skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How to call straightforward devs?
As I think about the subset of software developers who are building small to medium-scale web products, care about users but not as much about engineering (or at least want it abstracted), I am trying to find an accurate, empowering, and fun designation for it. Any suggestions: straightforward devs, nonchalant devs, effective devs, lean devs…?
That's an interesting perspective, thanks. I'd be curious to see how AMD's Zen 2 next year will play though. They should have a big power/performance to price advantage over Intel unless they're forced to cut prices.
Remarkable bird the Norwegian blue.
I'm interested to pick your brain about the second fundamental bottleneck you/the article mentioned. I'm not sure that I agree that serverless functions are fundamentally non-addressable. Today they're not addressable, but why can't they be in some future evolution of serverless? Sure serverless functions are ephemeral, but during their brief lifetime, is there something fundamental keeping them from being addressable?
If a marketing term means exactly the opposite of what you think it means (that's some hefty server they've got there), then you probably should look elsewhere anyway. Unless you enjoy dealing with a community and support team that speaks an inverted lingo, of course.
I'm not sure if i understand their view on fundamental limitations - they don't seem fundamental to me:

1. It does not seem impossible to imagine a function that spawns code close to data, be it on a VM with a connected fast SSD drive already populated with data. Also, Lambda-at-edge and Cloudflare workers are already more like “shipping code to data.”, or " the customer" in this case.

2. Functions are load-balanced and potentially parallelisable to millions of invocations. The only missing piece is some kind of parallel-invoke call, to give each instance of a function a distinct piece of data to process, and an identifier to save the result under. The identifier could easily refer to a local disk location, in some future implementation.

Also, another point from the article: "FaaS discourages Open Source service innovation".
seems wrong to me, as it may be said only about current super-early implementations, reason being, they are new.

In the long-run, I'd expect serverless to help open source, because of a simplicity of deployment. We will likely have projects working on an abstraction layer of compute and storage, hiding the underlying cloud or multi-cloud implementation. (Kubernetes is one candidate, it just needs ideas in the like of Virtual Kubelet to become more serverless).
The time to 'delete facebook' has been here for several years. A more accurate title would be 'person finally notices the writing on the wall'.
> If there's pressure it comes from outside FB itself

When I was a kid, long before Facebook, my mom would frequently receive an anonymous chain letter in the mail.

The letter would have some dramatic emotional appeal, or it would claim to be raising money for a poor family in the church, or it would promise pyramid riches, or it might have some mystical mumbo jumbo warning about breaking the chain.

But in the end, the stories about heartbreak or helping people or mysterious calamities were complete horseshit. Their only purpose was to convince my mom to copy the letter and send it to 12 other people, thus expanding the base of the pyramid for the benefit of whoever started the chain letter.

Facebook is the modern chain letter.

Just like chain letters, Facebook has lots of horseshit stories about connecting people, with implied mysterious social consequences for not participating.

But underneath all that, the real purpose of Facebook is to amplify social pressure to get people to expand the base of the pyramid for Facebook's benefit.
Having to "recompile" it means that it's not unmodified, though. Unmodified would mean that it runs like Windows programs where the same binary files work now as did then.
The boards I suggested are well supported in Mainline linux (though there are a couple minor patches that haven't yet been merged).
It also reminds you at the most inappropriate times about people either via "people you might know" and other annoyances on whom you should be connected with. These unwanted reminders can certainly create unwanted distress.
Why is this comment getting downvoted? I found that Wikipedia article quite interesting.
Yes, to force means to leave no alternative or option, and in this sense Facebook is not forcing those connections, and it's unreasonable to say it is forcing them.
I was curious what would happen if you made a tactile interface for other pets (dogs, cats, turtles).
People whose behavior revolves around their insecurities in that way have ceased to learn and grow. If those people who are "B" players now continue being open to learning new ideas, they are eventually going to leapfrog those "A" players in skill.
>CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video

What
If you ever get to the southern Alps of Italy you'll find a lot more lost places barely accessible by foot, if at all. Also a lot of old mines, contraband trails and houses can be found in the area around Iselle close to the Swiss border. It's sometimes amazing what you see there, some of those abandoned areas will have 100+ houses (build by hand).

Just one stunning object among many:
http://www.amici-del-leader.it/Home/Montagna/Le%20escursioni... (Villa Lancia, Valle Olocchia)

Edit: Maybe also entertaining for some, old stone pits where the Italian left everything behind in the mountain, including cars https://alpi-ticinesi.ch/foto/gallerie_foto.php?id=190&foto=...
Pragmatic?
What forms of government? Dubai, Germany, UK, Hong Kong, and USA. So, no Eastern Bloc “communist” regimes. Not sure what that has to do with my statement?
> there is no network addressability of serverless functions

Didn't inetd (4.3BSD, June 1986) solve the problem?
Child abuse at the hands of parents creates (C)PTSD. But there is a huge incentive to, well, not tell parents they've done a bad job. And parents can be trusted too much and conceal things, or sabotage the process (if the psychiatrist gets suspicious, they stop being seen).
For me, it's hard to separate "Cloud provider selling a service" and "Cloud provider selling compute, and giving away the free service". On a scale of things that are ok to things that are not ok to open source companies: 1) end-user rents an ec2 server, installs redis themselves, 2) end-user rents an ec2 server, runs a redis AMI that a third party created, 3) same, except amazon created the AMI, 4) Amazon runs an ec2 instance on the user's behalf, puts a nice UI on top for "spin up a redis server", 5) Amazon runs an opaque multi-tenant redis system.

Where do you draw the line? Most steps are just Amazon streamlining letting the user run the service, except for the last one which decreases the cost for the end-user.
> Chinese leaders have been increasingly focused on scientific misconduct, following ongoing reports of researchers there using fraudulent data, falsifying CVs and faking peer reviews

It sounds like a step in the right direction. It feels less gross if you think of "social punishment" as a lighter version of "legal punishment". No need to send cheaters to jail, but don't let them off the hook either.

Assuming the system won't be abused for political (I'm sure it will), the detection is accurate (I'm sure it'll be hard), the social punishment is reasonable (we'll see), it sounds reasonable in theory.
To get married, and to get divorced.
I expect to see a great deal of FUD surrounding human genetic editing the future. One gets the sense, reading the commentary from the scientific community following He Jiankui's announcement, that the outrage and condemnation didn't come from any details of the edit, but instead from a certain disgust at the idea that anyone would attempt to edit human genomes at all.

While it's true that, in theory, unknown edits could cause novel gains of function, and while it's true in theory that there might be undetected off-target effects, these sorts of outcome are unlikely. Mutating one byte of /bin/ls will almost certainly not transform it into a C compiler. Criticism of He Jiankui's work plays up almost-impossible negative side effects while ignoring the beneficial applications of this technology; it emphasizes the remaining areas of genetic ignorance while ignoring the massive strides in understanding from the past decades; and it suggests that we'll never have sufficient understanding to apply these techniques routinely. That is, it's FUD.

Human genetic editing is likely one of the most profoundly beneficial technologies ever developed, and to see its use delayed saddens and disappoints me. If the mainstream scientific community will block the development of this technology, using public condemnation, binding "ethics" panels, and (as I predict will come soon) censorship of research, then the ethical thing to do is to bypass the mainstream scientific community, as He Jiankui did. This work is too important to delay on the account of obsolete, non-utilitarian, and ultimately irrational disgust.
Facebook will delete itself.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...

Facebook interest has been steadily trending down for years.
Under the everyday notion of forcing someone to do something, Facebook is not forcing people to friend others.

The definition I cited was for illustration. Since when does backing up you point with a definition mean you're being slavishly robotic?

Since you're trying to imply my usage of the term is narrow and unrealistic, what's the different notion of "forcing" someone to do something that would make it true that Facebook is forcing people to friend others that they otherwise wouldn't want to?
> Had he not been assassinated, he probably would have become President.

That is a stretch, I think. As bold and inspiring a legacy that MLK left after his death, just think about what he faced while he was still alive. His turn in his last years from fighting solely against racial injustice towards also advocating for victims of capitalism of whatever race proved to be polarizing for the American public and it may have threatened his chances for elected office. Plus, his sexual life, as we now know, was eavesdropped on by the FBI and it is not hard to imagine that being used in a smear campaign if he ran for office.
Thank you for posting this comment.

I think creators of social platforms need to be vastly more aware that just because you know someone or are related to them doesn't mean it's a positive. They need to stop assuming that making certain associations is all to the good. Such default assumptions tend to do the most harm to very vulnerable people who most need some kind of support for protecting themselves.
Many hours a day for a parrot seems surprising though. So is life go to work, go home, parrot time, sleep, every day?
There's somewhat of a breakdown between responsibility and criminal liability, and you've jumped from one to the other. The original comment was talking about responsibility, and in this sense, an organisation's internal practices, accepted behaviours etc. all share significantly in the responsibility. Often responsibility really is impersonal. On the other hand, the substance of your comment points to the fact that criminal law is served on an individual basis, and perhaps that's a good thing.

It is, however, ignorant at best if we stop discussion completely at the point where an individual is put in prison for something they did on behalf of the organisation, or due to organisation policy etc. since part of the justice system is deterrence, the organisation itself should be factored into that calculation.

Various mafias are also organisations, but that's a much easier case than this - shut down a mafia by taking the heads of the organisation. That works because it's not "just business". But in the case of MIT I have a strong feeling that if there is such a systemic issue as other commenters are hinting towards, it won't be so easy to be rid of it by putting the person in top position in prison. Such a person is the appearance, not the essence.
I would say that broadly categorizing FaaS as vendor lock-in would be disingenuous on its own. Practical FaaS is a simple concept as far as developer implementation is concerned. Write functions, get HTTP context, and return a result. This article really only touches on problems with vendor implementation of FaaS, AWS may have these issues with I/O and lifetime of a function, but there are many open source implementations that you could install on custom hardware that bypasses these issues. Even some of the issues that seem like fundamental issues with FaaS (non-addressable instances, unable to use specialized hardware) are already solved by other open source self-hosted FaaS solutions.
Yes, my take is that this is a positive. The three big things that are expensive enough to mess people up these days are medical care, housing, and education. And at least part of what's keeping housing expensive is restrictive zoning. So loosening zoning a bit is a good thing.
The answer lies in your context for programming. The bigger picture.

The invention of the microprocessor was a watershed moment in human history, more than that of fire, or even splitting the atom. Mechanical intelligence provides for a realistic Utopia. It's not guaranteed, but it's unarguably possible. "Let the robots do the work and we'll take their pay."

From this point of view, anything that restricts the free flow and use of software is regressive. (I'm not going to address the subtle point of whether "Free" or "Open" better foster free flow. On the ten-thousand-foot level that I'm dressing it just doesn't matter.)

Trying to make a living from charging for (copies of) software is foolish compared to bringing about a techno-utopia as quickly and directly as possible.

The important question is, how do we marshal our resources to achieve a peaceful, ecologically harmonious, high-tech, post-historical world as quickly and painlessly as possible?
I could argue a completely different case. The only "restriction" it is placing on you is that you may not restrict anyone else from exercising the same rights that you yourself were granted by the license, which I believe is the original spirit of the 4 freedoms and the GPL family of licenses.

The software is "effectively free," because for every user who simply uses it for personal use, research, or even many forms of commercial use, they have all of the same abilities that they would have with any other free software license.

The restriction only comes in when you make a derived work of the software and do not pay forward that derived work under equivalent licensing terms as the work on which it was based.

And this is where the real disagreement is. What exactly is a "derived work", and where do you draw the line in the sand?

If I'm essentially selling access to somebody else's software, I have little doubt that access software constitutes as a derived work. I think it's fair that a license like the SSPL asks me to release the code which provides access to the free software as free software itself.

Suggesting that "My freedoms are being restricted" because a licensing term prevents you from restricting the freedom of others is the same argument that "permissive" license proponents argue against strong copyleft licenses.

If I release something as SSPL, it isn't because I'm trying to "restrict your freedoms". It's that I'm trying to prevent you from restricting other's freedoms by selling them proprietary work based on it.
Yeah... that's the thing.

We're a windows shop 100%. So it's non trivial controlling other machines from a command line.

I miss it so much.
I find it kinda funny that serverless can't do GPUs while docker containers mounted with the nividia-docker runtime can do GPU capable tasks.

Are these serverless solutions really so different?
Ask HN: How can I learn how to write my own DB system?
The government handing out the punishments is itself untrustworthy, which is why every additional power they give themselves is a step in the wrong direction.

>dozens of government agencies will have the power to hand out penalties to those caught committing major scientific misconduct

The key insight here is that you are not being punished as a result of a long, careful process administered by judges and a jury of your peers (which has some problems but at least is designed to be careful and not political), but instead will be at the mercy of a few government agencies which must by their very construction be political.

In the US, there is a similar problem in a much smaller dose, where the government is likewise attempting to assign itself more power without introducing controls to let the citizens be the ones who ultimately decide what happens. One example would be the "secret courts" in the NSA problem. Although the US government is presently much nicer to its citizens than the Chinese government, the only reason this is true is because US citizens have more leverage on the US government than Chinese citizens do on theirs. This can change, and unsurprisingly the officials are trying to gain more authority.
Fusion has proliferation problems too. In some ways this is easier than using fusion for energy production. A Q = 0.1 DD burning reactor, for example, would be useless as a power producer, but would produce plenty of neutrons (at lower, less damaging energies) to make plutonium in a subcritical natural uranoium blanket. And it would not need to breed tritium.
Who Controls Bitcoin Core?
If you have a 1500+ sqft house, want an easy setup & excellent coverage, and want pro-level capabilities, try a Ubiquiti UniFi setup. Troy Hunt did this and is converted: https://www.troyhunt.com/ubiquiti-all-the-things-how-i-final...

If you've got less square footage (or don't need top speeds everywhere), want to spend less money, and want something really easy to set up, try Ubiquiti AmpliFi. Here's Troy's writeup on that: https://www.troyhunt.com/how-i-finally-fixed-my-parents-dodg...

Personally, I am amply served by a quad-core HP thin client ($70 on eBay) running pfSense (w/ Intel server NIC, $25 on eBay) and a Ubiquiti UniFi UAP-AC-LR ($75-90 used on eBay). My living space is 1500 sqft. Internet speed is 150Mb/s up and down, and I get that speed of WiFi nearly all over the house. Total cost was less than $200.
So it might be a wrong step in right direction - as the majority of regulations usually are.
Hiener Marxen’s page is dead, unfortunately, as I found out rather painfully when solving a competition problem related to busy beavers.
Good way to keep the bird from being bored. This doesn’t need a fix, it needs to be a feature (for animals to use to keep company).
thats horrible! It makes me don't want to go back to China for having a faculty job.
Going cold turkey is never easy. If you're having trouble withdrawing, consider what I did over the past few years:

1. Turn off notifications for the Facebook app on your phone; next

2. Turn off notifications for the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps on your phone; then

3. Delete the Facebook app from your phone; then

4. Delete the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps from your phone; and finally

5. Log out of Facebook on your desktop.

It took me 2 years to go through from step 1 to step 5. It has made me happier and more productive. I still have a Facebook account. But the friction of grabbing my laptop and logging in forces me to consider "is this what I want to do? Or am I thoughtlessly reaching for the crack pipe?"

(It's been months since I've cared to log into Facebook. Feels more like trudging through spam in an old e-mail inbox, now, than anything compelling.)
> Will this weaken the scientific community in China?

It most probraly will because as soon as the system starts working the definition of "misconduct" will probably include ideologically-incorrect research results and subjects, failures to comply to the Chinese job etiquette etc.

And the Chinese Government reaction on Dr. He's breakthrough is an example of how policy can stand against science.
It's not what anyone who wants that scientist to be punished automatically wants, no more than someone who wants a glass of water wants a tsunami.

Besides, the Chinese authorities already said what he did violates Chinese law, so what would introducing new laws achieve here, unless they're applied retroactively?

The last thing I heard was that he went missing, any updates on that?
The notation can yield very dense programs. Significant systems have been written that can be expressed on a screen or two of code (search Arthur Whitney APL for "the legends").

When we learn to read, we learn to "sight read" words. APL/J/K constructs can be "sight read" as well.
Absolutely. But I was just making the point that what they were describing wasn't a case of it forcing them to friend those people.
How can somebody scam you out of your Instagram name other than you giving / selling it to them?
Actually, most modern FaaS based on Amazon's is portable, it's the other rest of the stack that isn't very portable.
> I still find a lot of these rules utterly bizarre.

Like what?
I have some doubts regarding this --

1.) What if the topic on which someone wants to publish is still developing, and the researches in the meantime produces wrong results which can be a genuine case, then does the individual get penalized?

2.) Also if point 1 is allowed then one might always claim this as a backdoor escape for all wrong publications.

3.) What role does a reviewer have if there is a false publication, will the reviewer be also punished?

I am not suggesting this is a bad move, it is just a different view point which might actually work out for good, but unless all points have been addressed correctly, claiming that something might be a punishable offence is definitely a step in the wrong direction.
Good comments. Many people seem to believe that Facebook can behaviorally manipulate other people, but not them. They are wrong.
Yes, they usually have greater levels of isolation.
Interestingly, a paper not 10, but 9 years ago, not by the same authors, but by the same group (systems folks at Berkeley), was proclaiming the cloud as an idea whose time had finally come. No mourning there. https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2009/EECS-2009-...
> It feels less gross if you think of "social punishment" as a lighter version of "legal punishment".

The mental gymnastics people present for support on these policies is astounding to me.
without reading TFA i can tell you. because the software architecture is irrelevant to monetizing a product. a great architecture is also “easy” to monetize.

if you look past 0->1 then the better arch starts to pay off.
> they cannot differentiate based on security promises marketed to them by vendors

If $VENDOR has a reputation of being hacked, it might deter people from buying their products.