Recent submissions

Comment · 9 days ago
If only. The EFF has been harping about this for literally decades. The DMCA in the US and similar anti-circumvention laws around the world (primarily EU) make doing that a serious crime, with punishments well beyond any conceivable impact to society at large.
Comment · 14 days ago
We already have that it's called SFTP. ;)

Wait what do you mean you want to use a key to log in, our stuff doesn't support that.

Comment · 14 days ago
There is plenty of room for antiquated process and technology in utilities that has nothing to do with grid operations, trust me. :)
Comment · 17 days ago
Assuming this never really ships (ahem), this is basically an upper-tier "YouTuber engineer" stunt video with a NASDAQ symbol attached. And the results there seem to suggest that Musk's marketing schtick is wearing a bit thin...
Comment · 1 month ago
These service status pages have so many other problems, I can't really get excited about this article's point. As a user of a service, I don't really care that an additional 0.09% of uptime is any more or less difficult to achieve than an additional 0.9%, even if you describe it in terms of fractions of time. I only care about two things: what the service status is right now and your service reliability's impact to me over the long term (get out of here with your 30-day crap).

In the electric utility world we have a few IEEE standardized metrics (with appropriately IEEE'd acronyms) for tracking service reliability that I like much better and always wish for when I'm looking at a status page. Pie in the sky stuff for sure, nobody wants to do this analysis and publish the results without a regulator telling them have to, but c'est la vie.

SAIDI - System Average Interruption Duration Index. How many minutes an average customer experienced service interruption in a year. This is the big one I'd want to see on your service status page IMHO. For the power grid, we consider any outage longer than five minutes to be an interruption ("non-momentary outage").

SAIFI - System Average Interruption Frequency Index. How many total periods of interruption occurred for the average customer in a year.

CAIDI - Customer Average Interruption Duration Index. How long it takes service to be restored for the average customer when there is an interruption.

For the US, here is what these numbers look like: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_11_03.html. If you're outside the US look up yours and have a good laugh at us. :)

For the "right now" aspect you have probably visited your utility's outage map, but here I would say we do much better than most utilities. The level of detail on the investigation and resolution is often more detailed, and we usually know better than to bother providing much in the way of a concrete estimate for restoration time of a current outage (though this is getting better in the utility space).

Comment · 2 months ago
Based on my very amateurish skim of this and a related paper, maybe so? They simulated the neutrino background as solar and cosmic ray atmospheric sources, so any source with a different energy distribution is perhaps a possible explanation for the event, I think.

But probably more likely is for this to have been a particularly energetic event in the tail of one of the known sources of neutron recoil detection they did model. More events needed!

Comment · 2 months ago
My friend, handling the waste of all the people that live in a city is one of the most basic examples of the public commons I can imagine lol. What are you talking about?? It is a bit fundamental to the concept of a city!
Comment · 2 months ago
I've seen and loved this before but only today I thought to zoom all the way out and see the true terminator affected by elevation. We usually only seen the idealized smooth curve. Very neat!
Comment · 2 months ago
Very nice article, and I appreciate SQLite's explanation of the bug too. And how extremely cool Tailscale appears to have been about it (paying for the VFS shim, etc.).

I'd have liked to have heard more about the decision to checkpoint so frequently that put them on this path though. Presumably that's to keep the WAL tiny for very fast recovery. Trying to mitigate some of the deleterious effects of inserting a DBMS into your network layer, I suppose? Tricky stuff. Wonder how that compares to typical etcd snapshot frequencies too.

Comment · 3 months ago
And how about safety of life systems? They use computers in chemical plants and on planes, you know lol. Integer overflows have a body count!
Comment · 3 months ago
Ok fine, but I bet you can't come up with a good gluten free banana bread recipe.
Comment · 3 months ago
Isn't this basically how more modern "chatty" CLIs use stderr? Put all the nice progress bars and emojis behind `if isatty(2)`? I thought so anyway, but I'll admit I've never actually looked at what npm, uv, etc. do.
Comment · 4 months ago
Man, that project is such bait for my particular sensibilities but just looking at the copy about not sharing your data and only sharing weights has me feeling very disappointed in the project already. I would want a project like this to not elide fact that sharing your weight updates probably effectively means sharing your data too.
Comment · 4 months ago
To actually follow through with this fully they would have had to revoke all kinds of internal access for foreign nationals and demand they immediately return their hardware (at 5pm on a Friday no less), no?

Unless folks are hearing that they did this I smell marketing and/or PR as the main driver of the action.

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton