aggregated Weekly World News?
by nojs | 2026-01-29 01:44:02+00:00
I'm looking for a source of "top stories in the past week" that I can read once weekly to catch up on the biggest events of the week.

I have not had much luck with LLMs for the task as they tend to omit major stories.

Can anyone recommend services for this (free or paid)?
by apsurd | 2026-01-29 01:44:46+00:00
I value your weird rant. Yes it did go on as a thought stream, but there's sense in there.

I've been thinking a lot around a kind of smart-people paradox: very intellectual arguments all basically plotting a line toward some inevitable conclusion like super intelligence or consciousness. Everything is a raw compute problem.

While at the same time all scientific progress gives us more and more evidence that reality is non-computable, non linear.
by llsf | 2026-01-29 01:44:59+00:00
In theory, but not in practice. The devil is in the details. Yes, Apple wallet and Google wallet allows to store loyalty cards. And those cards can be summoned using respectively VAS and SmartTap.

But... while all payment terminals are compatible to VAS and SmartTap, very few have the firmware and a POS that can make sense of it. So, in practice, beside Walgreens and maybe CSV, it is not much adopted.
by zamadatix | 2026-01-29 01:45:14+00:00
I've always found LiveBench a bit confusing to try to compare over time as the dataset isn't meant to be compared over time. It also currently claims GPT-5 Mini High from last summer is within ~15% of Claude 4.5 Opus Thinking High Effort in the average, but I'll wait with bated breath for the millions of amazing apps which couldn't be coded before to start showing up (or, more likely, be told in 6 months how these 2 benchmarks weren't the ones that should matter either). Artificial Analysis at least has the same at 20% from the top, so maybe that's the one we all agree to use for now since it implies faster growth.

> FWIW GPT 5.2 unofficial marketing includes the Erdos thing you say isn’t happening.

Certainly not, unless you're about to tell me I can pop into ChatGPT and pop out Erdos proofs regularly since #728 was massaged out with multiple prompts and external tooling a few weeks ago - which is what I was writing about. It was great, it was exciting, but it's exactly the slow growth I'm talking about.

I like using LLMs, I use them regularly, and I'm hoping they continue to get better for a long time... but this is in no way the GPT 3 -> 3.5 -> 4 era of mind boggling growth of frontier models anymore. At best, people are finding out how to attach various tooling to the models to eek more out as the models themselves very slowly improve.
by horizion2025 | 2026-01-29 01:45:58+00:00
My concurrency knowledge is a bit rusty but aren't spinlocks only supposed to be used for very brief waits like in the hundreds of cycles (or situations where you can't block... like internal o/s scheduling structures in SMP setups)? If so how much does all this back off and starvation of higher priority threads even matter? If it is longer then you should use a locking primitive (except for in those low level os structures!) where most of the things discussed are not an issue. Would love to hear the use cases where spin locks are needed in eg user space, I dont doubt they occur.
by fsckboy | 2026-01-29 01:47:10+00:00
what is/are the thread synchronization protocol called which is the equivalent to ethernet's CSMA? there's no "carrier sensing", but instead "who won or mistakes were made" sensing. or is that just considered a form of spinlock? (you're not waiting for a lock, you perform your operation then see if it worked; though you could make the operation be "acquire lock" in which case it's a spinlock)
by dabockster | 2026-01-29 01:47:15+00:00
> the Linux kernel and Linux distros both leave that unified memory capability up to the GPU driver to implement

Depends on if AMD (or Intel, since Arc drivers are supposedly OSS as well) took the time to implement that. Or if a Linux based OS/distro implements a Linux equivalent to the Windows Display Driver Model (needs code outside of the kernel and specific to the developed OS/distro to do).

So far, though, it seems like people are more interested in pointing fingers and sucking up the water of small town America than actually building efficient AI/graphics tech.
by adrianwaj | 2026-01-29 01:47:32+00:00
There must be a better way for people to organize themselves and their output. Can't delivery rates be predicted? Why not a pay-as-you-go? What does the client see about their contractor's work practices and project timeline?

Perhaps workers could opt for a pay-cut to work less hours. Upon employment, the worker decides how many hours per week they want to work and can change that as time goes on. Do they want to be a slave or a free spirit? It's up to them.

Smarter employment really needs to happen everywhere. What if there was a way for the final customer to know how their product was made and who were the actual individuals who touched their garment/device?
by likpok | 2026-01-29 01:48:37+00:00
The article goes into detail about how this level of morphine in the breastmilk could not have given the baby a lethal (or even clinically effective) dose.

Furthermore, Koren lied about what the tests showed the stomach contents to be: he omitted codeine entirely. Codeine (per the article) would not be expected to be transferred by breastmilk -- it's metabolized into morphine to be effective.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-01-29 01:49:12+00:00
That judge's ruling was essentially overturned last month on appeal.

> Even though Apple was no longer prohibiting linked-out purchases, the district court held that this new approach effectively prohibited linked-out purchases, and it violated the spirit of the injunction. The district court then enjoined Apple from imposing any commission or fee on linked-out purchases. However, the Ninth Circuit panel found that the complete ban was overbroad and punitive. Apple should be permitted to charge a commission based on costs that are genuinely and reasonably necessary for its coordination of external links and linked-out purchases, but not more.

"Genuinely and reasonably necessary", not being defined, will naturally be taken by Apple's malicious compliance department to mean "26%", I'm sure, and we'll get to enjoy a continued round of show trials in court with no meaningful effect for years to come.
by llsf | 2026-01-29 01:49:24+00:00
It all boils down to the tradeoff between convenience and security.
I don't think it is particularly easy to replicate a living hand with all the blood vessels.
And it is not particularly easy to get a NFC ring with a secure element compatible with payment terminals.

I thought that the engineering team at Amazon did a great job with Amazon One. I wish someone could pick up the tech and carry on.
by simonw | 2026-01-29 01:49:24+00:00
Because I've played this game too many times before - I know that some people will find a hole in any example you show them.

So before doing that work, I want to get a feel for if you're asking this question in good faith and have done any active looking yourself.

(My favorite two recent open source examples are https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/27/one-human-one-agent-on... and https://github.com/antirez/flux2.c)
by Lambdanaut | 2026-01-29 01:50:24+00:00
There's always two sides to a coin right? While everything you said is true, I think that there's a pattern people are generally aware of in this world. Things that don't serve a purpose, vanish.

We see it in worker replacement, in vestigial organic structures that shrink over millinea, and in the tools and objects we keep with us in our lives.

The question, once achieving this grandiose goal, is how long, and by what mechanism, will we continue to enjoy the fruits of our labor?

Perhaps there will be a time when we may enjoy this world without the pressure of being a cog within it, but ultimately this time may be short if we are able to manifest it at all.

The unease comes from the power we lose when we cease to be the means of production, and instead become a vestigial organ on a beast much more complex than ourselves.
by bsder | 2026-01-29 01:50:43+00:00
> But he has structured it in a way that prevents the money from helping this goal.

I suspect it's worse. It's structured in a way that will probably harm the goal.

The money will go to people who somehow already managed to marshal enough resources to get to the Olympics. Good on you for supporting people after the fact, but by that point money problems have long before winnowed far too many qualified athletes out of the pipeline.

That kid from Moab would be an amazing swimmer. That kid from Punxsutawney shoots one hell of a bow. That kid from Tuscaloosa would have a smoking slapshot. None of them have a hope of clearing the initial monetary barriers.

The most effective time to apply resources is when the athletes are young, not done.
by IAmBroom | 2026-01-29 01:50:44+00:00
Agreed.

While I was jobless for 18 months, I met someone in the storage locker, late at night, who was SO EAGER to chat. Kept talking to me for an hour while I boxed and stored my junk that wouldn't fit in my tiny, cheap rental housing.

I realized that the storage unit was heated, with unmetered power (if you rented a power-supplied unit) and a working restroom.

He was so chatty because (I realized) he was living there. And desperate for social contact.

I let him talk to me, because I'm not a solipsistic asshole who thinks the Great Recession of 2008 didn't affect people.
by Aloisius | 2026-01-29 01:51:12+00:00
> Calling ICE "gestapo" and Trump "Hitler" and are genuinely crazy things, gestapo can be pretty accurately described by 1984 as the thought police, ICE, while being an organ of a state is far from that.

I'm not sure what you mean. The Gastapo was an organ of the state. Geheime Staatspolize means "Secret State Police."
by zeta0134 | 2026-01-29 01:51:24+00:00
The strategy I see with the most success in online communities is something to the effect of, "If it appears in the trailer, or what is very obviously the earlygame tutorial area, it's basically fair game. Otherwise use spoiler tags." Some puzzle games are best experienced entirely unspoiled (Outer Wilds) and others benefit from sortof a layered hints approach.

Steam guides for Blue Prince are fantastic about this, and were extremely welcome to me once the RNG nature of the game stopped being exciting and started being a tedious obstacle. There's nothing quite like needing to spend several real world hours to try a puzzle solution that may be a complete waste of time, simply because the game doesn't really like to spawn the needed rooms (in an acceptable configuration) very often.
by overgard | 2026-01-29 01:51:30+00:00
Well, if you consider Maslow's hierarchy of needs, "creatively enabled" would be a luxury at the top of the pyramid with "self actualization". Luxuries don't matter if the things at the bottom of the pyramid aren't there -- i.e. you can't eat or put a shelter over your head. I think the big AI players really need a coherent plan for this if they don't want a lot of mainstream and eventually legislative pushback. Not to mention it's bad business if nobody can afford to use AI because they're unemployed. (I'm not anti-AI, it's an interesting tool, but I think the way it's being developed is inviting a lot of danger for very marginal returns so far)
by chihuahua | 2026-01-29 01:52:49+00:00
They can probably hire enough random dudes in India, especially if AI reduces the need for call center employees.

It will be slightly creepy when the Optimus walks into the bedroom and stares while its owner is ... in the middle of something, but that's a small price to pay.

Plus the Tesla employees in the U.S. will also be able to share the video, so it's a win-win.
by llsf | 2026-01-29 01:53:16+00:00
I agree in theory, but yet I have an iPhone, and Apple is managing my biometrics.
I do not have Clear, or TSA preCheck, etc. but still my biometrics are in the US database.

So, in practice, I am not sure if that is truly a non-starter for "normies" and even some "techies". I already gave up on my face biometrics living in US.
by IAmBroom | 2026-01-29 01:53:36+00:00
I note you are in South Africa.

"South Africa entered its first recession in 17 years in late 2008.... with nearly one million jobs lost by 2009, pushing the unemployment rate to roughly 24%."

That's 24% of your own country that you "are not close to", and therefore don't care about.

Wow.