skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Perhaps because it's an obviously worse system that would be replaced if only the incumbents weren't protecting it.

I'm sure any individual middle manager would give you a very reasonable explanation for any of these behaviors. If you're operating in a political environment and you don't play the game you're going to end up the sucker sooner or later. How do you fix the problem when you need to be part of it to have any leverage to fix it? The only thing you have power to do in that situation is behave ethically or unethically (depending on who's definition of unethical you're using of course).

I'd like to think that startups that grow enormously will prove over time that slow enterprise-y corporations are at a huge disadvantage and that will slowly make it's way into business schools. But part of the reason risk averse behavior takes hold is because the stakes get higher as you get larger. Today's spectacularly successful startups are tomorrow's enterprises unless they make a deliberate effort not to be.
Nice engineering work! This is a really interesting case study.

Has the investment into bespoke storage technologies and data centers paid off already, given the real costs to build and set it up, and opportunity costs for other uses of engineering time? How long did it take to pay off through reduced costs, or when do you expect it will in the future? It would be interesting to learn at what point it might be worthwhile for a large player in a space like file storage to switch from existing commodity cloud solutions or proprietary on-premise solutions to custom ones -- as an extrapolation basis for other problems.

The general implication behind my question is: a custom solution can provide lower cost when viewed in isolation on a per-unit basis, but the total costs to the business must also account for the engineering work to develop, troubleshoot, deploy, and migrate to the storage system, as well as the time needed to lease and build data centers, etc., as well as to operate facilities and software stacks long-term; and to hire people to do that specifically; and also take into account the other things one could have done but cannot due to the decision to focus on a given problem (e.g., if the investment purely lowers cost, then that might be a tradeoff compared to another project that adds differentiating features. I know your blog post also mentioned performance, so it's not either-or) To make a good decision one must also weigh the expected value of alternatives, e.g., the current and predicted feature-sets of existing cloud or on-premise storage technologies, their expected prices over time, their expected regional availability. There's also the complication of owning substantially more assets rather than having operational expenses on cloud providers or other third parties.

I'm just curious to learn more about how you think about navigating the decision space. Of course, there's significant strategic value to "owning one's own destiny", but it also seems to have required significant investment and attention from Dropbox engineering team for perhaps a few years.

Any general advice regarding how big your use-case needs to be before this kind of engineering is worthwhile? How do you analyze the situation to identify when that's the case -- how do you identify the inflection point with confidence? Was it your prototyping that helped you determine that you could execute on this approach?
Just to clarify, I am NOT suggesting companies should be hacking back :) I'm just pointing out a trend, which could continue to evolve.
Right, so no evidence that Snowden's leaks hurt American ops. Sure, we can infer that the terrorists (or whoever) may have tweaked their opsec in response, but it's not like that will drive them to do anything that wasn't simply an opsec best practice all along. If the NSA was simply relying on people being sloppy (not using encryption, etc.) and that changed, well... that was inevitable over time anyway.

As for backdoors in routers, etc... again, it was always just a matter of time until that stuff got caught. And it's not like people haven't always suspected that they were doing that stuff.

And even if some small percentage of what Snowden leaked did harm US operations somehow... I'd argue that it was justified in light of the big picture, in regards to the illegal stuff. Finding out about mass surveillance of US citizens, etc., justifies any collateral damage the spook complex may have suffered, as far as I'm concerned.
Not sure it's just me or if I have misread this, but the article says the university claimed it has classes before DHS announced it was fake and provides no classes at all. Quote: "...and Twitter messages about classes canceled because of bad weather".
In that sense, even though it is doubtable on whether this sting operation is an entrapment for students in a legal term, it is an "entrapment" for the students in the fact. Presumably, We can see that before government shut down the university, students were only been told "you don't HAVE TO go to class" for some period of time when they were in CPT (or internship), but NOT been told the university NEVER had and won't going to have any classes. Being in the lie that the university may hold class somewhere, or in the future, and it was relatively new and totally legitimate, students could buy it and participate into this later known "scheme".
Push for $15 Raises Pay–and Tensions
I'm sure there's financial sense behind it too. Americans aren't just cowboys firing off their "freedom" guns at every major decision we come to.
While I find UBI to be a fascinating idea worthy of consideration, I vehemently disagree with running this experiment in East Africa. The proposal seems to either be blind-to or minimizing the potential for unintended consequences. Decades of trying to alleviate poverty in Africa have taught us, more than anything else, that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Giving food tends to act as “dumping” and weaken the agricultural industry. Providing foreign aid tends to empower corrupt governments. These consequences only became clear after years of hindsight. Who knows what unintended side effects of UBI will be?

If we are going to try UBI, a fundamentally Western idea, it’s only right that it should be tried in the West. I’m not saying it won’t work - just that we don’t really know what will happen. East Africa has suffered enough from our neo-colonial experiments.
Yes, lawyers are still needed. For the sake of brevity, I didn't call the title "Hackers are the new lawyers, but lawyers are still useful." :)
Oh, yes I did misunderstand that! I thought the "batterypack" part was referring to the Powerpack product. Thanks for the clarification.
Also there was a writer for Phrack from a long time ago I used to be friends with IRL, does anyone know who I could contact to help find him?

Nice try, FBI!
> His rule is he never fires anyone.

Just out of curiosity: what about reasons unrelated to absenteeism, like some sort of gross misconduct, drug or alcohol abuse on the job, untenable behavioural or psychiatric issues stemming from that, etc?
In pursuit of a mathematically derived Scheme, you might be interested in John Shutt's Kernel [0], based on his formal theory of F-exprs called the Vau Calculus [1].

[0] http://axisofeval.blogspot.com/2011/09/kernel-underground.ht...

[1] http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4093
I was not clear: I wanted to say that this is how I think the "reasoning" goes. Obviously, almost everyone has got something to lose.
This is why VR will never be popular
The AirBnB founders also maxed out multiple credit cards.

https://medium.com/cs183c-blitzscaling-class-collection/scal...

"Joe and I both had ~$30K in credit card debt and this is what we were using to fund the company."
Person of Interest has returned
> The article completely misses the fact that lithium is not the most important metal in a lithium-ion battery. More pounds of cobalt are required

Yes, but then you should also say something about the relative availability of lithium and cobalt.
Work on your business from 7pm to 3am every night? Let's say you work 9am to 6pm. Let's assume you have to get up at 8am, that gives you, very optimistically, 5 hours of sleep. Some people can survive on that. Even more people think they can survive on that and just end up becoming crazy people who nobody wants to be around. The vast majority of are simply not physically equipped to do that.
"No drone strikes would be worse"

Well, that's the assumption isn't it. Can anyone validate that assumption?
Would you mind explaining what he meant when he said "[...] there is now no denying that lawyers can no longer be permitted to regulate one another." I don't know anything about the law so I don't understand how lawyers are regulating themselves.
Biggest Loser contestants regain weight lost
I came here to say just that. Aid is good, but it should be either (1) very temporary acute relief goods (food, water, shelters, sanitation, clothing) (2) very high technology services, such as MSF (Doctors without Borders) provides, or (3) capital assets for the population at large, in the form of business microloans and direct cash grants.

In brief, unless the nation is in crisis, send fishing poles, not fish.
Okay, I am probably wasting my time, but "eating a variety of foods, including leafy vegetables," is essentially unrelated to anything I said.

Instead, I mean, for example: "Gosh, I have symptoms of being low on selenium." Googles high selenium foods and finds that brazil nuts are, hands down, a gazillion times better as a source of selenium than the next closest thing. Buys mixed nuts containing brazil nuts, because a single brazil nut has more than you need for the entire day (and, plus, I couldn't find brazil nuts by themselves).

I don't eat a highly varied diet. I don't even eat all that many fruits and veggies. Most days, I have pizza for lunch (from Little Caesar's or Domino's) with some kind of potatoes on the side. But I do eat the things that I have determined over the past 15 years that my body needs regularly to be able to not be completely broken.

I do blog about this, which no doubt does not interest you, in spite of your lament that everything science currently knows does not work and everything you currently know does not work.

Best.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rugged_individualism

Which works fine until you realize you don't operate in a vacuum, and your destiny is influenced by forces outside of your control.
Hah. Yes, from my overview, that pretty much seems like what's going on. Oh well, as long as they upgrade their laughably antiquated systems, all's well, even if they have to justify with buzzwords and tech hype.
Of course they're impossible to find. What incentive is there for anyone in Silicon Valley to come forward with their support? It would be career suicide given the obvious statements from Sam Altman, Chris Sacca, and many others in the article.
It's actually possible to run a startup entirely on 5$ droplet. I would suggest switching to Vultr (still 5$ but 0.75 GB and block storage and they accept bitcoin)

It's motivating to get that first paying clients quickly to pay for server. (ramen profitable)
cool. I thought I had read in an issue of Popular Science or Discover magazine that one blade was theoretically the best but I don't know enough about it to say for sure.
If you're restricting permission like this, why bother with a blockchain at all? Why not just use a conventional database?
Legality aside, those ongoing operation are Un-American and many reasonable people, perhaps a majority, in this democracy of ours never had chance to vote or have any say in their creation.

Then taking into account legality, many consider them a violation of the 4th amendment. And again such a policy was instituted without ever a public discussion in relation to the constitution.

Someone revealing such policy to the Democracy it was forced on can never be a traitor.
My father has been homeless at times. I'm not sure why anyone would CHOOSE that path. Having a home, even if that means a bed in a shared room, or a small sublet in an apartment, is pretty crucial to one's sense of well-being and safety.

It's hard for me to understand how someone can get productive work done when they don't have a comfortable, safe place to rest their mind for a few hours.
Pakistan Treating 2 Brothers Who Become Paralyzed Each Night
Don't you need to use the API gateway on top of lambda? The pricing there seems like it doesn't go low enough for a lot of uses (1 million requests for $3.50 is fine, but if I only have 10,000 requests a month I am paying 100x what I need to). Or am I interpreting the pricing wrong and that 1 million requests could take 2 years to happen? Amazon pricing is way too confusing.
Or maybe they are keeping quiet due to the atmosphere in the bay area
Experimental support for HTTP checks in ping.gg
>in comparison try doing the above with Mac OS X + Mac OS X Server - like pulling teeth

Because OS X Server is complete crap. As is ARD. Not even Apple uses OS X Server to manage their devices. I believe they use JAMF's Casper.
My only first hand experience is with Washington. When I was furloughed in 2008 it was relatively easy and pain free to receive benefits, at least by government standards. My room mate at the time was only able to find part time work in retail at the end of unemployment and was easily able to obtain supplemental food assistance from the state. I won't argue the rules and regulations are a complex mess. For example, I would think it would be easy and in the governments best interest to try and transition people from the unemployment program into school/university programs, but that is near impossible with the way the regulations are written.
I believe a team of one or two talented individuals can build something that scales well and that will save a HUGE amount of money once you get into any significant portion of a petabyte with your data. One or two months of S3's list price can easily pay for the cost of hardware. You can easily go with whitebox hardware from say supermicro, and colocation is SOOOO much less expensive. If your not storing a significant portion of a petabyte, its going to probably be cheaper development wise to just use S3. You also don't need to build something as complex as their system, they have to scale to exabytes. Unless you plan to hit that scale immediately or have that much data, you can build for something less complex and smaller to start.
"Hier niet poepen zegmaar."

I'd remove that to prevent confusion as it did with me ;)
We're going to go into detail on that (the OSD component) in a future blog post... but short version, yep, it's a custom "filesystem" directly done on the block device.
The problem with DynamoDB is it has minimum provisioned throughput requirements that would make this rather expensive for a blog that was not free-tier eligible even if it got no traffic at all.

In contrast, SimpleDB seems to only charge for actual throughput used.
Relevant: https://xkcd.com/1367/
When you have no need to solve the Byzantine general problem, why get involved with the Blockchain and all its overhead and slow throughput? Why not just use a versioning database?
I don't understand your responses here: this is a western charity putting in 10 million USD and soliciting (and not exclusively soliciting in the target country, which hasn't even been identified) another 20 million USD for the effort. Where do you get the idea that the donations would "likely be in local currency"?
Maybe you should read more about these panama papers before saying he is walking a thin line.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but in this scale model, I think the part of the building marked with a black rectangle (upper left) is what is currently being built.

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-inside-tesla-gigafac...
>Mythbusters tremendously advanced the cause of science, and they did it in no small part by not taking themselves too seriously.

Personally I think that's a bit of a stretch, but I'm not trying to say the show isn't great. While scientists could learn from their format (providing videos of their experiments, for instance) I wouldn't say that the mythbusters have advanced the cause of science at all. Would you say that the TV show Bill Nye the science guy advanced the cause of science? Science education he has definitely advanced the cause of, but science: not from the TV show. Similarly, I think the mythbusters have advanced engineering education tremendously, specifically television engineering education.

If you think they have actually advanced the cause of science, I would love to hear why. I'm not trying to be a jerk, I'm just speaking from having watched a few episodes, so I definitely could be wrong.
Thanks for this, I enjoyed the Readme and I'm working in something similar for myself, so having your code available will probably help me a lot.
What hostility? Come on, you have to admit that a procedure which expands the problem out to the sum of 5 numbers is pretty insane.

BTW, my shortcut got mangled by Hacker News. Multiplication turned into italics. I did 17 times 3, which is great, but I don't think that anybody should be expected to see that path to a solution.
While I'm glad to see this, it appears this article is from February. I guess this hasn't gotten much press?
If I understand correctly, non-Server editions of Windows have an artificial limit of 20 simultaneous incoming network connections. But I'm not sure if it's just an EULA thing, or it's only enforced in specific services (e.g. file/printer sharing, IIS), or if it's implemented at the network layer. If it's the latter, that would surely disqualify it from "server OS" status.
You still didn't answer the question. If English isn't your first language, then it would explain why what I wrote isn't coherent to you.

You're making the same fallacious assumptions about miners that people do about individuals in tragedy of the commons. You think that the individual cares more about the system rather than their own rational goals, but they don't.

The same resource economics that apply to international fishing also apply to bitcoin - both the fisherman and the miners care more about personal gains than they do about the system as a whole. They don't restrain their profit because you project your idealism onto them.

And it doesn't matter who promises what - there needs to be a consensus for the change to happen, and that's why bitcoin is flawed. The previous four forks to fix this block size failed, four times, which is evidence to back this up.

You can keep spinning the flaw as a speed hole though, it's pretty entertaining :)
Thanks for sharing your point of view and I appreciate you doing so in a respectful manner and taking my own feelings on the subject into account.

I'm still not sure what the best solution to this problem would be. While I certainly believe that everyone, including and perhaps especially Americans, should be more cognizant of how our actions are viewed by others, I don't in general like the idea of constantly being fearful that some action, no matter how innocuous you may think it is, will cause offense to someone else and thus needs to be avoided. I think it's fair to assume that some of the things you or I may do or believe will be offensive or alienating to someone somewhere. I hope you can find my attempt at understanding your point of view sincere and that I don't mean to be dismissive of your concerns.

I also don't know what could be done to address the issue internally without upsetting many people here. Even I would find a banning of the chants to be heavy handed on the part of management.

As I said previously, perhaps the best course of action would be to simply stop broadcasting from within the Hawthorne facility. The launch and recovery feeds are far more interesting than the employee celebrations anyway.
We shall see at voting time.
Unfortunately lawyers still depend on the law as their weapon. And laws tend to respect borders whereas cyber weapons do not. The ability for a lawyer to defend against a cyber attack is incredibly limited.

I think the article addresses this in both suggesting these attacks are more common in China (where lawyers from other countries tend to be notoriously ineffective) and in the hypothetical scenario that corporations grow in power to be above the law.
Yes, only programmers know the importance of caffeine.
If course global name-spacing has something to do with it!

What's the difference between a "username" resulting in nike/package-name and a package called nike-package-name?

Not much in practice. Name-spacing doesn't mean "add another made up name entry somewhere".

That's why people who thought about these issues out-sourced this concern completely: Prove your ownership of nike.com and you can publish as nike.com.

Suddenly 99.9% of the trademark issues are gone, handled by registrars.

I think this approach is pretty obvious and I find the lack of thought coming from rust devs deeply concerning.
We use Lambda for our contact form; it's great. Our website is completely hosted on s3/cloudfront so it's much cheaper and stable than running a dedicated machine.

If I get some time this weekend, I'll clean it and push it up to github.

[EDIT]
Here it is. This has been working for us for almost a year. If there is interest, I can clean it up.

https://github.com/cowholio4/lambda-contact-form
(We actually only rebuilt two components in Rust--most of Magic Pocket is still go.)

Memory usage/control, easy FFI with C, safety/correctness of code. Those were the big advantages for our projects.

Edit: deterministic destruction of resources is pretty great too. Yay RAII.

Edit 2: So is the ability to use the "standard" C tool suite for performance, memory, debugging, etc. valgrind, jemalloc profiling, gdb/lldb, perf. All that stuff.
I am on the street for health reasons, not to start a business (and getting pretty grumpy about it), but if you find it that hard cope, you might want to check out my blog: http://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/

People do realize I am homeless if they see me often enough, but they don't realize it upon meeting me the first time. I am less open about it than I used to be, because fuck prejudice and what judgey, uncampassionate, unhelpful assholes the vast majority of people are.

Best of luck.
For 3 Months, i did not log on to my Hotmail account and they deleted all my emails & contacts and locked my account.

Gmail was savior in those time. I had perfect email id on Hotmail but even that couldn't stop me from switching to Gmail.
If you were releasing your tool to the reviewer free of charge, absolutely.
This seems to be an argument against operating any charities at all in East Africa. That must be controversial?
Did you want to be homeless? There are SO many people that do not have the opportunity or education or resources you do. And yet you choose their poverty. Why?
Well, but SpaceX hasn't. They have not reused any rockets. They've landed a few rockets, they've test-fired one of the landed rockets. But that's far from a track record of reliably recovering their rockets, turning them around and sending them back up that could drive the massive cost benefits that they hope for.

I'm not really playing skeptic here -- SpaceX's progress has been incredible, and I'm inclined to believe them that they can do it -- but it hasn't happened yet.
No apology necessary but I appreciate the sentiment nonetheless.
> First it was...I don't recall, what was the product they bought?

It was called "Live Mesh", and it was good until they started "improving" it.
Yeah, that is true. Mainly because the deletion of its supercharger for production, but also relevant to the topic here, pilots didn't love having that drive shaft between their feet.

Still a functional design though, with certain advantages.