skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> But that doesn't mean there's zero net benefit. The benefit is a permissionless network that no one can control unless they produce more computation than the rest of the network. So, the benefit of each miner coming on is raising the attack threshold and increasing your confidence that it won't be attacked.

Hypothetical scenario: a hardfork of Bitcoin is developed that maintains all of these wonderful properties — impossible for any one party to control, bypasses financial choke points, impossible to censor — but requires orders of magnitude less energy. It utilizes a variety of clever mechanisms to achieve the same goals without using Proof of Work calculations to secure the network. This sort of thing is what the exactly what the MIT team in the article is attempting to accomplish, it's not an intractable problem.

Would you support switching over to the new fork? I would. It does all the things I like about Bitcoin without this big carbon footprint. No downside.

But do you know who will never support the fork? Bitcoin miners. They've invested millions in custom hardware to let them process proofs of work as quickly as possible. They have a massive economic incentive to continue to use PoW. Forever. Even if there exists a better way.

Maybe in this world the price of BTC would go down as people moved to alternatives. I'd like to think people would be ashamed to use an unnecessarily inefficient currency. But when I hear Bitcoin advocates dismiss environmental concerns as irrelevant or shift the blame onto government tax policy, it doesn't make me terribly optimistic.
Why not make the gif a graceful fallback instead of showing modern browsers both svg + low quality gif
This seems like a completely arbitrary and absolutely biased place to draw a line. Why Bitcoin and not luxury cars or Hello Kitty backpacks? How about we shut down Six Flags and Disneyland?

This sounds very much like you've decided that you don't like Bitcoin (and that's fine, with good reasons) but you have rationalized it with an argument that is almost certainly inconsistent with the rest of your worldview. Bitcoin isn't any more bullshit than countless other systems/goods, the argument based on environmental externalities is a very weird reason to draw such an absolutist line given all the other (arguably) bullshit systems that incur the same costs.
This is just the most extreme example. AWS is just really expensive.

If you want a VPS take a look at Digital Ocean or Linode.
I think "It's probably costs way too much." and "I'm going to get pestered by some annoying salesperson if I contact them, aren't I?" It's a very strong incentive to not consider the product.
Brilliant:

> Lisp has been out for 60 years
I thought "taxes are theft" was bad enough. Is the new galaxy-brain "inflation is theft"?
But Indian democracy is deeply flawed in implementation; the central government hogs most of the power while there is little left for state governments to make a difference, there is too little competition between the states. Moreover through the appointed Governors in states, the Centre influences things in the states as well, which isn't something democratic. In short, the federal structure is broken.

The upper house in parliament does not have equal representation for all states, unlike the US Senate. Moreover the central government can dismiss the state government on the flimsiest of grounds.

The buerocracy is deeply entrenched in policy making and execution, where it should be largely in the hands of the
peoples representatives.

The courts are temperamental and inconsistent in interpreting the constitution.

The constitution itself is a shaky document, which does not guarantee protections to the citizens with sufficient absoluteness. Many provisions were defined ambiguously.
It's not fair comparison unless we are comparing all in costs that include ops.
I am generally not critical of people posting benchmarks. Neither am I trying to rain down on your parade but seriously you do not use Apache Spark to process 3.8G or 15.6G of data. It is too trivial.
It appears that the function or meaning of these is not well-understood. Of course, both might have changed with time and place.

Nonetheless, it is a nice reminder that Medieval Europe (and Britain) was a much stranger and more complicated place than the what is usually imagined in popular entertainment.
> Go as deep as you can in the answering the question.

I'm not a fan of this because it wastes time. Its better to give an overview of the steps and then if more information is required the interviewer can ask for it. They can keep asking for more information until they are satisfied the person knows enough or the person can not answer anymore.
It's been established that it moves in the direction of acceleration, but an addendum I thought of is that the balloon's speed will at first keep getting faster as the gradient is built up as the air is squished to one side, then slow down as the air pressure reaches equilibrium again.
I made the same mistake! Truly suprised to go back and see that it said 'gas', would have sworn it said brakes.
I'm inexperienced in the hardware front, would that machine likely not break down under a large load for 3 years straight? Nothing is set aside for hardware failure etc.
it'd be great if more people would read this link... but, since that's not where we're at on this forum here's the synopsis:

"""

The Takeaways

* Contrary to what you’ve heard in the media, bitcoin mining is not an environmental disaster. In fact, it is one of the cleanest billion-dollar industries on the planet.

* The combined total bitcoin mining network draws less power than global gaming consoles running 4 hours per day.

* Bitcoin mining is mainly powered on renewable energy, at levels more than four times higher than the global average (>77.6% vs ~18.2%).

* Every year, enough hydro power is wasted in Yunnan and Sichuan alone to power the Bitcoin mining network many times over.

* Bitcoin miners are highly mobile and can therefore serve as cornerstone demand for low-cost stranded renewables.

* By increasing profitability and lowering reliance on subsidies, bitcoin mining can positively contribute to the development and scaling of renewable energy projects wherever conditions are the most favourable.

"""
They include ops cost for on-prem server
I understand that, but I think it's mostly a matter of opinion ("somewhat simpler"). It seems like the code comes out the same length either way, and they're both linear time algorithms.

I can't imagine any case where a user will care -- it's an internal detail. Whereas there are places where a user would notice if you used a CFG vs. a PEG.

A long time ago, people might have been concerned about the recursive calls of Pratt parsing, but it seems like a non-issue now.

I do think Pratt parsing is easier to understand, but that might be because I encountered it first.
You are seeing to the heart of my argument. Thank you for that. I agree on the 5-10% mark, and find it's true even in smaller orgs that have a mature enough product. Once the product solidifies, having a bunch of different dependencies dictate which direction you can go is not in the best interest of the company, and should be reevaluated accordingly.
Elizabeth Warren to Unveil Sweeping Plan for Universal Child Care
I think the expense is mostly because these are GPU instances, which are not yet commoditized. Unlike VMs, multi-tenancy on GPUs is just a little bit harder.
some coders that don't get too critical about their job

Couldn't be farther from the truth.

As someone who works there I've noticed this general trend of animosity towards Google, it seems to be fueled by the fact that people feel a sort of inferiority complex when they don't clear an interview or they feel they wouldn't be able to crack it if they ever gave it a shot, this leads to an overcompensation of attitude in the other direction, a sort of "sour grapes" narrative where there is an effort to downplay the prospects of working at Google or ridicule the people working there like you did just now.
Strikingly different than the kind of experience I would have imagined. Or liked.

Thanks, no. I've had plenty of guys-weekend-away experiences, I like them better when they are 'free range'.
Mirror

https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmQiAPBXLtDSDV4V2GbvMSAidE7bAaenstdb3TY...
Bookworm: A Simple, Focused eBook Reader
> PHP has been out for 23 years

Feeling old.
text user interface. A terminal interface that isn't restricted to a command line.
I thought ads on HN were discouraged?
Depends what the warranty is, I think three years is standard and you can pay for five or seven. (You pay commensurately, however.)
hug-of-death-ed. :'(
Our on prem server has been running for about 7 years on a high load. Its a little unpredictable but I would expect a server to last longer than 3 years
What is convergent preferential bias?
I'm envious of you. I had no restrictions on technology use, growing up. I dropped out of high school at 16 and spent the next 15 years doing very little of note (with video games consuming the bulk of that time). Now I'm 35, struggling through my undergrad, and surrounded by kids.

I have some ideas about where to go from here but it's not going to be easy. The search for real meaning and really meaningful relationships is ongoing.
Don't French Letters mean something else?

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/97402/french-let...
HN killed it:

This project has received too many requests, please try again later.
I'd also argue that ancient physics based around static objects would've been an insufficient basis for developing a theory of thermodynamics, which is what was required to turn the steam engine into more than a curiosity for pumping water out of mines. Without Newton and Galileo developing a physics of motion there wouldn't have been a Carnot.
“Reverse location” search warrants identify all cellphones near a crime scene
But isn't that $69,000 peanuts compared to the cost to hire sysadmins who are on call 24/7 to swap out: RAM, fans, drives, power supplies, provision new images, etc.?? So you saved on cloud costs, but now you have the admin burden: 1-3 people for $200k each. No?
The article also assumes 100% utilization on the cloud. I wonder if continual GPU-based training of DNN models is perhaps a fairly circumscribed use case?

Most DNN model training workloads are lumpy and transient.
That whole album is pretty excellent.
On the other hand, they didn't calculate in any residual value after 3 years.
From the article: "Our TCO [(Total Cost of Ownership)] includes energy, hiring a part-time system administrator, and co-location costs"
The Death Delusion (2007)
If I'm reading the chart right, GPU servers on AWS are cheaper if you utilize them less than 65-75% of the time, and turn them off when not in use.
Must be extremely part-time, for $10k/year total cost.
Let's assume this is true... The CTO wants someone that will mentor but is unwilling to mentor his team. :-). Seriously, set expectations for your team and see if they rise to it. Folks don't read minds. CTO is probably screaming about how slow the release is and developer is cranking out feature after feature and now is flipping it around that developer is not talking to the business. If the developer was spending time, talking to the business and mentoring and doing little coding, perhaps CTO will claim that developer rarely ships and is not qualified. Frankly, folks that care about promoting from within do so and does that don't, will always look for outside talent.
Regular AWS EC2 is still a lot more expensive than the alternatives that I mentioned.
If you have only a single server, and you need 24/7 support, then probably it is true you don't want to hire a full-time sysadmin for one server. But, for the people who are doing this kind of thing, they probably have more than one, so the cost of sysadmin is spread across more than one server.
Passages: George Mendonsa, Kissing Sailor in Iconic WWII Photo
> Our TCO includes energy, hiring a part-time system administrator, and co-location costs. In addition, you still get value from the system after three years, unlike the AWS instance.

They covered that I think.
This makes sense only if your prospective clients want "lift and shift" into the cloud. But lots of people are using AWS for their services like S3, RDS, Cloud Front, Route 53, etc.
If you're referring to the new retail rules, the govt left enough loopholes so it didn't really affect Amazon and Flipkart for too long - https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/services/retai...
Maybe not! I wonder how much if anything was paid for this placement. And I also wonder if I should be preparing an "article" about my company. We could sure use some extra exposure.

Anyway, despite my belly-aching, it was an interesting read.
You want to help the environment? Then stop consuming totally. Do you eat things? It is wasteful, just drink ocean water. Do you use any form of entertainment at all? Movies, games, songs? TOTALLY WASTEFUL for the environment. DOES NOT HELP HUMANITY AT ALL. Time to go live in a hole and die, because living is about consuming and waste.
I totally love bookworm. The best epub reader that I've found for linux. I only wish it was in the ubuntu repos.
Hi, I'm from the orthodoxy and I'm here to disparage you.

$disparaging_paragraph

Thank you
A lot of times when you colo you can get staff there to take care of those sorts of tasks. Their cost breakdown includes using this service.
Ask HN: What Does to Take to Create a Tack Sharp Photo
I want to know what goes into taking a super sharp photo. It is just all about really good glass/lens? How much role does the camera body play? What other considerations need to be taken? Final output size (hence camera sensor resolution)? How does light impact sharpness? What else?
It lists Logo and BASIC but not Pascal/Turbo Pascal or Delphi? I'm mildly disappointed.
>Harder questions ultimately filter out too many qualified candidates to be optimal.

This was the key sentence if anyone missed it. "Optimal" for whom, exactly? Not for FAANG certainly. They don't need to worry about filtering too many candidates out, because they have a nearly infinite pool of applicants, and infinite money to conduct a search.

They can ask as difficult questions as they want, because they can pass hundreds and thousands of qualified candidates, and still have plenty more where that came from.

Edit: If you consider "optimal" to be the expected cost of a hire compared to the expected profit, it is fully plausible that if your margins are big enough, asking hard questions is the most effective way to ensure low false-positives. But as everyone knows, comments on articles about interviews are never about the economics, it's only about human ego of feeling rejected.
Darn, I missed that Monodraw was maintenance-only. I use it at least once a week if not more frequently.
Now if they'd only throw in S3 for pseudo-infinite data storage, reliable SQS for work queue management, 10/25/100 Gigabit networking between the instances, redundant power supplies and cooling and racks in carefully selected stable locations for free, I'd buy a dozen!
Save $69k sounds a lot more significant than save 38%.

If you're going to be using the server less than 73% of the time, AWS sounds better.
I'd be curious what the TCO is when factoring in storage. i.e. What is replacing S3 for data storage in the colo setup?
That's a typical trick of open source stuff owned by heavily commercial entities.

Sales dance to follow.

They are targeting decision makers or managers who are given a budget and deadline. Meaning "spend your budget wisely and deliver or else...".

If you're an individual looking for a deal - move on...
Finally a sane voice instead of your usual "they took mah freedom of speech".

I remember when the Nepal's royal family was massacred. We had all our telephone connections cut for 5 days with full blown curfews. They were necessary to stop riots, rumor mongering, and knee jerk reaction of people to the horrible news.
> Our TCO includes energy, hiring a part-time system administrator, and co-location costs.

Which is a myopic view of TCO. This ignores so many things about purchasing on-prem hardware (for good or bad):

Admin:

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

Speed / convenience:

- Try before you buy

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

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

Maintenance / Capitalization / Finances:

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

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

- Hardware can be capitalized, which means you can push it to the balance sheet (for tax or valuation purposes)

- 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.

Hidden costs:

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

I understand why there is a market for this product, but it's not always an apples/orange comparison. Generally speaking, if you know what your workload is going to be, (I'd be hard pressed if a lot of orgs really know the answer to this) then on-prem hardware is not a terrible choice, but it has to be analyzed appropriately.
I explain lots of programming concepts to friends/family in terms of Excel. Truly a wonderful program.
In terms of greasing palms, the USA is no different, except that it's legal there. For example, in India it's illegal for a company to pay a political party for favours; so they pay bribes. In USA this is just called lobbying and it's perfectly legal.
there does appear to be a ppa: https://babluboy.github.io/bookworm/#install
They're hiring a share of colo staff.

It's a comparison to AWS, so everything that you install/do/operate on that server is extra in both cases.
I mean $10k/yr/server doesn't sound too unreasonable. Just sounds really bad when you're only looking at one server.

$100k/yr total compensation (i.e. 60k-ish salary) for someone babysit 10 servers isn't super unreasonable.
Digital Combat Simulator! The first time I locked onto a target and fired a Maverick after figuring out how to start the plane from cold by reading the 600-page manual [0] is one of my proudest gaming moments. It was a great exercise in learning how to learn. Once you've figured how to manipulate the HUD and MFCDs and program waypoints into the CDU, every real world technical topic you could possible learn suddenly seems possible. I don't get intimidated by complex systems anymore precisely because DCS gave me a huge confidence boost.

[0] https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/downloads/document...
I'm kind of angry that I've never been asked to do it.
Machine Learning Data Set Preparation
YC has nothing to gain by selling ads on this forum. The business is already extremely wealthy and successful. Any ad revenue from this would be absolutely peanuts. It just doesn't add up.
Is this bad for my microwave?

More importantly, would this be bad for... someone else's microwave at a party?
Interesting note about Lambda Labs, all of the press links on https://lambdalabs.com/?ref=blog are about a ~"privacy violating Google Glass app" that recognizes faces and geotags photos of them.

I don't see why they choose to promote that link now.
I never get the point of these things. This is like saying a Raspberry Pi hooked up to your home router is cheaper, why bother buying Gmail for your company.

Or like saying that if you spend 20 hours every day in an Uber buying a car would be cheaper over 3 year term.

Nobody is disputing that buying similarly specced hardware on the market is likely to have a cheaper TCO, the point of cloud providers is that also have a bunch of stuff attached to the servers, which turns to be pretty important.
Who's running model training 24/7 to justify reserving this instance or co-locating your own hardware? (Apologies in advance for not being very imaginative)

Their ImageNet timing fits within the bounds of a Spot Duration workload, so in the most optimistic scenario, you can subtract 70% from the price - assuming spot availability for this instance type. (Of course, there are many more model training exercises that don't even remotely fit inside 6 hours.)
p3dn.24xlarge's pricing makes no sense at all. It feels like aws did it to pull off some PR/marketing stunt without any real users in mind. I've tried getting spot instances for it, but aws just errors out. So they don't even have enough of them to allow spot instances. And it's a gpu machine. So the usual arguments of scaling up on demand or adapting to load don't really apply. You either have this usecase or you don't. And if you do, just buy the hardware.
It is baffling that someone with over three decades of experience would be expected to go through the same interview process as a recent graduate.

When I graduated (over two decades ago, and in Belgium), testing was a regular part of the interviewing process. However, it was understood that this was only done for people with no or very little experience. Later in my career, this fact helped me weed out the jobs which were below my experience level. After stating such and withdrawing candidature for the position, in several cases I was even contacted to come in for a more senior position.

The world has certainly changed.
Top Fastest Electric Scooters to Buy in 2019
You are not the target audience since you don't have the use case nor the budget
I use Calibre as an iTunes for ebooks from humble bundle, but this may look like a nice alternative for environments where Calibre it's too much.

Thanks for sharing.
I think so, if you can afford turning off a server during the night then it makes sense to take advantage of some sort of hourly billing which is what most clouds offer by default.
Most HN devs downvoting here never worked on real scalable systems to even understand what you are talking about, tbf
The drugs manufactured by Indian cos are licensed, not stolen. The US itself imports several billions worth of pharmas from India every year, and the USFDA inspects pharma plants in India for this reason.
Damn bro, you are missing the point. As has been described, pure market mechanisms do not and cannot price externalities correctly.

That’s why we have environmental regulation, as imperfect as it is.

This implicitly means a society does make choices about how energy is used. Therefore, a discussion about societal priorities amongst individuals is essential.

Likewise with regulation related to finance and money.

Energy and money. Among the most highly regulated things in all societies.

I agree with the poster that POW cryptocoin systems are a shocking waste of electricity.

In addition, the only use cases that have proved viable are illegal or highly destructive to the social fabric.

When you look at the sheer amount of money transferred from losers to winners, it’s clear that this is not a benefit to anyone. The scams, the hacks, the thefts. Bitcoin and it’s ilk are parasitic systems that weaken the host.

To compare to Ferraris, well Ferraris are a niche product, are already regulated, and have a historical component that accounts for their hedonic properties.

To compare bitcoin to hello kitty backpacks is just a category error, which belies that the argument is disengenuous.
>I'd be interviewed as if I were a recent college graduate.

>leans heavily toward young

So, it's a problem to interview everyone the same way? But it's also ageist because the interviews are accessible to people with no industry experience yet?
As someone with both IBS and anxiety, this is slightly scary
Very cool, but minor ux nitpick: No need to have the select options in the dropdown when all of the options are already on the screen. The doubling of content is distracting from the experience.
It can be added to the list of things to do with other people microwaves.

1) Lead pencil drawing on paper (ideally a circle) in the microwave.

2) Incandescent light bulb in the microwave.

3) CD in the microwave.

4) Grape!