MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Carolina Cloud – the farm-to-table of cloud computing
by bojangleslover | 2025-05-27 19:50:39+00:00
We were getting smashed with AWS bills and despite not having much background in it, realized that assembling our own hardware is about the same as 1-3 months of renting it on AWS. It was a no-brainer to build our own.

We since started expanding to friends and family, and are proud to report we've saved several small businesses massive amounts of money.

We are based in North Carolina with latency to us-east-1 of less than 8ms. We have had 99.99% uptime over the past year. And we charge between 1/3 and 1/2 of an equivalent AWS machine (usually closer to 1/3) while offering a 300% refund for any downtime.

We are not the best fit for mission-critical things like consumer banking apps, FedNow or the Instagram backend, but we're perfect for things like high RAM instances for data science experimentation, getting your feet wet with GPUs and CUDA and hosting a RAM-intensive backend for your iOS app or Chrome Extension.

We also offer direct phone support...we have backgrounds in finance, software engineering and data centers ourselves so we'd love to help you strategize.

Oh yeah, and we have GPUs.
by wagwang | 2025-05-27 19:50:48+00:00
It's time to be unburdened by what has been and sharply divide the vocational school and the higher learning/research track like most other first world countries. It's very cruel imo to send mediocre students (who likely won't produce any meaningful research) down research paths while they drown in debt. The state is complicit in this too by guarantee'ing the loans.

And btw, I don't deny that there is value in intermingling vocational studies and cutting edge research - it very much makes sense for some STEM disciplines, but that's the exception not the rule imo.
by Draiken | 2025-05-27 19:51:17+00:00
Companies exist for one reason: to generate profits. There's not way around it.

An ethical company will pay fairer wages, will not exploit users, apply dark patterns, stifle competition, etc. and non-ethical companies will do all of the above to generate more profits than the ethical one.

In the utopian world where there's endless competition, perhaps people could choose the ethical companies and they'd win fair and square. But the second you add reality back in, you add monopolies, oligopolies, geographical restrictions, etc. into the mix and these companies can get away with whatever behavior they want since consumers don't have a choice.

That's not even accounting for the fact that many people couldn't give a single f** to ethics, as long as they can buy their products for cheaper. Many would love to care, but simply cannot afford it, since all companies optimize to compress salaries.

I could go on, but hopefully my point is clear. Traditional companies will eventually become evil in their pursuit for profits even if they don't intentionally do so.

Ethics is not part of the equation at all.

It's bleak but until I see proof that this is incorrect, my point stands. Both the logical conclusion of capitalist theory and the real world we live in right now agree. Small and medium businesses are not yet big enough to optimize themselves to become evil (although it doesn't stop them from being evil for other reasons). Since the end game of competition is monopoly, we can see how big conglomerates are straight up buying up the competition which will eventually tip the scales to being a majority of big companies.

The reality is that the only businesses that stay small are the ones that don't scale. Otherwise big players would've already swooped in and enshitified them.

I'd love to imagine when I grow my company I'll be ethical, fair and structure it in a way that the goal is to make everyone in it rich while producing something good. But the most likely outcome is that it'll get crushed by competition that will not care or if I hit big, it'll grow enough and become evil.
by SOLAR_FIELDS | 2025-05-27 19:53:21+00:00
They actually hand wave and gloss over two of the other biggest drawbacks:

- Starlight is 6 years less mature than docusaurus

- the people who maintain starlight have some level of billions less at their disposal to keep the project going. If Astro and the company behind it go belly up now you have a new problem on your hands

The main appeal I can see is for someone who wants a lot more extensibility and control over the design aspect of their docs. For those who just need to slap some pretty good looking docs into a well supported framework for the next 10 years would do better with the more battle tested framework supported by BigCorp
by Footpost | 2025-05-27 19:53:27+00:00
The reasoning for this choice in the base ISA is discussed in the RISCV ISA manual, Section 2.4 on "Integer Computational Instructions" [1]. Given that RISCV is a modular ISA, it should be possible in principle to have suitable ISA extensions that do integer overflow detection. Maybe the absence of such an extension in 2025 indicates that this is not a pressing need for many RISC-V users?

[1] https://lists.riscv.org/g/tech-unprivileged/attachment/535/0...
by FrameworkFred | 2025-05-27 19:54:24+00:00
I agree with some of the article. I agree that code is a liability that's distinct from the asset that the code is part of. It's like tires on a car, they're liability-like whereas the car can be thought of as an asset.

But AI can do some architecting. It's just not really the sort of thing where an unskilled person with a highly proficient LLM is going to be producing a distributed system that does anything useful.

It seems to me that the net effect of AI will be to increase the output of developers without increasing the cost per developer. Effectively, this will make software development cheaper. I suppose it's possible that there is some sort of peak demand for software that will require less developers over time to meet, but, generally, when something becomes cheaper, the demand for that thing will tend to increase.

I think the rumors of our demise are overblown.
by glaucon | 2025-05-27 19:54:32+00:00
You don't mention what the income from the government job is related to the private one, is it much different ?

Also in some places a government job comes with a pension that a private sector job would not, is that a plus point for moving to a government job ?

WRT Social Skills, I think it's a good idea but I wonder if there are ways of improving your social skills independent of where you are working ? Is Toast Masters something you would consider ? There seem to be a number of options within Nepal https://toastmastersnepal.org/clubs-in-nepal/ .
by jchw | 2025-05-27 19:54:40+00:00
Multi bag is probably over-complicating things. You can take a note from TGM and just keep a running window of the last n pieces and reroll m times until you get one that wasn't in the window or run out of tries. I think n is usually 4 and m is usually 6. This works great, is easy to implement and doesn't feel too predictable (i.e. like single bag does.) Also you can preload the window with two S's and two Z's to lower the odds of getting those first, since that's annoying :)
by 4ndrewl | 2025-05-27 19:55:35+00:00
Does the description of database indexes even count as _shallow_ knowledge? Sounds like a dictionary description with an example. Not even table stakes to warrant your inclusion in any conversation on the topic.

I know that some birds migrate depending on the season and they fly in certain formations for efficiency. I'd never,ever think I could have any serious conversation with a biologist or ornithologist.
by AdmiralAsshat | 2025-05-27 19:55:56+00:00
Not surprising. I remember being an undergrad when my BA was ending. I was out-of-state, my nearest relative was several hours away, and I basically only had enough space to pack up from my room whatever could fit in my car. I don't think I threw out much, but there were definitely some things that were resigned to the bin because I simply didn't have anywhere else to put them. For example, I'm pretty sure I threw out a cheap but perfectly functional blender (maybe in the $40 range). The reason being: what was I going to do with it? My parents had a blender; whoever I was staying with in the short-term had a blender; if I wanted to mail it back home I'd probably pay more in shipping costs than the cost of the blender; so what purpose was there to hang onto it?

It was also a surprising PITA to get someone to take my gently-used mattress. Most places (Goodwill, Salvation Army, etc) didn't want it, which I can understand. I know several of my roommates ended up just dumping theirs. I called around some churches and they finally put me in touch with a family that lived in a trailer park nearby who were happy to come and collect it. I let them survey pretty much everything else in my room that I hadn't already packed up at that point as well and take what they wanted--the bed frame, some lamps, etc.
by ted_dunning | 2025-05-27 19:56:12+00:00
Your last sentence is the answer. These kids are buying so much it won't fit into a carry on.

Americans buy, on average, over 50 items of clothing per year. Older people buy less, younger people buy more.

The result is too big to carry. "Omnia mea mecum porto" is from a very long time ago.
by riskassessment | 2025-05-27 19:56:33+00:00
Sure but I think it's an oversimplification to say that universities are unfocused and that this lack of focus is a problem because 1) the alternative already exists (smaller colleges are typically focused primarily on education with less research and less sports) 2) Universities doing a lot of things (including offering undergrads connections to research labs) is one of the main reasons that they are an attractive option relative to colleges.
by etruong42 | 2025-05-27 19:56:33+00:00
The author argued that the American Dream that the "boomers" had access to is still available, and I believe that American Dream did mean having to uproot, much like the settlers before them.

Perhaps you feel like this needs to be called out more explicitly rather than just hinted at. I think another concern that the author doesn't _highlight_ but is plenty clear is that this sort of lifestyle probably is more amenable to the able bodied, with their frequent allusions to hunting and fishing.

So while the author doesn't explicitly list out all possible issues, and everyone will have different priorities and opportunities in their life, I think the author is plenty clear on what they're describing, and the concern you raised is easily inferred from what they're saying.
by cellis | 2025-05-27 19:56:38+00:00
I recently worked with a friend on an electrical rewiring job. There’s no way robots as they’re currently being developed have anywhere near the dexterity and vision + motor skills required to do electrical work in an average home built for humans up until probably 2030…and I don’t think they ever will. I’m willing to make a long bet on that. What I would bet on is new structures being built that are “robot ready” and that more and more of the housing stock is built like that, but given the pace of coding ( building code updates ) I don’t see that happening for another 20 years.
by zahlman | 2025-05-27 19:56:39+00:00
Barely any of the people involved are mods. I said that repeatedly before your post yet you chose to ignore it, despite apparently singling out my posts specifically for consideration.

Objectively, people are nicer now. Informal policies turned into a proper Code of Conduct over time and moderators (the actual moderators) take it very seriously.

Being strict about this is objectively correct and it has absolutely nothing to do with power tripping. Nobody wants to close and delete questions. They want those questions not to have existed in the first place, or rather to have been asked properly in the first place.

The system does not incentivize any of this curation effort; it happens entirely thanklessly and driven purely by intrinsic motivation to produce a specific valuable thing.

This is not a matter of "bureaucracy".

As far as I can tell there is no issue with site traffic:

https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/08/08/insights-into-stack-ov... https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1901940/
by bityard | 2025-05-27 19:56:45+00:00
Yes, but there was still fraud. You didn't send your money away to just any random ad you ran across. Sears was VERY well known. And if you didn't know the company or its reputation, you likely wouldn't send your money away to buy something without at _least_ hearing a positive experience from someone you know and trust.

MITS was not unknown, but they were not a household name. And any microcomputer at that time was quite an expensive toy. Costing an amount that a lot of people could not really afford to just lose.
by inadequatespace | 2025-05-27 19:56:55+00:00
Right. What the article is unsurprisingly glossing over (per usual) is that just because AI is perceived (by higher-ups that don’t actually do the work) to speed up coding work doesn't mean it actually does.

and that probably to some extent all involved (depending on how delusional they are) know that it's simply an excuse to do layoffs (replaced by offshoring) by artificially so-called raising the bar to what is unrealistic for most people
by ceejayoz | 2025-05-27 19:57:15+00:00
Many of the Founding Fathers were slaveowners. Their racism would most certainly have treated white-skinned European-descended Hamilton differently than a dark-skinned descendant of African parents, even if both were born in the Caribbean.

We have plenty of echoes of this today, like the birthers doubting Obama's citizenship. We all know why he was singled out for that one.

I'm not sure how an understanding of their racist beliefs translates into an endorsement to you.
by benjaminaster | 2025-05-27 19:57:37+00:00
Hello people, author here!

Some comments on this from my side:

- You people totally overwhelmed my website... I use(d) Firebase static hosting because it's completely free and super simple, which reached the 10 GB monthly limit now. I changed to Cloudflare in the meantime, but it'll need some time for the DNS records to update. IN THE MEANTIME, PLEASE USE THE GITHUB PAGES LINK INSTEAD: https://benjaminaster.github.io/CSS-Minecraft/

- I made this almost three years ago now, to try out the limits of what's possible with pure CSS, and to test out the then-new CSS :has() selector.

- This project never got much traction until now, so I never bothered to write about how it works. Simon Willison now already wrote a blog post about it, so I guess I don't have to anymore... https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/26/css-minecraft/

- For the best experience, please view this on a desktop browser, either Chromium-based or Firefox.

- The source code is at https://github.com/BenjaminAster/CSS-Minecraft. The "index.pug" and "main.scss" files contain the actual source code; the rest is mostly just the compiled output.

- Here is a video of me building a house with it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OH8-Y9frP5k
by SoftTalker | 2025-05-27 19:57:56+00:00
OpenBSD include bgpd(8) out of the box:

DESCRIPTION bgpd is a Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) daemon which manages the network routing tables. Its main purpose is to exchange information concerning "network reachability" with other BGP systems. bgpd uses the Border Gateway Protocol, Version 4, as described in RFC 4271.
by williamsss | 2025-05-27 19:58:06+00:00
There’s something that’s embittered me about the subscription model and projects made purely for greed. I particularly enjoy supporting projects fiscally which that are passion projects that they could probably charge more for.

https://www.keybr.com - shows ads if you want to use it for free or you can pay a small fee to remove ads. The code is open-sourced so you can make your own. Helped me get the hang of split keyboards and was money well spent to support.

https://enso.sonnet.io - ingenious idea that has helped me write without loosing focus editing myself. The solo developer guy shares an entertaining blog full of illustrations and rich content. his project is available to download in full from Gumroad for a small one time fee.

If there’s any projects you know of like these please share them!
by whatshisface | 2025-05-27 19:58:17+00:00
One of the unfortunate lessons of the past year has been that there is no ideological conflict between supporters of "return to home" (I don't recall the precise translation) and antisemites. I myself discovered this fact in the writings of pre-Nazi German nationalists, but did not expect it to become relevant in my lifetime. The track record of extreme support for Israel is as strong in the present administration as the track record of accepting probable or evident you-know-whats, who (and I can dig up evidence if you want to see it, but I don't want to do that - it's in the documents of white nationalists dating to the alt-right era as distinct from older groups) have actually adopted Israel as a model for their own nationalist views in the past decade or two.
by hansmayer | 2025-05-27 19:58:38+00:00
100% this. Actually a lot of (younger) folks don't know that the current LLM "revolution" is the tail end of the last ~20 years of ML developments. So yeah, how many more years? In a way, looking at the costs and complexity to run them, it looks a bit like building huge computers and tvs with electronic tubes in the late 1940s. Maybe there is going to be a transistor moment here and someone recognises we already have a deterministic algorithms we could combine for deterministic tasks, in place of the Slop-Machines...? I dont mind them generating bullshit videos and pictures, as much as the potential they have to completely screw up the quality of software in completely new ways.
by neilv | 2025-05-27 19:59:20+00:00
I spent many years curb-shopping student discards in Cambridge, MA. It's not only in late May, but year-round. By convention, many people just set out reusable things beside the trash on the curb, and the things disappear.

I think much of it is a combination of jet-setting affluence, and of international students, who might not be affluent, but who can't take it with them, and are too busy to sell it.

The sad thing to a curb-shopper is the knowledge that most on-campus discarded stuff never makes it to the curb, other than "Allston Christmas".

The other day, when there were a lot moveouts happening (when you can actually "pahk yah cah in Hahvahd Yahd") someone had set up some large donation bins, so hopefully the things are going to someone who will use it, rather than to a landfill. (The city now also runs year-round clothing donation receptacles.)

Earlier this month, I helped this person who needed help getting a nice piece of furniture from the curb into their car. She capped off gushing about the nice find, with "Harvard students!"

What restores a little of your faith in humanity is when people will go out of their way to donate, or to put something carefully on the curb with a sign, when it would be easier just to toss it into the dumpster.
by hendiatris | 2025-05-27 19:59:46+00:00
In the lower level arrow/parquet libraries you can control the row groups, and even the data pages (although it’s a lot more work). I have used this heavily with the arrow-rs crate to drastically improve (like 10x) how quickly data could be queried from files. Some row groups will have just a few rows, others will have thousands, but being able to bypass searching in many row groups makes the skew irrelevant.

Just beware that one issue you can have is the limit of row groups per file (2^15).
by zahlman | 2025-05-27 19:59:56+00:00
> except for when there should be current answers.

Yes.

They belong on the existing question - unless the existing question is poorly asked and the new one is better asked.

New answers can, by default, be added at any time - and should, if existing answers are actually out of date rather than simply being old. (Many 10+ year old answers really do still apply.)

Asking the question again is not how the site is designed or intended to work.
by zahlman | 2025-05-27 20:01:03+00:00
> There was a belief, sometimes unstated but often explicit, that no more (serious) discussion is really to be had, and further wondering how can one stop people from asking. It became difficult to discuss anything if there was even something vaguely related asked before.

There is nothing to do with unstated belief here.

It is explicit policy that we don't have discussion at all.

We have answers to questions.

Which is why there's a question (explicitly labelled as such, and not just "help me") at the top of the page, and every post below it is labelled as an answer (and is explicitly not a response to anything else but is simply there to answer the question).
by pmig | 2025-05-27 20:01:16+00:00
It's a good point. I am personally not really a fan of versioned docs. Having a CHANGELOG.md or similar is critical, but how often do you really want to explore the docs in a specific version? And there are also way better options to pinpoint changes. You can think of using git blame instead of clicking through a dozen of point releases of your versioned docs.
by avereveard | 2025-05-27 20:01:34+00:00
a lot of token are used reading files whole just to understand where to fit the feature requested and the edit point, access to an AST would allow the llm to see the project "wireframe" so to say, by asking classes or method level granularity, and only then retrieving the source for the symbol that most likely contains the edit point the llm needs. some token consumption there is anovaidable as the llm need the source to build a diff, but still, it's focused on the feature than the search.
by metalman | 2025-05-27 20:01:55+00:00
reactivity? the question would be answered by simply confirming that the body does not take on xenon and rejects it, IE: zero xenon reactivity....and are there in fact phisiological changes when breathing it, how it is processed by the body if taken into the blood stream, and then somehow released could be something as simple as (temporarily) messing up red blood cells and triggering an immune response to make more blood, NOW!
by timewizard | 2025-05-27 20:01:55+00:00
> seems like the author just really hates working in an office

I think satisfaction from working in an office is directly related to the pay given to those coming into the office. Her role would not have been a high paying one. I genuinely can't blame her for that; but, it does seem like it also made her bitter towards her co-workers specifically.

> and interprets office perks as traps to make you spend more time there.

Do they have any other actual purpose?

> but I also see that as a likely anomalous perk

It shouldn't be anomalous. The lockdowns incidentally showed that not _every_ single job needs to be held in the office by rote. It also showed that even if you do not all 5 days a week are necessary to get the benefits that come from working in a shared space.

> and can't be too upset about having to go to work in the morning.

If it's genuinely required for the job then sure. If we're doing it just because the manager just wants to do his favorite thing then I think we justifiably can take the position of being upset by this. If it has no impact on the bottom line then why are you hassling me for something you do not actually need?
by anyfoo | 2025-05-27 20:03:56+00:00
Gosh, after all those years I've only just realized the double meaning of "fruit flies". Thanks!

Before that, I just thought it was more of a non sequitur, but still amusing. There was just something inherently funny about imagining a banana hurling through the air in an awkward tumbling motion, right after the sagely abstract concept of time and its elegant arrow metaphor.