skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
(Author here)

I agree with a lot of your points, especially the fact that TCO is practically impossible to calculate, is highly subjective, and should ideally include opportunity costs which, almost by definition vary from person to person.

I've definitely thought through some of your points. First I want to say that if your load is spiky you have no business buying hardware. No matter how you slice it, you're simply not going to be able to get hundreds of GPUs of throughput with an 8 GPU machine so it's not possible to get the same "product". So for those doing short bursts of hyperparameter search, stick with cloud.

But, like you said, for those with high utilization and known utilization patterns, it makes a lot of sense to go on-prem. Let's just say pretty much anybody who is buying a reserved instance from AWS should consider buying hardware instead.

>- Cost associated with finding an admin who understands how this thing works

Pricing based on what co location facilities will provide you without much search and is pretty generous. $10k per year per server is silly high and should cover that search cost.

> - Try before you buy

You can try essentially this exact machine on AWS. That instance and hardware are almost exactly the same. Now of course this doesn't apply to many instance types.

> - Time it takes for the box to be built, shipped and sent to the data center

5 business days is our mean lead time for that unit. Most workstations are 2 days.

> - Time (and cost) it takes to install software, drivers, etc

It comes with that stuff pre-installed as mentioned in the article. See Lambda Stack for driver / framework / CUDA woes: https://lambdalabs.com/lambda-stack-deep-learning-software

> - 3-year? What is the useful life of this? When does it seemingly become obsolete?

I'll admit it's a long time but 3 years is about right for GPUs from my experience. I personally purchased new GPUs for my workstations in 2012 (Fermi), 2015 (Maxwell), 2017 (Pascal).

> - AWS will continually upgrade their hardware and you keep paying the same

Yes, but only if you never commit to a reserved instance, in which case costs are 3x higher. If you buy a reserved instance you don't get upgraded hardware.

> - Spending $90k instead of $184k in year 1 with the option to turn it off if you want (no longer need). This could be very valuable for a startup who wants elastic spending patterns.

Yea, most of these are people who are already using GPUs really often for internal training infra and are finding it expensive.

> - Returns, breakage, warranty in case of a hardware failure

Our hardware comes with a 3 year parts warranty. Of course, this doesn't pay for your time lost but it's pretty rare to see parts fail and the $10k / year more than covers in-colo swap outs.

I agree with all of your points. I don't think that we really disagree with much here. TCO is hard to calculate :).
Facebook Joins Amazon and Google in AI Chip Race
Python 1 is 28 years old??
The big news is the 32gb RAM in the 13” mbp. Amazing that a small form factor is starting to be treated like a real computing device by Apple.
tldr; guy did "comparative indigeneity" studies bullshit, went on an anti-zionist tweetstorm, got a job offer revoked, and litigated it. Now he's sitting on the driver's seat of a schoolbus, but also on $800,000 from a legal settlement. Just a simple man earning an honest paycheck.
1)How long does it take to get a Lambda Hyperplane operational, from the point I place an order?

A p3dn.24xlarge is a few minutes.

My experience in deploying new hardware-based solutions is that it typically takes between 6 and 12 weeks.

2)How does the TCO compare when I only need to train for 2 hours a day?

3)If I was previously training on AWS p2.16xl, I could upgrade to p3.16xl with basically 0 incremental cost (for the same workload). Does LambdaLabs offer free (0 capex) upgrades? If so, how long would it take to upgrade?
I should probably change the first sentence in the article to this.
I doubt that's why people upgrade. If you made the sensor replaceable, people would still be using digital cameras from 1996 except with the latest sensor.

I have several replaceable-sensor cameras and the bodies/lenses were made before I was born. They still take great pictures because it turns out that focusing light onto stuff is largely a solved problem. (They don't even use batteries, much less need an up-to-date OS! But I will admit that carrying a separate light meter is a little annoying.)

Yes, there will always be people that need a 1 billion point autofocus system, and that will require some heavy software engineering. That is a niche use case, even more niche than needing a digital camera to begin with.
Was the audio unmuted last time the headphones were unplugged? I don't have any apple hardware but this is a common feature of Android. Your laptop might remember the state "speakers are on but headphones are muted". So when you remove headphones, it switches to the speakers and starts playing.
EC2 has per-second billing:
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-per-second-billing-for-...
Do Neural Nets Dream of Electric Hobbits?
What I love about Calibre is I can manage all my books there and open the network library from FBReader on my phone where I do all my reading.
Why do you say “imaginary points”? Do you consider your bank account balance to be “imaginary points”?
Who knew

When the government excludes an American Multi national Global company from selling a product in a country

Locally produced and made goods increase in sale

NO FARKING SHIT

btw the sky is blue
Is Netflix Making a Documentary About Altcoins
Uranium decays to radium which decays to radon, a gas. The real danger to uranium ore is inhaling radon. Also, the staff should be much more concerned than any tourist. The tourist angle seems sensationalistic, and a lost opportunity for informing the public about the dangers of radon.

unitednuclear.com sells uranium ore in addition to more exciting radioactive elements, and they have (had?) a page somewhere describing the need for good ventilation anywhere you store more than a small sample of ore.

EDIT: Maybe I was thinking of the product page for their radon gas detector, http://unitednuclear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&pr...

We purchased one of these detectors for ourselves and put in
in the room where we stored our Uranium ore samples. The
device indicated over 100 pCi/L ! For reference, the average
indoor reading is 2pCi/L... at a reading of 100 pCi/L,
immediate evacuation is called for.

...

Since we do sell Uranium ore samples, it's important that we
stress a point. Collecting and storing a few Uranium ore
samples is not going to create dangerous levels of Radon gas
in your home. However, if you are and avid collector, and
you have several pounds of Uranium ore in your home, you'd
should consider buying one.
Promoting Employer Branding Through Technology
Volume value is stored separately for each audio interface, and I don’t think they’ve added a special case to zero all interfaces of one is zeroed.

Also begs the question of the reverse. If I muted my headphones and then slightly raised the volume, did I intend for my speakers to start very softly when I do go back to them?
To be fair, a MacBook pro is the highest end premium product in this space being used with official software for a well-defined industry use case.

That's hardly the same thing as a bunch of developers installing an aftermarket OS on a midrange laptop. And even then, "you have to install a BIOS update" is just shorthand for Lenovo fixed the problem, right?
I don't know how that problems is going away. Javascript doesn't have a great standard library and it's hard to impose restrictions on which packages/features/functionalities should be the "defacto" ones.
I've always thought it would be cool to have a language where functions were tagged as distributive, associative, symmetric/commutative, and monotonic and the optimizer (and editor!) used these properties to determine optimizations or simplifications. Note that this would be for all expressions, not just arithmetical ones.

I vaguely recall hearing about some fancy C++ template based techniques for accomplishing this, actually, but haven't looked into it.
Scientists Use Crispr to Make Stem Cells Invisible to Immune System
This is somewhat relevant if you are interested in underactuated robots in production. One of our customers, Tokyo Kitty [1], a nightclub in Cincinnati uses two underactuated robots to deliver drinks to private rooms without spilling. We use convex optimization (chapter 10) to not spill, the bartenders and patrons love it [2].

[1] https://www.facebook.com/thattokyobar/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_PeLAlVpzQ
A good, basic ebook reader for Windows is FBReader. The Windows version hasn't been updated in years (development seems to have shifted mostly to Android) but it still works just fine.
Here is the missing context from press release:

```
"In precision medicine, it's important to find groups of patients that have genomically similar profiles so you can develop drug therapies that are targeted to the specific genome for their disease," Allen said. "People have applied machine learning to genomic data from clinical cohorts to find groups, or clusters, of patients with similar genomic profiles.

"But there are cases where discoveries aren't reproducible; the clusters discovered in one study are completely different than the clusters found in another," she said. "Why? Because most machine-learning techniques today always say, 'I found a group.' Sometimes, it would be far more useful if they said, 'I think some of these are really grouped together, but I'm uncertain about these others.'"

Allen will discuss uncertainty and reproducibility of ML techniques for data-driven discoveries at a 10 a.m. press briefing today, and she will discuss case studies and research aimed at addressing uncertainty and reproducibility in the 3:30 p.m. general session, "Machine Learning and Statistics: Applications in Genomics and Computer Vision." Both sessions are at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel.
```
https://eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-02/ru-cwt021119.php

& the context of the AAAS session
https://aaas.confex.com/aaas/2019/meetingapp.cgi/Session/215...
FBReader was my go-to eReader app for a long time, but in the last few years (since they went closed source) they haven't added any useful (-to-me) features, but have added several advertisements (in the form of popups and in the menu). Still looking for an alternative
2015s were the last good MBPs. I pray daily that mine will last forever.
Heck, I'd take that job!

...seriously, any chance that's a real thing? Sounds better than what I do now.
Immigration and Labor Bans in Dubai and the UAE – STA Law Firm
Setting aside the giant environmental debate, does anyone here actually have an opinion of this new cryptocurrency?

e.g. Do you think the advancements are novel, or just a mashup of ideas already tried in other blockchains?

Do any other cryptos do the "breadcrumb" shortcut?
Title appears to be clickbait. The article contains no mathematical statements: it just shows a cat classifier failing when being used on data that is presumably different from its training data.
I have not tried that, though I will experiment. It seems to be an issue with the latest OSX version (Mojave), as I cannot recall it happening on the last OSX major version (High Sierra?). I do not have new headphones across this version switch.

As a workaround, I have to go to the audio app and explicitly pause, which I frequently forget to do if the audio is muted. My desk mates have heard way more samples of my library than they'd like, I'm sure.
For many yogurt would be a bad thing to digest. For others it works perfectly. Depends on what bacteria you have/need. Too complex for a one liner.
Unless someone can prove they have the private key to the genesis block, then we should doubt their claim to be Satoshi.
Building or repairing furniture. And I certainly suffer if I don't make time for it.
The price includes $15k/year colocation costs. That easily covers the redundant power, cooling, rack space, massive amount of bandwidth and redundant network network connections. Last place I handled colocated servers, we spent ~$17k combined for racks in two different data centres hosting a combined ~60 servers, so $15k/year for a single server is a very conservative estimate.

If you're buying more than one, that'll easily cover enough to cable up whatever network you want between them.

Many colo providers also have their own cloud services, and nothing stops you from using S3, SQS and the like, though of course if you use AWS services "from the outside" you do need to factor in their extortionate outbound bandwidth charges.
They can depending on the class. Fluoroquinolones yes. Penicillins not likely.
I never said I used GWT.
Yeah, we created and maintain it!
I think it’s a joke title but genuinely cannot tell.
Wow, another two minute hate. Thanks, HN. Doubleplus helpful.
I see this with other stereo systems. It remembers the volume for each input used. If you were playing out of your speakers and you had the volume set low, it remembers. If it was playing through headphones with the volume high, it remembers. It also remembers if you had it muted or not. It can be frustrating if you don't know what's going on, but if you do its a really nice feature.
Found a working PDF link also here: http://everyspec.com/NASA/NASA-JPL/JPL-D-60411_VER-1_32832/
I'm sure Hadoop is older than 7 years.
Lambda Labs engineer here. Here's what we're trying to argue:

Many benefits of running infrastructure in the cloud are lost for offline batch processing jobs. Training machine learning models doesn't require low response times, high availability, geographic proximity to clients, etc. Yet, with cloud, you're paying for all this extra infrastructure.

The main benefits of cloud for tasks with machine learning type workloads are cost saving (if utilization is low) and no electrical set-up.

On the other hand, cloud is extremely expensive for groups that require high base levels of GPU compute. The article is arguing that such groups can save a huge amount of money by moving infrastructure on-prem.
Actually, cryptocurrency mining serves an environmentally-friendly function in energy markets because it absorbs excess capacity in the geographic regions where mining is done (i.e. where electricity is cheap) and allows it to be “exported” rather than go to waste. Interesting stuff.
> costs were pretty stable by number of servers, and so favored using fewer, more powerful servers

Didn't this make each failure a bigger hit to your overall capacity? How much redundancy did you have? I used to work in adtech with colocated hardware, and it was old and failed a lot, but they had enough it didn't matter ("we're down 5/120 in Germany but we can swap them out while we're there next month").
You're not alone, I seriously regret my six month old maxed-out touchbarless MBPro and really wish I'd managed to hold on a couple more months for the Retina Air. Its keyboard hasn't started sticking on me but its battery life is trash, half the time it dies after like an hour and a half while thinking it's at 20% battery so it doesn't even hibernate to disc like it should.

Last week I started migrating back to the five-year-old Air. Would've done it if not for the fact that my home directory is larger than the free space on it, I should try reinstalling the Air from scratch and see if that clears up enough space. Or just look into getting a new SSD for it.
For Windows people, Edge also works as a great epub reader.
Is a great developer worth 10 marketers?
I was going to mention DAL213, small world (small Internet?). It's a great stream.

The crazy part is that simulator is in an apartment, not a house. They had to bring it up with a crane.
>Not sure why this getting downvoted.

Because it not since 2017, but since the 2016 MBP. The 2015s aren't perfect, but they were really good. When we had wished the next iteration would itch closer to perfection, they made a bloody mess of it.
available for windows?
My example implies that some cars will be broken into for items that are in it while other cars will be taken by the assailant, the $30,000 example is for visual purposes. Do you expect all cars that are left open or broken into, to be just for a 'car stereo'? Do you expect all assailants to go to court and incurring the judicial cost I listed?

"As an example, while a simple automobile case may resolve quickly after case initiation and incur less than $10,000 in fees, the total costs of such a case can also exceed $100,000 per side if the case goes to trial." - IAALS.Du.EDU
I know, the quintessence of this article isn't about "quitting your job and do sth. totally different", but...

From time to time, I feel like that. Just leave software dev behind, and become a truck driver.
Yes, sort of. You can find people with small-ish number of servers that will pay stupid money to have someone on-call when you count on a per server basis. In practice it's a nice side-gig, but you'll tend to need several of them, as people do understand they're paying a premium to have you accessible, and do expect to pay (substantially) less per server if they have more of them.

In practice this will tend to include out of ours availability and/or devops type work, not just low level sysadmin stuff or physical maintenance, as a lot of that can be farmed out to "remote hands" at the colo providers on hourly rates with 24/7 availability and will certainly cost a tiny fraction of that $10k/year.
I remember learning on 1.52? around the turn of the century.
Is that really the case?

So far all companies I worked for had a wave-like pattern for customer generated workloads, simply because of the locality of the customers. It doesn't even matter if it's a globally used product, as some markets are usually stronger than others (e.g. US vs. Asia). So you have some base load, which is relatively stable, but on top of that daily or even more frequent "spikes".

For non-customer-driven workloads you even might want to have spikes. Take big data pipelines for example. While you could schedule them so that they're not spiky, you might benefit from running them as fast a possible to get your results earlier. That's something you probably wouldn't do with dedicated servers, simply because it'd be too expensive. Instead with dedicated servers you'd optimize for utilization instead of speed. When you only pay for what you use, you don't have that limitation and can fire up as many instances as it makes sense. That's actually a pretty nice benefit.

And don't forget changing workloads over the course of multiple months. The calculation looks completely different if you buy a dozen of servers now, but have your computing requirements change in a few months, so that you don't need them all anymore (reasons for such are manifold, but could be as simple as optimizations to your code).
This looks awesome! Thanks.
Tutorial: Anki Vector Detects Objects with Machine Learning
Are you claiming that crypto-mining is pricing out useful scientific research? If so, can you provide evidence for that claim? Keep in mind the geographic nature of electricity generation and transmission.
> Midrange laptop

I mean, a topped out x1 carbon is pretty much the non-macbook business laptop, so this is a bit unfair.
https://bitcoinist.com/bitcoin-mining-renewable-coinshares/
True, for most workloads 16 SSDs in a single enclosure will be far faster and more efficient, but will require offsite backups.

If you need redundant blob storage, pretty much every colo providers has solutions, and most of them are going to be cheaper than S3. Worst case you can use S3, and then need to factor in the bandwidth cost difference.
I don't understand the question
It isn't illegal, but I wouldn't want to work with someone who has poor social skills. Programming within a team and business is a highly social activity. I would much rather work with someone who can read a room than one who is smart at programming but is completely dense socially or can't communicate well at all.
This reminds me of that Elon Musk meme where you buy glasses by searching "x".the glasses are free but the transportation is like twice the price to male em
Humans don't use Apple. Monkeys will defend it anyway. So why care?
https://outline.com/advb7U
Tell me how anything you just said shows how it could be easier to smuggle physical currency out of the country than digital currency, which was the point that I was refuting.
That's a legitimate complaint. I just paid the money to go premium to remove ads. I've been using it to read books since my Nokia 770 and it has everything I need from an ebook reader so I'm reluctant to change.

There's a fork of FBReader on F-Droid called simply 'Book Reader' which is being actively developed (last release 2019-02-08.) Might be worth trying out.

Git repo is here: https://gitlab.com/axet/android-book-reader
I'm about as anti-Apple as it gets and I agree. You don't need words like "alarming" in an article about audio bugs.
That was an evolutionary dead end that didn’t persist; since every other browser that followed focused on retrieval and display, not editing, they didn’t need to distinguish between “follow this link” and “open this link for editing.” (To be fair, given the lessons of SGML, there wasn’t any reason to think folks would just open up vi or emacs and start editing markup, so they get a pass on the UX for that one.)
Most of the radioactivity from uranium ore comes from radium impurities, and radium decays to radon, a gas. So, yes, it's entirely plausible for there to have been in an inhalation hazard. Though if anyone should be concerned it's the staff, not the tourists.
I find myself much easier to be a principled individual with $800K in the bank account than without. Give the man a break.
Technically, nothing works for Linux on the X1C out of the box, because the X1C ships with Windows. Or "no OS" if you're a corporate buyer.

I love that several distributions of Linux are basically turnkey solutions for most systems (I run Ubuntu on both of my Thinkpads!), but it's not quite fair to compare Lenovo hardware running a 3rd party OS with Apple's vaunted "it just works" hardware/software combination.
I thought soda was just a universal evil, and scourge of obesity?

I thought unethically sponsored sugar science and metabolic cardiac lipid fear mongering were to blame for the big diabetes cover up, no?

So, is this just more evil carbonated soft drink and beverage dogma as journalism rearing its ugly head?

Are we to accept the idea that people want soda anyway, as the key take away from this article? Maybe we’re being led astray?

Shouldn’t it be that people ought to know better? Even though the big companies are gone, shouldn’t people still cease the consumption of unhealthy foods?

Why applaud this? If we recognize that it’s still happening, should it not be eradicated?
I found the name Niklas Gray from one of their previous HN submissions[0]. Googling the name turned up a Github account[1] and a blog[2], but nothing hinting at what they do, except that it's game related.

[0] https://ourmachinery.com/post/physical-design

[1] https://github.com/niklasfrykholm

[2] https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/author/NiklasGray/1016727/
Ask HN: What are some great personal blogs/portfolios?[1]
This was a question about content, but I would imagine that most answers are also valid to your question.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19114037
Good riddance.

Guidelines refresher:

“You agree that you will not under any circumstances upload, post, host, or transmit any content that:

is unlawful or promotes unlawful activities;
is or contains sexually obscene content;
is libelous, defamatory, or fraudulent;
is discriminatory or abusive toward any individual or group;
...”
Deep Learning in Python (Free Course)