Would it be beneficial for a platform to display the country of account origin on each user’s profile? I’m curious how the HN community thinks about this from angles like privacy, moderation, transparency, anti-abuse, and whether it meaningfully improves discussion quality. Are there strong reasons for or against showing this kind of metadata publicly?

One of my Phonak Audeo 90’s (RIC) died the other day after 5 years and I’m shopping for new. What’s your go to hearing aid currently if you’ve upgraded recently or have been thinking of doing so?

Moderate loss, have worn them for many years, enjoy listening to music and nature, but also need help in meetings and noisy environments.

Not worried about cost and wanting to get one more good deal out of work insurance before I retire.

We’re hitting a classic distributed systems wall and I’m looking for war stories or "least worst" practices.

The Context: We maintain a distributed stateful engine (think search/analytics). The architecture is standard: a Control Plane (Coordinator) assigns data segments to Worker Nodes. The workload involves heavy use of mmap and lazy loading for large datasets.

The Incident: We had a cascading failure where the Coordinator got stuck in a loop, DDOS-ing a specific node.

The Signal: Coordinator sees Node A has significantly fewer rows (logical count) than the cluster average. It flags Node A as "underutilized."

The Action: Coordinator attempts to rebalance/load new segments onto Node A.

The Reality: Node A is actually sitting at 197GB RAM usage (near OOM). The data on it happens to be extremely wide (fat rows, huge blobs), so its logical row count is low, but physical footprint is massive.

The Loop: Node A rejects the load (or times out). The Coordinator ignores the backpressure, sees the low row count again, and retries immediately.

The Core Problem: We are trying to write a "God Equation" for our load balancer. We started with row_count, which failed. We looked at disk usage, but that doesn't correlate with RAM because of lazy loading.

Now we are staring at mmap. Because the OS manages the page cache, the application-level RSS is noisy and doesn't strictly reflect "required" memory vs "reclaimable" cache.

The Question: Attempting to enumerate every resource variable (CPU, IOPS, RSS, Disk, logical count) into a single scoring function feels like an NP-hard trap.

How do you handle placement in systems where memory usage is opaque/dynamic?

Dumb Coordinator, Smart Nodes: Should we just let the Coordinator blind-fire based on disk space, and rely 100% on the Node to return hard 429 Too Many Requests based on local pressure?

Cost Estimation: Do we try to build a synthetic "cost model" per segment (e.g., predicted memory footprint) and schedule based on credits, ignoring actual OS metrics?

Control Plane Decoupling: Separate storage balancing (disk) from query balancing (mem)?

Feels like we are reinventing the wheel. References to papers or similar architecture post-mortems appreciated.

A few years ago, it felt like we had another news story of a major security breech every other day or something. (I'm exaggerating of course but the stories were a regular occurrence.)

It occurred to me today that I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen a story like this.

Have news stories about major security breeches been less common during the (approximately) past two years compared to the two years before that?

I don't know how I would go about verifying this--I'd have to find a way to classify a "big news story" and "major security breech" and then go back through the news--but I'm wondering if others have noticed it.

If it's not just me, the next question would be why. Have actual security breeches gone down, or just reporting on it?

https://imgur.com/a/EcBT3Cc

I noticed that Techmeme is currently boosting some guy's podcast to the very top of their website as a headline. I've also noticed the website overall becoming very deafeningly pro-AI in the past six months, often using the same idea in my screenshot to boost pro-AI content to the same headline spot or "above the fold" at the very least.

Are they taking kickbacks somehow? I don't see how a random podcast deserves headline treatment like this unless they got paid or some kind of kickback to promote it. And even then, it's not labeled as promoted content. The whole thing smells fishy to me.

I have moved to lesser big companies but still found the talent lacking and people make lives hard for others. Especially in the Bay area. I just want to be mission driven and code, but most places the product, founder or mission and hence the people seem flawed without good incentives. Most simply chase promo and managers often take advantage of this to create a bad environment. Ignoring this behavior for long has led me to burnout with no recognition for doing good work.

At this point, I'm willing to take a paycut for more fulfilling place and a non-profit/OSS seem good places as only people aligned with mission would be likely working there. OSS has more odds of being higher quality and technical. But I have no idea how to break in.

Just made a Hetzner account, activated 2FA, the usual.

Then go to buy a storage box, and I get this;

> Our automated system check indicates that your account information has an increased level of risk. Please choose one of the following verification methods:

And you can pay 20 EUR up front by PayPal, or hand over your passport (fat chance!)

Is this genuine, or does everyone get this and it's a fake reason?

(I've signed up to pay by bank transfer, so I'm also wondering why they don't ask me for pre-payment by bank transfer. As it is, no way on God's clean earth they get a passport, and I'm not on Paypal, so will try to use a friend's, but seems my second try to board Hetzner train has bounced - first time I left almost immediately, when I saw spaces not permitted in passwords.)

Let us imagine walking through a Neolithic village thousands of years ago, surrounded by collectively cultivated fields and domestic animals cared for by the group. There is no struggle for accumulation because this concept is foreign; people work together, share food and resources, economic differences are so subtle as to be almost non-existent, someone may have a few more sheep, but this does not create castes or hereditary privileges; life is organized in an egalitarian way because survival itself depends on cooperation, it is a functioning anarchy, a social eco-balance that honors the cycles of nature. Then something cracks; with the advent of the metal ages, copper, bronze, and finally iron, societies undergo a profound mutation and with this mutation, like poison flowing in a river, the first real social inequalities arise; one wonders why metals? The answer lies not in the material itself, but in the manufacturing process they require. Extracting minerals, smelting, and forging is not a job like any other; it is not accessible to everyone, it requires special knowledge, knowledge that can be guarded and, for the first time, commodified. Now there are people who control the production of axes, swords, and plows, and this control gives rise to privilege; the metalworker, once a member of the community, begins to transform into a node of power. One wonders whether it was the craftsmen who demanded higher wages or whether the common people spontaneously recognized their value. The answer given by historians is the second option, which is clearly a hypocritical choice derived from a capitalist mentality. Personally, I reject the theory of spontaneous exchange. In my opinion, there was creeping extortion, blackmail: “Without my plow, your field is barren; without my axes, you will struggle much more when you have to cut wood, so pay me.” But it wasn't just the blacksmiths who were parasites; the tribal chiefs, once foremost among their peers for their social commitment and wisdom, began to tax trade by demanding a toll on sales from blacksmiths or middlemen who sold metal tools to their communities, thus enriching themselves without forging any tools. even the priests were transformed, from guardians of an immanent sacredness to peddlers of a commodified sacredness; they began to sell blessings, to make people believe that an axe without their ritual would not cut or that a field without their prayer would not bear fruit. They began to create heaven to justify their role on earth, laying the foundations for all the institutionalized religions that would follow. The evidence of this corruption is right before our eyes. Just compare a Neolithic tomb with modest graves that are the same for everyone with a Bronze Age tomb where, among a sea of anonymous graves, there are very few tombs containing objects of great value such as jewelry and precious ornaments. It is the first macabre snapshot of a society divided into classes: the rich and the poor, the powerful and the subordinates. With the increase in inequality came the systematic exploitation of man by man, and the work of the majority began to serve not the community but the privilege of the few. this cursed dynamic did not stop with the Metal Age, it continued into modern societies, with their colossal inequalities, their billionaires and their desperate people. Our societies are the direct heirs of that pyramidal system born in the smelting furnaces of the Metal Ages. This is not progress; it is the long, dark night that has fallen on a dream of equality, and we are still paying the price today.

I work mainly in energy market communications and systems that facilitate energy trading, balancing and such. Currently most parties there take minutes to process messages and I think there could be a lot to learn from financial systems engineering. Any good resources you can recommend?

Both the EU and the US have introduced face scanning at airports to "increase security". EU rules are currently stricter and US rules allow some opt-outs for people that are uncomfortable with it. But it's only a matter of time before it becomes de facto mandatory for everyone. They claim that data is not retained or shared with other parties. Yeah, right, I totally believe that... Can something be done about this? I'm convinced that very few customers think face scanning is an improvement.