skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Is a “no-ops” architecture viable?
Like many developers I know, I am somewhat set in my ways when building new web projects - it's usually a bunkhouse nginx/express/postgres on an EC2, or Heroku if I am willing to spend the $$. However, with all the apparent advances in serverless technology and the mature DBaaS providers out there, it got me wondering if startups or other developers are realizing the promised benefits of these architectures? To me, it seems like Heroku is the easiest minimal-ops solution out there, but it can get pricey. Even a simple EC2 setup could require fiddling in the AWS console (or CloudFormation templates), ports & security settings, VPCs, DB backups, etc. In both cases you still would need to pay attention to resource allocation.

I see a lot of news about serverless architectures & frameworks, and other hosted services like auth, DB's, etc. Are any startups experimenting with building fully "no-ops" architectures (I use the word as a classification, I realize true no-ops is impossible)? Or at a certain point is the benefit of minimal ops outweighed by the overhead of needing to glue multiple separate services together?
Gone mad music player for android can shuffle your play-queue which is possibly what you want?
There are theoretical risks, depending where you are based:
Court costs
Injunctions
Risk of Punitive damages

They may share a record label, but do they share the same publisher?
Renault's driver UX is a disaster waiting to happen
> Do we have many people dying from lead and pests nowadays?

You misunderstand the problem.

You "die" from a heavy metal or other accumulating poisons only if you get an acute poisoning with a pretty large amount.

But if you get only tiny amounts for decades you don't die. You just suffer form a lot of "minor" ailments, and most of the time nobody even attributes it to lead (or mercury or whatever). That's because the correlation with aging is almost 1 - after all this can go on for decades with imperceptibly tiny increases in issues, completely in line with aging. Your brain will function less well. Your eyes may be dry and other minor sight issues. Key word "minor", you will not have some big clear symptoms, you will have lots of small issues. A few more warts from decade to decade. A bit more psoriasis. A few cramps. You are more easily tired ("it's the stress"). Maybe some slight depression, occasionally, and you don't get anything done. You get more colds than ten years ago and they last longer. Allergies start and grow.

Check my history, I posted about it, I had chronic (mercury) poisoning diagnosed, and only through luck and persistence. I have a long list of such symptoms that are all gone now even though I'm ten years older now than when I started (chelation) treatment, and which I myself, just like any doctor, always thought were "normal" issues that everybody has. That includes stuff like a nodule disappearing from my thyroid and the thyroid shrinking to normal size, to the great amazement of the endocrinologist, under chelation treatment within less than a year, after it had been there for over two decades. Needless to say, instead of asking questions and following up on how I achieved the miracle - nothing at all. And it wasn't some random miracle that cannot be explained, clearly this had to do with the chelation treatment, since that exact area became very active exactly after the 4th or 5th such treatment. Nobody cares.

Anyway, your post shows one of the problems: If there isn't a big problem visible right away there is none. Heavy metal poisonings with tiny amounts over decades are next to impossible to prove, unless you are "lucky" and for some reason when you are tested you actually have quite a bit moving around in your blood (unusual for such chronic exposure, where most of it is stored in various organs).

So nobody knows - wants to know? - how big the problem really is. My own doctor, researcher at a university clinic, is pretty pessimistic though.
Considering John Deer does not want their users to perform self repairs, it might be more realistic than you think.

https://theamericangenius.com/business-news/farmers-cant-leg...
Ummm technically if the computer systems in question were secure, wouldn't demonstration be impossible? Q.E.D.
I guess I was imagining something decentralized where you wouldn’t need a “provider” beyond the author, the chain, and maybe some sort of “smart contract.”

My blockchain knowledge pretty much starts and ends with the legal aspects of cryptocurrency but I guess I was imagining a system where Ernest Hemingway, for example, could upload his latest novel (or maybe a hash?) to the chain and sell access tokens. So any time a user tries to access the file it can only be read if they have an access token for that novel’s ISBN.

Once the book is on blockchain it’s theoretically there forever, right? (Not sure how this works exactly - does at least one other machine on the chain need to be running?) But I don’t think it could be removed as easily as shutting down a server like Microsoft did. Or be censored/restricted by a government.

I suppose you’re right that there would still need to be an iBooks/Kindle type centralized reader/token wallet app or else it would be a total pain for users.
Merely downvoting your comment should be punishable by a six month revocation of internet access.
I went on peertube and I get the feeling half the links would have gotten my ISP angry with me. Bit too much piracy for me.

EDIT: Update, they aren't even real full movies. They're just baits that tell you to click some link in the description.
You could apply the same headline to any big corp or subsidiary whom applies censorship for some silly ideals.
> Now I'm more confused as your answer mentions they are not supporting Mastadon servers that don't censor porn, hookers, and strippers - so 'not supporting' maybe that's what I should of been asking about, I guess that means they are not banning users, just making it so their user's services can not connect?

Keybase has this concept of Identity Proofs. You put a special signature on a page in a specific way that Keybase has vetted. For example, I can put a signature on my HN about page (which I have), give Keybase my username and they can prove that the HN user is me which proves to other Keybase users that I am real (i.e., not a bot nor a fake profile created for trolling/nefarious purposes). On it's own, my HN proof isn't very strong but coupled with other services and I now have a complex profile of proofs that spreads the social vetting across multiple companies/organizations.

Mastodon is a social messaging platform like twitter mixed with custom message boards of the 90s/00s. The key bit from the latter is that each "instance" is run by anyone on their own hardware with their own level of security determined by whomever administrates the server. Keybase (according to the comments linked above) decided that they would only be setting up this Identity Proofing with the most general instances and not with more specialized topic instances (particularly sex work or porn) because (these are my assumptions wrt their reasoning) there is a time cost to setting this stuff up but also to not align themselves with instances that may be taboo to some of their userbase (read: potential paying clients).

To get to the point: Keybase does not have read access to your content (they use E2E encryption), but they do make certain decisions about how their tools integrate with the outside world. I don't know their politics but I would guess that since they are working towards finding clients to setup custom instances of their model (to start making money), they are just trying to avoid misaligning themselves.
Try coworking. Many places have flexible memberships. Even one day a week or once a month can make a difference.
Best game ad I have seen for a while
HOA's are a pox on our cities for so many reasons.
It'd be real nice if we could make an expeditionary force and start setting up more cities outside, to continue the analogy. At the moment, most groups wanting to leave the city contain too many undesirables, but eventually there'll be enough critical mass. What does that look like? At first - an ecosystem of services, packaged together, rather than piecemeal. Firefox, duckduckgo, an open calendar. I don't think it means linux per say, but maybe a privacy-focused android distro and an overlay for windows. The OS doesn't matter as much anymore.
A place that sustained itself and produced useful materials/medicines etc. without anybody's "doing anything" would have been the ideal about 500 years ago in what is now the US. And it's a permaculture ideal more recently. There seems to be a streak of the Protestant work ethic running through this. Otherwise how could doing more work be a virtue?

Well actually I thought of an answer: Lots of things that take a lot of effort are done for not much more reason than to show how much effort they take. Which in turn reflects positively (supposedly) on the person who did it, testifying to their possession of ample extra resources to do the difficult thing. But I would think that would only be truly relevant for mating purposes. Like "This guy plays guitar, whose mastery takes an intellect, skill and devotion of time and resources that would potentially be available to you and your offspring if you were to mate with him" type logic. But what does it mean in the suburban lawn belonging to a complete family?
Alphabet Completion Rate in APL
I wrote a blog post about it but it was used against me by an interviewer at riot games. So I unpublished it.

Essentially it boils down to outlawing vague arrays of behaviour that can apply to essentially anyone and thus must be selectively enforced. I used examples from history surrounding vague laws and the implications that came from that (usually it’s the precursor to huge atrocities or totalitarian regimes. Although I’m certainly not saying they always are).

The wording for the freebsd code of conduct was the most troubling, if you take it at its letter then you basically shouldn’t (or can’t) have non-work discussions because any comment on appearance, lifestyle, diet or even sending “hug” without prior consent is verboten.

It’s also a list of things that are not allowed. Not a way of actually presenting yourself.

Some of the hacker news guidelines are a good example of the inverse: “assume good faith”

The thing is. It comes from a very US-centric political source (geekfeminism) and was barely given any time to be disseminated or discussed, so people were a bit sour- and the handling of criticism only made people more sour

Anyway. This thread doesn’t need us to digress into this topic, and we already have.

I shouldn’t have included that snippet in my comment. I know it’s controversial.
> I just go with what ever my auto formatter uses.

Ah, so you're That Guy who messes up hundreds of irrelevant lines with whitespace changes along with their bug fix commit. :)
Show HN: Using ZFS native encryption on a desktop system
How to evaluate computers that don’t quite exist?
Of course they are. It's not "brand safe" content. Few things are, really, as we'll soon find out.
Dark Side of the Moon, Abbey Road, and We Will Rock You / We Are the Champions are my go to examples for this. I hate going for a run and getting the penultimate track from Dark Side of the Moon on shuffle. It cuts out right at the climax, I always stop my run and manually tell Google to play Eclipse next.

While I'm on my soapbox, another tremendous annoyance I want to get rid of: "Deluxe" tracks. I'm so tired of scrolling through re-released/deluxe versions of albums to find the album with the original track listing. I don't want remixes or rough cuts in my random playlist. With all of the shallow marketing attempts at selling the same classic albums to the general public over and over again, the alternate tracks outnumber the original.
> Israelis like to build. Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage. This is not a difficult issue.

That sounds pretty racist to me.
Like the exceptional claim that human consciousness resides in the brain despite documented evidence of remote viewing [1], terminal lucidity [2], memories of past lives [3], etc.? Maybe it's time these "scientists" start doing actual science instead of sticking to their ultra-materialist dogma.

[1] https://fas.org/irp/program/collect/air1995.pdf

[2] https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/wp-content/uploa...

[3] https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/publications/aca...
It's clumsy but you can see why Spotify don't want anything to do with handling uploaded music on their servers. I wonder how Google treats it from a legal/copyright perspective. I suspect they are just too big to care.
Last I saw, the FreeBSD code of conduct is a list of things you can't do, so it's easy to interpret that as "anything that isn't explicitily denied is allowed", and it only disallows negative comments that"reinforce systemic oppression" against certain groups (ignoring that opressed groups can vary across the globe). I don't use FreeBSD, so their CoC has no impact on me, but it's far from neutral.
I've developed plenty of shared memory software. In 99% of cases, a well placed mutex lock will solve the problem entirely. Of the remaining percent, maybe 5% are the type where you can just not lock and it'll work out sufficiently often. Another 45% might benefit from designing a channel/queue. The reamining 50% need a specialized lock to run well.

But all shared memory problems can, without much difficulty, be solved by using a mutex. It might not be best performance but you'll likely not need that much performance in the first place (after all, you're coming from the JS ecosystem).

Memory barriers aren't particularly hard to understand either, I've written some systems using them that ran very stable. Same for lockless or atomic or reentrant algorithms. It's all very fun and doesn't take that much skill if you're willing to read into it.
I'm making this as a separate comment so that if there's one thing you take away, it's this:

Whatever someone says they are upset about is only rarely what they are actually upset about.

This seems simple and obvious in hindsight, but to truly internalize it has changed my life experience. They aren't sad that you forgot to call; they are concerned that you don't love them. It's almost like when someone is upset, you should try dropping down at least one level of Maslow's hierarchy to interrogate "what's really going on, here" because the upset person is frequently not consciously aware of what they are really upset about, either.

To that end, if you practice consoling people by addressing what they are feeling instead of what they are saying, it might as well be like gaining a superpower. And that is why I put this book at the top of any list. It is the real deal in this regards.
The use of "MM" is really confusing me. What is 1MM views? I can't help but parse it to a mega mega view, or one tera view, but that seems excessive.
This is why I stick with Django, DRF, Postgres, Reactjs, linux vms and REST over HTTP. Once the business problems are solved we can try out new tech. With this stack I've built many web apps and there are fewer surprises.
Is there a way to disable amp in my browser? It’s hard to get to the real sites
can you clarify which options to click on? I dont see a label that best fits this complaint. there are options like terrorism/child abuse/offensive content, etc.
Did this certain person further crack down on this country and associated oligarchs, even after Congress passed sanctions, which this certain person signed? Did this certain person do far more to punish this country than this person's predecessor, even though the predecessor knew this country had been interfering with federal elections for well over a year and did nearly nothing to stop it?
From Here to Infinity
Except YouTube hasn't even banned overt racism and calls to violence. You can still find plenty of it on the platform. Once a channel is large enough, there's effectively nothing you can do short of copyright infringement to get banned.
We Need to Talk About Nuclear Power
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2019/06/05/diabetics-for... People have been hacking their own poorly-secured insulin devices for a while now. It's better to have this done out in the open instead of pushing it underground with legal threats.
Victor-- you've done the community a service by showing us that There Is More Than One Way To Do It, (TIMTOWTDI) even in the 2019 world of web services.

Don't let the nitpickers who don't like affiliate links get you down. Just keep improving your site and providing useful info like this.

I'm glad to know somebody who went to Princeton is created such a useful site. I live in the area. Maybe I'll see you at a Meetup sometime.
Did I say it was acceptable? Did I use those words? Did I not say that I do not like where its going? At the same time, can I blame anyone for going security overboard when multiple buildings are destroyed by kamikaze hijacked airplanes? A first responder from that just recently died. So yea, still a bit of a sore wound for people. This isn't like talking about Rome getting sacked. Some of us still remember when the towers stood.

Passengers are vigilant. Ha! The one thing your average civilian is not is vigilant. The internet is rife with bad folks doing bad things in crowds. And most people do nothing.

Plus, look up the millennium plot. The news doesn't make a stink when things go well. Lots of people have been stopped at airports and even before being able to start. You only hear about the failures, because it makes for better news.

Fact is, pandora's box was opened. We are in a new age where people get their fame from doing big, nasty things. The Rolling Stone put the Boston bomber's face on the cover for fuck's sake. Where rock star faces have been. I like that on imgur, some people bucked that trend by periodically showing the faces and sharing the stories of those that fought back. But guess what, someone has to actively protect too. Yea, lots of issues with the TSA. They knee jerked hard towards some super fucked up practices those first few years. You think traveling with a really slavic last name was fun? I was always randomly put in the special search line. Three times I got backroom questioned over my recent travels. I still show up 3 hours early to fly out of habit.

But I also chose to roadtrip more often instead. Which was more fun anyways.

Maybe if the public could actually police themselves and evil was eradicated, then we can do away with security in general. Until then, it's a response to a problem where no one is offering a better one other than hugs and unicorns that fart rainbows.
> I didnt say ad business was good or bad, but...

But that's the business you chose for your illustration.

> I didn't say that imploding ad business means privacy regulation is bad for small business, but ...

... you specifically talked about ad business alone and drew the conclusion that "big regulations create big business moats ... which demolish smaller businesses."

It's a good thing that GDPR destroyed ad business that existed only by selling user data without consent. And there's nothing big about GDPR. It's very small and easy to comply with.

If your business is built upon selling and profiting from user data without user's consent, good riddance. If not, GDPR doesn't affect you in the slightest.
This is a good example of what people do in real life when confronted with change they want vs repercussions.

Compounded by the fact that it was posted by username 'gambiting'.
Were you using a traditional spinning rust hard drive? OpenBSD is basically unusable without an SSD because of the filesystem they use.
Word equation editor is a useful toy for people that need a couple of equations here and there.

In college I used to transcribe my notes into nice pdfs using LaTeX, at one point I had snippets for all the common equations, I wasn't even thinking about what to do to write it down, it turned into muscle memory.

Besides that, Word now has support for LaTeX, it speaks pretty loudly about LaTeX qualities over the "let me look for the line integral symbol in these menus".

Yeah, it has a pretty steep learning curve, but once you get over it there's no better way to write equations.

Obviously, it is not for everyone, as I said, if all you need is a couple of equations, Word point and click equation editor is more than enough, but there's nothing "cavemanly" about LaTeX, it's powerful and once you learn how to use it it doesn't stand on your way.
Spoofing, phishing, and Gandi: what you need to know
I didn't know about that sub. Thanks.
Delivery success is usually based on the download of a tracking pixel. Problem is, Gmail downloads and proxies all images (including those tracking pixels). So anything that doesn't get completely filtered out before showing up in the inbox or spam box is going to be seen as -received- by, as far as I know, any software out there.

There are quite a few messages that never even make it to the spam box, which I have never understood because plenty of very obviously sketchy spam messages get through to my spam box. Yet, occasionally we have trouble getting very legitimate transactional emails through to some customers.
What is the use case for this? If I download all of my data from Facebook, why would I want to upload it to another product or service elsewhere?

If your killer feature is allowing me to browse my data with a user-friendly interface (instead of a clob of data on local disk), I think you need a demo, video, or even a .gif showcasing it. You have an image that hints at it, but you never actually sell it. Someone who quickly scrolls down your main page might miss the "browse" portion of your product in its entirety.
GCP provides infrastructure for digital ocean?
> So if I open a new small business and want to advertise it on AdWords or elsewhere on the internet I have no recourse

Ad tech was extremely profitable before personalisation and wholesale trading of private data.
I have a terrifically annoying bug that shows up somewhere between X and GTK and all Gecko-based browsers. While I'm scrolling down in a web page with the mouse wheel, within a few seconds the page will stop moving. The mouse will still move around, but it will stop changing its cursor based on hovered elements, and further mouse actions will do nothing. It will unjam itself something like 30 seconds later if I wait, or immediately if I press any key. Then all the queued mouse events will rush through at once, so if the key I hit was Ctrl, the page's contents zoom out and I have to reset it. If I hit Shift, it walks back through the history and I lose my place. So I was hitting Alt for a while, besides shopping for a distro.

I couldn't debug it normally, or even get a clue about which package needs to be downgraded, because I can't pop over to the terminal without unjamming it. So I'd need another machine with which to SSH in, and those are all unusable ATM (well, I probably just needed to suck it up and install SSH on the phone). But ${somehow} I found out that triggering a redraw with ${something} also unjams it, so I set the clock in the XFCE panel (also GTK, FWIW) to display seconds as well. Now it still jams but always for less than a second.
No-ops means someone else does the ops/system admin. Depending on requirements you may find a fully-automated or turnkey setup. I can deploy a WordPress site on Digital Ocean (and other platforms) with a few clicks.

When something goes wrong you need ops support. Too many things can go wrong, I think impossible to anticipate all of them. The less familiar you (or whomever does system admin for you) is with the setup and environment the longer it will take to find and fix problems. The more complex the infrastructure (and serverless/microservices gets complex fast) the more expertise you need to deal with the inevitable problems.
OP fixed it.
Someone just set the vertical indent (form feed character) to 90 lines. It supposedly helps the humor-impaired.
Well, nobody can know everything.