Hacker News: uberduper

New comment by uberduper in "Codex for almost everything"

uberduper — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 20:42:54 +0000

I did some work on an agent that was supposed to demonstrate a learning pipeline. I figured having it fix broken linux servers with some contrived failures would make for a good example if it getting stuck, having to get some assistance to progress, and then having a better capability for handling that class of failure in the future.

I couldn't come up with a single failure mode the agent with a gpt5.x model behind it couldn't one shot. I created socket overruns.. dangling file descriptors.. badly configured systemd units.. busted route tables.. "failed" volume mounts..

Had to start creating failures of internal services the models couldn't have been trained on and it was still hard to have scenarios it couldn't one shot.

New comment by uberduper in "Codex for almost everything"

uberduper — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 17:22:46 +0000

Do people really want codex to have control over their computer and apps?

I'm still paranoid about keeping things securely sandboxed.

New comment by uberduper in "Missouri town fires half its city council over data center deal"

uberduper — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 14:17:22 +0000

Well they're liquid cooled, so there's some extra handling required. Then there's the sky high failure rate.

New comment by uberduper in "Missouri town fires half its city council over data center deal"

uberduper — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 23:26:14 +0000

A dozen people couldn't handle the number of daily nvidia compute tray RMAs one of these datacenters produces.

New comment by uberduper in "Missouri town fires half its city council over data center deal"

uberduper — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 19:48:46 +0000

Appreciate you making my point for me.

New comment by uberduper in "Missouri town fires half its city council over data center deal"

uberduper — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 18:31:55 +0000

I don't know anything about this particular site, but I presume it's one of the new mega gpu sites.

I'm seeing many people in the comments with an early 2000's era concept of datacenters. The scale of these new sites is mind boggling. Take your idea of a typical datacenter building. Make it 4x bigger. Then put 4 of them together into a cluster. Then imagine 10 of those clusters at the site.

New comment by uberduper in "Missouri town fires half its city council over data center deal"

uberduper — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 18:19:56 +0000

There's going to be continued support from local electricians, low voltage wiring vendors, various facilities service companies, HVAC, and now plumbers.. lots of plumbers. So many leaks. A site like this is going to have probably a few hundred full time people on site all the time in addition to the contracted folks.

New comment by uberduper in "Missouri town fires half its city council over data center deal"

uberduper — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 17:42:28 +0000

Local shops will absolutely be contracted to work on the project. A datacenter project like this can't find enough qualified electricians.

New comment by uberduper in "Missouri town fires half its city council over data center deal"

uberduper — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 17:31:08 +0000

Many jobs during construction. A site like this is a substantial multi-year construction effort.

Long term permanent jobs.. not so much.

New comment by uberduper in "Oracle slashes 30k jobs"

uberduper — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 18:03:30 +0000

CDDL is more permissive than gpl. It's not a violation of cddl to intermingle with code under a different license. GPL is the issue and it's the individual contributors to linux that _could_ sue.

New comment by uberduper in "Oracle slashes 30k jobs"

uberduper — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 16:33:15 +0000

There's no zfs grenade. It's CDDL, feel free to use it wherever you want. Oracle can't come after you for violating the gpl even if somehow using zfs on linux violates the gpl.

New comment by uberduper in "Dune3d: A parametric 3D CAD application"

uberduper — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 21:47:06 +0000

Recent freecad is pretty decent. My main complaint these days is the performance of the geometry engine.

New comment by uberduper in "Nobody gets promoted for simplicity"

uberduper — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 16:06:00 +0000

AWS loop a long while back wanted me to design a playlist system so my dumbass brain snapped to m3u files or w/e people were using back then and designed a system to host/share playlist files. The teenager (ok probably in their 20s) interviewing me seemed more and more confused as we went on but he never tried to redirect me to what he really intended.

New comment by uberduper in "Ask HN: Vxlan over WireGuard or WireGuard over Vxlan?"

uberduper — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 22:22:15 +0000

If you actually want to use vxlan ids to isolate l2 domains, like if you want multiple hypervisors separated by public networks to run groups of VMs on distinct l2 domains, then vxlan over WG seems like the way to go.

New comment by uberduper in "Ask HN: Vxlan over WireGuard or WireGuard over Vxlan?"

uberduper — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 22:10:22 +0000

What are your discovery mechanisms? I don't know what exists for automatic peer management with wg. If you're doing bgp evpn for vxlan endpoint discovery then I'd think WG over vxlan would be the easier to manage option.

New comment by uberduper in "Internal RFCs saved us months of wasted work"

uberduper — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 14:03:15 +0000

> This leads to authors having to re-explain their thinking in detail, covering points that they’d omitted for brevity or because they are obvious to those with a good understanding of the problem.

There's nothing wrong with this. Being able to explain your thinking in detail to someone that doesn't necessarily understand the problem is a pretty good exercise to make sure you yourself fully understand the problem _and your thinking._ Of course, this can't turn in to a lecture on basic things people should know or have looked up before commenting.

New comment by uberduper in "Internal RFCs saved us months of wasted work"

uberduper — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 13:55:00 +0000

My take is that an RFC should be very early in the engineering process, like as part of a proof of concept phase, and should not block progress towards completing a design proposal. The design proposal should list any legitimate alternatives to overall or component designs discussed during RFC along with the reasoning for not using them in a "designs not chosen" appendix. This at least gives your engineering leadership an opportunity to evaluate the general design ideas before anyone is prepared to die on the hill of those ideas.

Architecture / Design review happens post proof of concept but still before any significant development work and major action items are blockers to beginning development. Further discussion about designs not chosen can happen here, especially when a flaw is uncovered that would be addressed by one of those not chosen.

New comment by uberduper in "New magnetic component discovered in the Faraday effect"

uberduper — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 15:16:55 +0000

That's an unsatisfying answer. I have some work to do if I want to understand it.

New comment by uberduper in "New magnetic component discovered in the Faraday effect"

uberduper — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 15:19:14 +0000

What a timely article and comment. I've been watching a lecture series over the last few days about quantum mechanics and the many worlds interpretation. And I have questions.

I may have missed it or didn't understand it when I heard it explained. What underpins the notion that when a particle transitions from a superposed to defined state, the other basis states continue to exist? If they have to continue to exist, then okay many worlds, but why do we think (or know?) they must continue to exist?

New comment by uberduper in "New magnetic component discovered in the Faraday effect"

uberduper — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 14:47:03 +0000

Double slit experiment has been done with electrons which are, afaik, much easier to detect and send single file. It's been done with molecules. It's not a thought experiment.

Quantum superposition is real. There's no doubt about that.