skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey there, I lead Developer Advocacy at AWS for Serverless (https://twitter.com/chrismunns) and have been involved in this space since pretty much the start. Thought I'd toss my hat in the ring there as there seem to be some fairly passionate responses across the board here.

This post is accurate. It's accurate in the new dev experience of someone picking up a framework tool and following the standard walkthroughs/examples that folks like my team and I have been creating the past few years. As far as I'm concerned Einar (the author of the post) did everything I would have done in their position with their experience with this tech. The math Einar did also seems to be accurate given a 1gb RAM and <100ms function duration as well as the API-GW costs, which don't fluctuate based on request duration or Lambda configuration.

Einar got feedback later on that they should have looked at ALB (Application Load Balancer) which does provide a different HTTP request interface back to a Lambda invoke. ALB is the right choice for dead simple proxy requests where you aren't using any of the more advanced features of API-GW. It would lower the cost significantly as well as increase the performance due to a slightly lesser overhead in request path. It would change both the numbers in the blogs title though I can't say it would be 1:1.

We've done a shit job of making this clear and thanks to Einar's post lighting the fire under our butts we'll make work to correct that.

What I am happy about in Einar's post is that they were able to get up and running in almost no time, explore, poke, test, and write this post about their experience very very quickly.

The other thing to highlight here is that I am happy to lose a battle to Elastic Beanstalk, or ECS, or Fargate pretty much any day of the week. All of these exist to significantly reduce the operator burden which compared to running your own container management can be incredibly high. Most companies I've run into in the past 7 years that I've been at AWS have struggled to really measure operator cost but when they compare it to just raw time difference both the technologies I just mentioned and "Serverless" tech like Lambda shift the time spent factor so greatly that cost savings becomes painfully obvious.

Anyway, we're here, we're listening, there's a lot going on behind the scenes (see recent announcement about how VPC cold-start pains will be gone soon).

Thanks,
- Chris Munns - AWS - Serverless - https://twitter.com/chrismunns
I would tend to agree.

When Snowden first 'came out', I was 100% onboard that he was a treasonous, self-aggrandizing traitor. Even though we sort of knew what NSA was doing to an extent - there were rumors about NSA or AT&T monitoring all internet traffic in San Francisco since the 90s [1][2] - I would not give the argument that what he did was patriotic even a moment of consideration.

Now that things have settled a bit, and perhaps having gained some more perspective, I do feel that what he did was justifiable, perhaps even patriotic.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

2 - https://theintercept.com/2018/06/25/att-internet-nsa-spy-hub...
I've always found Troy Hunt's tech stack of haveibeenpwned.com interesting. The API does 5M requests a day with Azure Functions and Cloudflare caching. Ultimately only costing him 2.6c per day.

https://www.troyhunt.com/serverless-to-the-max-doing-big-thi...
> Do you account into this TCO the time spent in retraining an gaining operational, production grade experience with serverless for all the teams involved?

Hopefully, or else it wouldn't be a total cost of ownership!

> And laying off perfectly capable employees because they are now redundant because serverless has a cost too (financial and emotional)

No doubt. But if your capable employees aren't providing value outside of "keeping the servers humming" there's a very good chance that someone is counting up their fully loaded cost and comparing it to bids from Accenture, Capgemini or Infosys.

I'm fairly ambivalent on the whole push towards serverless but arguments like this feel an awful lot like the pushback against virtualization vs. running bare metal.
My Android Code Review Checklist
Lydia got a job as a developer aged 19 so it was fun to ask her some questions. And it turns out she isn't Swedish like everyone thinks.
It's the perfect use-case for it tbh. If you read the comments here, the pricey part of Serverless is API Gateway. With Alexa Skill development the Alexa service triggers your lambda directly, bypassing API Gateway. So it's really super cheap. I have built numerous skills and my bill is literally $0.00. Alexa also gives you $100 credits per month if you build & publish a skill..which is also free.
Maybe but this post is about making the two sides of the computer NOT communicate.
which is rather ironic because Free Software and Open Hardware Designs are all about control by the users. the specs and everything was there, so letting countries build their own would easily have been doable (ignoring what the country needs to do to implement that). having a dozen countries build their own could have had some interesting effects.
A short list of those tons would be wonderfully helpful to share. :)
So, you are saying nobody should scrutinize the charity?
Agree to all of this. These artists, besides maybe Flume, are exactly the size / popularity of what I was talking about in my post.
All you need to do to get around those things is just beam the recordings over when the phone is plugged in, say, when people are sleeping, and simply exempt the recorded data from the metrics.
A Step Toward Quantifying Independently Reproducible Machine Learning Research
Microsoft launches a free 'Python for beginners' video course for aspiring devs
I know you probably meant "continuous" instead of "continence", but I can't help but chuckle at the usage.
Will America's debt doom us?
Currently a bit more than a year at my current workplace. I have on-call every 4 weeks for a week. This weekend was my third call.
TLDR; I don't think this twitter thread is good public science communication, and should not appear on the HN frontpage.

As a quantum computing researcher, I can't make head and tail of what OP is saying after and including tweet 7. I don't think OP understands interference correctly. As someone points out elsewhere in the comment section, she might mean decoherence, but I can only evaluate what she has written.

She also makes light of the theoretical computational complexity results underlying the demonstration of quantum supremacy using random circuits. This experiment's results and interpretation might be iffy at best, but the underlying strategy of the quantum computing community in this matter are sound. We don't want to keep asking for funding for the next 20 years without proofs of principles in between, and this experiment is one step along the way.
Well if those are the two measures then this paper would be wrong. 5 out of the top 10 most entrepreneurial countries according to this paper is in Sub Saharan Africa where government corruption is very high and there the inclusive policies are hit or miss...mostly miss while the US is number 46 on the list. As someone that has worked in both regions, the USA is waaaay easier to do business than Sub Saharan Africa but I have seen first hand that there is more entrepreneurship in sub-Saharan Africa than the US. I feel the people just do not expect the government to provide anything, so they just do it themselves. Most people have two jobs. One for the Govt or a Cooperation and they have their own on the side
The happy path is one solution in a labirynth. Once you’re off the happy path you are navigating a labirynth in the dark. It is a very frustrating experience. It would be useful to have a process map similar to the site maps of the internet 2.0 times.
Replicating GPT-2, the Most Dangerous NLP Model (With Aaron Gokaslan)
You think this "leak"/leak is related to the recent IBM announcement?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21004615
The answer has always been a source of cheap, clean, abundant, and safe energy. But I'm not very optimistic about seeing it in my lifetime aside from maybe next generation fission plants. It WILL happen, just not anytime soon. We may see a fusion plant going positive soon, but probably not for a price we can afford commercially.
At the time of the program in many areas of Argentina it was rather internet was not really widespread enough.
And when the kids would go in the internet would be either to play Counter-Strike or log into Facebook, that was taking over the world at the time.

> if you give them sufficient baseline education

That didn't happen. I think even 1/500 is too optimist.

Anecdotally, there were some security measures implemented in the netbooks in Argentina that would require periodic re-enabling (So as to prevent kids for quitting school?) and the only "smart" thing I saw coming out of the netbooks was kids finding out how to circumvent those measures (That in this age and time means just googling it)
I'm calling it now: The US Government will pass a law protecting Boeing from litigation over this, or they will bail them out, because "too big to fail".
It feels like that ought to be inflammatory and hyperbolic, but honestly, I was wondering the same thing myself last night.

If you're the British government, and your citizens who are legitimately in a foreign country, travelling on valid passports and doing nothing wrong, are being forcibly detained, and if the local authorities are not stepping in to try to resolve the situation in some reasonable way, how do you treat that situation?

On the one hand, you presumably want to be diplomatic when dealing with another nation. Certainly you don't want to escalate any potentially violent stand-off unnecessarily.

On the other hand, the basic facts are that those are your people and they're in trouble through no fault of their own. Isn't your first responsibility to protect them and get them safely home if need be? At some point, there will inevitably be a very serious discussion about how far you need to go to do that, and that discussion will consider deploying scary people with weapons in another country, which most certainly is an act of war.
That's awesome, I love your bar chart analogy. BTW I enjoy using Freeplane too, and wouldn't object to seeing screenshots of others' mind maps...
`give`
These sorts of arguments without statistics to back them up are useless. You can always find a thousand people Law X screws and a thousand it saves to generate anecdotes to support your personal position.
I guess, I can say that I worked on a project for introducing interactive advertising displays into their branches. It was killed because they didn't like the power cabling.
Thanks - when you're primary on-call, how often do you receive alerts / pages that you have to action?
i think the handcrank was an after-market product, created long after the OLPC project had realized that it wouldn't actually work.

or rather, what wouldn't have worked is a handcrank built into the devices, as the stresses would break it, whereas a handcrank mounted separately on a table, connected to the laptop by a cable, doesn't have that problem.
I don't know why people's expectations of this place are so high. Remember this was the community that defended Damore, Stallman, Ito, and even some were speaking positively about Epstein.
Recommending what YouTube video to watch next: a multitask ranking system
The games are only temporarily marked down, what you are observing is discounting as a promotional tool because discounts get in front of more people than full-price games.

These are not perpetual discounts that would make the defacto real price be the discounted price. After the launch week/s the game price will revert and eventually fluctuate from being occasionally discounted, included in bundles, given away etc.

Discounts are an important sales tool for games - you can see major publishers today are pretty much constantly offering big discounts on one store at a time. Steam etc all have discounted game lists, websites track game deals, there's a huge subreddit for them at r/gamedeals, there's sites tracking the lowest-ever prices for games etc.
I've got Linux servers that have gone that long without rebooting (and some that are much longer!), but I generally view it as a bad thing and a failing on my part, and would feel the exact same way if I was still running illumos and freebsd servers. Software updates happen for a reason, even on BSD, and servers running for that long mean that they aren't getting those updates.
I think US politicians' failure to act effectively in the interests of US citizens is caused more by the concentration of political power than it is by bad people. The US isn't alone among developed countries in having this problem, but there are plenty of developed countries that manage to avoid it. The answer is more democratic accountability, in the form of measures such as proportional representation.

This Jennifer Lawrence video summarises some desirable reforms:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfQij4aQq1k

See also Lawrence Lessig's "Our democracy no longer represents the people. Here's how we fix it":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJy8vTu66tE
War on Fear – Xinjiang: A New Explanation
how's the net worth holding up?
Don't digital boards have that awful input lag that leaves your mark trailing well behind your finger?
In many ways, the OLPC project was like "Stone Soup":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Soup

>Stone Soup is a European folk story in which hungry strangers convince the people of a town to each share a small amount of their food in order to make a meal that everyone enjoys, and exists as a moral regarding the value of sharing. In varying traditions, the stone has been replaced with other common inedible objects, and therefore the fable is also known as axe soup, button soup, nail soup, and wood soup.

The infamous crank, the $100 price, and the Sugar user interface, were among the indigestible stones.

Seymour Papert's vision of constructionist education provided some of the most nutritious meat and potatoes that nourished the soup, as did Mary Lou Jepsen's display hardware:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21045877

>Also, the OLPC's hybrid monochrome/color display that Mary Lou Jepsen designed was truly innovative, power saving, easily manufacturable, green electronics, and it was even quite efficient and crisply legible and under direct sunlight (requiring no backlight for the high resolution 200 dpi reflective grayscale LCD pixels, which could stay on while the CPU was asleep).

We were able to convince EA to relicense SimCity under GPL3 and contribute it to the project, because it was a quintessentially constructionist educational game. Without the OLPC project to rally around and rationalize the virtues of free educational software, it would have been impossible to convince EA to do that.

Open Sourcing SimCity, by Chaim Gingold.
Excerpt from page 289–293 of “Play Design”, a dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy in Computer Science by Chaim Gingold:

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/open-sourcing-simcity-58470a2...

Micropolis: Constructionist Educational Open Source SimCity:

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/har-2009-lightning-talk-trans...

Contract between EA and OLPC for open sourcing and distributing SimCity:

https://donhopkins.com/home/olpc-ea-contract.pdf
This could be really interesting, we are currently using some custom bot detection techniques that also try to slow down / crash chrome headless and such, but it would be nice if we could just use this new Cloudflare service and stop worrying about maintaining it.

I have a few questions, though:

1. How does this work with mobile apps / single page applications APIs? I'm worried this would block legitimate users

2. Is it possible to enable/disable this feature on URLs patterns using page rules? I'm not seeing the option right now

3. Do blocked requests end up in the firewall logs? If so, how do we filter for it? Specific rule id?

4. Is there a way to enable it in log mode in order to evaluate the impact it would have?
How to Construct the Optimal Neural Architecture for Your Machine Learning Task
Show HN: Screen Recordings with Console Logs
We built a Chrome Extension that allows you to record a video of a bug synchronised with console logs and other technical data.

The idea is that this way engineers can get better bug reports and therefore spend less time on unnecessary communication and looking for the root cause. PMs and QA can on the other hand save time on bug reporting.

Website: https://birdeatsbug.com

Chrome Store link: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bird-eats-bug-screen-reco/mdplmiioglkpgkdblijgilgebpppgblm

Thanks in advance for your feedback!
> There are many companies, including facebook/google/etc, that employ kernel developers who primarily write free software

We pay eventually -- in this case the "free" software is paid for with a loss of freedom elsewhere, in this case by giving up your private information and fulfilling our role as as "consumers" using their code.

There are many that would rather actually pay in a transparent fashion.
Nobles have had a very bad few centuries. I'd be worried about persecution.
> Others are able to use money to make more money.

They don't make more money. They make more wealth.

You are confusing metaphorical use of world money as synonym of wealth to what actually happens.
I call it duty of care. If you're exposing X, and release files of unrelated Y you screwed up to a degree.
> For the 80% or more, serverless works just fine.

Citation?
RaptorCS Power9 Blackbird PC: An expensive mistake
One possibility is that in rich countries with less corruption where people can have high-paying jobs that are not stressful and can still have plenty of personal time, the incentive of looking for alternatives (like starting you own business) is not that high. Another way to put it is that in Israel it's more of a survival culture and many people see entrepreneurship as a path out. There are many countries similar to Israel that are less innovative; this can be explained by the fact that Israel is still an advanced country with good universities and military that always needs to improve.

On the other hand, entrepreneurs are usually independent people who really value freedom and don't like to work for others. Regardless if they can find a good job or not. So I'm not sure if my first theory holds. Maybe Israelis are just more independent then the average European (which can be explained by the culture and environment too).
This is a new version of tdo based on Firebase which supports new features such as offline mode, realtime data sync between devices, drag & drop and touch events.
For some hilarious commentary on the OLPC project, you should read the Fake Steve Jobs blog. He was at pains to point out that MIT Media Lab != MIT.

Someone last week said the Media Lab is called the Remedial Lab at MIT.
Well, having had my third call in the 14th week of being on call I would say about 0.2 times per week on-call.
> Node.js version might be different

Yes, in major only. Your lambda has node 10, you might be running 10.x or 10.y

> my dependencies might be different

No, the lockfile does that.

> the OS is different, the filesystem is different

Agree, but how much does one Linux+systemd different from other Linux+systemd? How much does the FS?

> It's the reason people started using Docker really.

VMs, docker and having to care about and manage isolation platforms is the reason people started using serverless.
Doesn’t mandatory service violate the Non-Agression Principle[1]? It is after all coercive by definition.

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-aggression_principle
To be frank, there's hardly any convincing climate change science in the Nature story. It's mostly about activism, CO2 emissions with only some super high-level info of impact of greenhouse gases on people (without justifications or models given). It reads like a political story, not scientific one - I didn't know that nature is publishing such stuff.
More like their ancestors polluted in their own backyard. The hardware companies that worked with them already left or went out of business. Trying to collectivize the guilt would be just silly like "NYC companies are responsible for the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire and the 2008 financial crisis".
> They go straight away to a vendor

This argument only works until you reach a certain size or security requirements.

At the end of the day, if it's critical to the business it doesn't matter what the paper says, you're still responsible for any damage to the business from a bad vendor.

----

It's just like car manufacturers, nobody cares that Takata was actually responsible for faulty airbags. They simply know their GM vehicle has a dangerous recall.
To folks in the field, it is my impression that this is about as minor as assuming P != NP. Conjectured, unproven, but the world would be a lot more interesting if wrong.
> For the 80% or more, serverless works just fine.

Cite this. I don't believe you. I'm across a pretty broad slice of industry and can only draw on anecdotes from colleagues, but the majority of people with actual hands-on experience are disillusioned and say that the biggest (only?) drive for serverless at this point is top-down organisational pressure created by technically incompetent strategic management that looks to 'thought leaders' and Gartner to tell them what technologies to use.

if serverless works for 80%, then why is that 80% not even remotely reflected in the sentiment here? HN is usually a pretty good gauge for how the wider engineering community feels about a particular technology.
I've used Linux 'on the desktop' since retiring my Windows machine in 2003 and the one thing I have never had is problems to print. Just hook up to the local print server and go. But lately, since all this new goodness came along suddenly there are printers - and scanners, let't not forget about those - that no longer work that worked just fine before.

If you're one of the lucky ones for which all this new stuff solved problems that you had then good for you. But try to understand that what holds for you does not hold for everybody and that your gain in this particular case is my loss. Compatibility with Apple machines is something that matters to me a lot, especially because one of the first things I do when I get my hands on that nice hardware is wipe it and install Linux on it ;) But I don't need their protocols on my network.
TCP pools and connections are part of why I'm excited about reactive design right now. Although it still doesn't address the problem with a bunch of TCP timeouts eating my entire connection pool if the firewall team locks out our production servers again...