skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Serverless" is "I don't have to provision a server, or worry about where it is, or maintain it, or what OS it's running, or any of the other fiddly details."

You define a function, you hand that function to a company, and they make sure it runs when certain conditions are met. You then don't have to worry about the server.
Should not this incident involve PCI in some way?
The "market" is not actually a real market. There are no customers shopping on Amazon saying: "I only want to purchase things that were produced on a systemd free computer".
I've tried that, but unfortunately, at least on GCC, taking the address of a label suppresses inlining of the containing function (which is important of you are trying to implement generators, less critical for async functions), so it often generate worst code than the switch statement implementation.
This feels very "Serverless is cool, everyone is saving money on it, lets do the same"

> I only had to add a simple config file, add one dependency and one small startup class to my existing API project.

This is not the way to do it, you have to spend some time on lambda approach.

Usually splitting up your code in to smaller chuncks so you don't end up with long spool up times and you can do things like keeping your lambda warm and caching high impact parts of the code. (sometimes of course you can't cache, I know)

Having gone through this process myself with a very very large code base, it would have not worked to just slap it into serverless.

Going server less can save you money, but not by just taking your existing app and throwing it on Lambda.
If you value lack of change over all else, you can always use Slackware. Most other distros have introduced newfangled gizmos like "package managers with dependency resolution" which should have been a sign they don't value stability above all.
> I think the essential office chitchat issue is "being yourself" vs. "seeming like a high quality professional". I've found out the hard way that relaxing and aiming for a real conversation carries a high % chance of saying something unbecoming of a team leader.

Indeed, this is a very good way to put it.
Although I do understand people who say silly things at the lunch table without a second thought - they value fun and genuine social interactions more than "upward mobility".

If you can't be yourself for at least 8h/day and you also can't be yourself after that, because you shouldn't base you social life around your co-workers, then who are you? And when are you allowed to be yourself? Weekends and bank holidays? Fuck. That.

We would all be happier if we were allowed to be ourselves all the time. Maybe by hopping around until landing on a cluster of likewise co-workers who can see the "high quality professional" side by side with the crazy cat lady or the punkrocker.

But again, I think your decription is correct and that we live within a very sad state of affairs.
Lambda is too expensive at the moment, sure. But I think we all know that the costs will, over time, go through the floor, and in 5 years time nobody will want to create server software using anything else.
First of all, it’s hidden sevices, not dark web.

Second, to anyone crawling hidden services or crawling over tor, please run a relay or decrease your hop. Don’t sacrifice other’s desperate need for anonymity for your $whatever_purpose_thats_probably_not_important. It could be some fun thing to do for you, but some people are relying on tor to use the free, secure and anonymous Internet.
I've been told many large companies only have a few months cash flow to keep them operating. I remember many years ago this fact was exploited by the unions when a dispute couldn't be resolved. They stopped collecting payments (pre internet) and the dispute was resolved quickly.
How else would you handle it?
>> Systemd is just an infinitely better way of handling init and service configuration than anything else I've used on Linux

What metric?

Is it ok for systemd to take over logging, dns, ntp and bunch of services in order to provide a better init as you like it?
How to Design Mobile Forms to Boost Conversions
The production side usually renders the final audio mix off-line, so no real-time requirements there for getting optimum sound quality. I'd say the occasional rare pop or stutter is worse to have during a live performance than when mixing and producing music.
isn't that just a limitation of the current incarnation of serverless systems? ie. serverless is only effective for burst traffic because it's expensive.

You would think that after you tailor the code to the platform and make it stateless, it would cost less for the cloud provider and not more.
Get your meals planned by an expert nutritionist
Ask HN: What are your favorite proofs in computer science?
I'm seeing a lot of comments claiming this claim can't be trusted because there's no useful computation being done.

There are many competing proposals to test for quantum supremacy: Boson Sampling, Fourier Sampling, IQP, Random Circuit Sampling. The computation needs to meet certain requirements. Worst case hardness, average case hardness, anti-concentration. Also there needs to be a way to test to see if the output of the computation is correct. This is easier said than done. RCS is the only one that meets all three and can be verified.

What's happening here is a test of RCS: A general quantum gates are being programmed to generate a random circuit. Think about randomly connecting some components on a breadboard and then simulating what would happen. Except this is done programmatically. The question is to then predict the output with a classical computer. This can't be done easily.

For a deeper dive into RCS, see this paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1803.04402.pdf

>> In this paper we study both the hardness and verification of RCS. While RCS was defined with experimental realization in mind, we show complexity theoretic evidence of hardness that is on par with the strongest theoretical proposals for supremacy. Specifically, we show that RCS satisfies an
average-case hardness condition – computing output probabilities of typical quantum circuits is as hard
as computing them in the worst-case, and therefore #P-hard. Our reduction exploits the polynomial structure in the output amplitudes of random quantum circuits, enabled by the Feynman path integral. In addition, it follows from known results that RCS satisfies an anti-concentration property, making it
the first supremacy proposal with both average-case hardness and anti-concentration.
> I'm in the container camp because serverless isn't cheap and you can't have long running processes.

Do you think you'll have the same opinion in five years time? Or how about three years?
> Finally, I'm not trying to bash API Gateway, Lambda or serverless in general here...

AWS API Gateway should be bashed because it truly is shoddy.
I think we you implemented a solution you never know which way is cheaper until you see the bill. Then it really becomes the chicken and egg question. Will you decide to go serverless is whether your solution will be very complicated one day. If the solution is simple already then you won't get too much benefit from serverless.
Markets are not only on Amazon. Supporting a distro with time or money is a market transaction too.
Hire a PR firm to "pivot" and "get ahead" of the story.

It's Ed Snowden, with limited availability vs. PR firms and "patriotic" media with limitless budget.

War is peace.
Now allowing a bike, unless it is in a box, is what gets me. I don't understanding the reasoning behind this.
I consider Snowden the gold standard of government whistle blowers. Manning tried to do a good thing but was sloppy and trusted Assange a bit too much. I admired Assange during the early days of Wikileaks, but I really can't stand his grand standing. Before Snowden, people like Thomas Drake tried to address similar issues but got nowhere.

If the people in power don't like people like Snowden shining a light on their crimes, maybe they shouldn't be committing those crimes to begin with. There needs to be proper congressional oversight of these things. When that doesn't exist, it becomes the duty of the individual people involved in the government to inform the people about what the government is doing, and that's exactly what Snowden did. Not eagerly, and he paid a heavy price for it, but he recognised it as necessary and did what needed to be done.
It's easy to inspect your one, that didn't get the custom firmware loaded or bugdoor activated. To be fair the applies to mobiles as well (and probably more so since they are better targets).
Ease of configuration and maintenance is the metric.

I specifically addressed the question you asked - I would prefer that the different parts of the systemd software suite be split into programs that can be installed and run (or not) as the user pleases. I'm happy to use systemd, however, because I like nearly every part of it.
Snowden's trigger was seeing the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, lie under oath about mass surveillance to Congress when specifically asked about blind data collection.

When the head of the organisation commits federal crimes without reproach(he was not prosecuted after the details were revealed), who are you supposed to report to except the public?
I believe that the Rich Hickey’s mantra “simple is better than easy” applies very well to UIs.

A lot of the times UIs try to hide complexity by making it “easy” to do common tasks, but the underlying complexity is still there and rears its ugly head when you inevitably bump into an edge case, then you have to learn all that complexity (or as is often the case - rage quit).

A good example is Amazon software in general - from their shopping software to AWS console - all great if you’ve done it before and follow their guided path, but if you want to understand what will _actually_ happen or to do a specific edge case well then you better have a lot of nerves and patience.

Seen a person actually brought to tears by a shopping experience were she fell outside of a happy one click sale path and had to do some amendments, with some significant money on the line. She just felt powerless because suddenly an “easy” experience turned bad and now she had to understand _all_ the minutia around sellers, shipping and refund policies.

Not a pretty sight.

Had the underlying principles been a little less convoluted, and actually exposed, then a user could successfully navigate even some edge cases as then he would have at least some tools at his deposal.

Right now UIs tend to drift to “click and pray” category, where you identify what’s the several common scenarios and just cover those.
Oliver Williamson and the "New Institutional Economics" school came up with a four-layer model explaining that real-time/day-to-day economic activity is influenced by contracts (time frame: months to years) which in turn are influenced by institutions, laws, etc. (time frame: years to decades) which in turn are influenced by things like culture and religion (time frame: centuries).
I'm blind and deaf. I've explored 127 countries alone – here's what I've learnt
It DOES apply to a certain extent, and can produce a whole different set of headaches.

Instead of having "threads" you have the main program loop and the interrupt that sends audio (mostly through I2S, interrupt triggered when the I2S buffer is empty). When the interrupt hits you better have a buffer ready to be sent, otherwise it will click. Of course, the interrupt handler has to do just that (set a DMA transfer to send audio).

All that in sync with: capturing audio, reading from SD or storage, mixing, changing volume, applying effects, etc. Together with whatever the MCU has to do like reading buttons, communicating with other devices and dealing with a bunch of other interrupts. It's not always deterministic.

If the MCU has to do a lot of audio processing in-between audio interrupts, a big buffer (not always available) can be the solution at the cost of latency. If a smaller buffer is used instead, then the MCU executes the audio interrupt very frequently and the main program barely executes...

... lots of headaches.
My popcorn got cold. This train-wreck is taking too long. The suspense is killing me.
OLPC’s $100 laptop was going to change the world (2018)
The fact that you consider companies ethical is neither here nor there for the privacy score of their policy though. You haven't made a very strong case as to why your opinion needs to impact the metrics (or really given any justification for your feelings at all).

As to your two options having nothing to do with privacy: The fact that there cannot be any third-party beneficiaries is in fact a baldly privacy-friendly statement, because a third party is yet another party that may influence a privacy policy in a net-negative way.
Is there any fundamental reason for this, apart from AWS' pricing model? It seems to me that ideally, serverless should scale from extremely small to very big without too many problems.
You can use a BSD or Slackware.
When reporting this, it's useful to include your browser and exact version number. Most browser ship updated SSL cert packs with new versions, and debugging can be hard without this information.
> SOURCE CODE
> Sorry, but I do not release the source code for any of my software. This is particularly true for the Cash Register program.

> The Cash Register program. has many things that must be hidden like the passwords and PIN numbers. It also has things that users must not be able to change like sales and tax amounts and transaction numbers. These things could easily be changed by anyone who has the source code and anyone with the source code could write a program that would change the hidden things and then release it on the internet making my program useless.

It's all in FAQ. I don't really get the whole thing about the PINs/Passwords, but I'm guessing there's some logic in it.

The funny thing is he explicitly explains to people how to modify the binary with a Hex Editor to change language strings...
But things like this would happen, even from acclaimed developers, giving the engine a bad reputation among players:

> The frame-rate difficulties found in version 1.01 are further compounded by an issue common with many Unity titles - stuttering and hitching. In Firewatch, this is often caused by the auto-save feature, which can be disabled, but there are plenty of other instances where it pops up on its own while drawing in new assets. When combined with the inconsistent frame-rate, the game can start to feel rather jerky at times.

That studio is part of Valve now!

> Games built in Unity have a long history of suffering from performance issues. Unstable frame-rates, loading issues, hitching, and more plague a huge range of titles. Console games are most often impacted but PC games can often suffer as well. Games such as Galak-Z, Roundabout, The Adventures of Pip, and more operate with an inherent stutter that results in scrolling motion that feels less fluid than it should. In other cases, games such as Grow Home, Oddworld: New 'n' Tasty on PS4, and The Last Tinker operate at highly variable levels of performance that can impact playability. It's reached a point where Unity games which do run well on consoles, such as Ori and the Blind Forest or Counter Spy, are a rare breed.

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2016-firew...

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-02-10-firewatch-dev-...

Hopefully as the engine continues to improve dramatically, this kind of thing will be left in the past
I don‘t have an opinion on the macro picture of whether paper books are a net drag or benefit to the environment because I haven‘t done the math. I was only responding to OP that being taught on paper books somehow means lifelong attachment. I grew up in a paper world and like I said now even have „negative attachment“ to paper. That‘s one counterexample, and I know a few others. Soclearly it‘s not a general truth.
Only leak the files that are relevant.
> Happy to answer Qs about the tech behind [...]

What tech is involved to get something like this on the web?
> So you have to add a lot of logic to support all that.

Or, to point out the thing that is obvious to anyone who grew up on the old web:

Removing a whole lot of logic also works.
No, but you thinking it would be shows your biases/filterbubble.
In practice our infrastructure costs for scale-to-zero technology like Lambda and DynamoDB has been a lot lower. So much of the cost in reality comes from idling non-prd instances.
Interesting. Do you know why the sensors seem to have a binary output only, as opposed to checking for full level and dirt?

If we put our minds to it, these days we can often make sensors that are much better than humans for these kinds of applications.

Btw, you are talking about the former US president Obama? Seems a bit weird for him to care about car maintenance?
HD Microscopy in Milliseconds
Well, they're not in business anymore
I am not arguing against reporting wrongdoing, I am arguing against leaking secret files that have nothing to do with these wrongdoings.
I was thinking of something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuring
Millions of laptops are configured via LDAP and Active Directory every day.
Ye, but depends on how much loans Uber has if they can ever be profitable. But in theory yes. Just sack 95% of the RnD departement and raise fare prices untill supply and demand even things out.
JACK and pulseaudio are designed for entirely different use-cases. I have both installed on my system and switch as needed.
Why startups condense in America? http://paulgraham.com/america.html
> The buyers and investors are the one to worry, not the paid help.

Ah, the famous Nuremberg defense. Sorry to invoke Godwin's law immediately, but shifting responsibility away from the people executing the questionable work to the people who either own or consume it is a denial of agency of each and every software professional.

I argue that the workplace of the knowledge worker is not one of blind obedience. Moral reasoning should not be suppressed just because there are other market forces.
But there are distro maintainers that can choose between maintaining a systemd free distro or not. Sysadmins that can decide between deploying a systemd free disto or not. Developers that can decide between supporting systemd or not etc.

I have been out of that game since before systemd showed up on anybodies radar and thus have no horse in this race, but a lot of seemingly smart people appear to have independently decided that they prefer supporting systemd to any alternative.
"Serverless", or "App Engine" as it was called for the few years prior the hype, actually delivers pretty good results for a range of parameters. It might even be a wider range of parameters than the ones where the results are subpar... Or not, I'm not sure how to weight the "I have a predictable base load large enough for its cost to dominate the other factors" vs the other cases. But as always - popularity of a tool is a poor predictor of fitness to particular job at hand.
The new home directory does not need to be encrypted. It can easily be encrypted, but the main feature here is portability.
I've recently found the work of Alfie Kohn and his books (Unconditional Parenting, Punished by Rewards - these I've read) it's heavily evidence-based (lot's of cited research).

It challenges the status-quo but I really enjoy his perspective.

The books aren't really about dealing with very small babies , but you might enjoy his teachings.

There's a DVD (about 2 hour long) "Unconditional Parenting" which is a great summary of the book with the same name.

Best of luck in that adventure!
PA is fine for most needs. It's just not suitable for pro audio / music producing aplpications though. Niche problem, I agree, but still... (Jack is used here).
What did you use besides systemd and sysv? Personally, while I'm ok with systemd, I think Upstart was a decent replacement for the pile of scripts of yore, and gained little from the switch from it to systemd (we used Ubuntu Server where I worked).
I have a 48 but now I just use my 50g. The build quality isn’t as nice but it’s a hell of a lot faster. If HP had bothered to actually port the software to ARM instead of writing a Saturn emulator it could have been maybe 25x faster, though.

Anyone try the Prime? It seems like it’s targeted for kids, but the screen looks nice.
ALSA required you to configure dmix for cheap audio hardware to even have multiple sources...
There's already serverless where you don't have to do anything with OS/servers/infra: PaaS, like Heroku.

But no, that's not Amazon, so no one cares either way (pro/contra, cheap/expensive, fast/slow, easy/hard) :|
How do you suggest one configures Redis to avoid this kind of possible data loss while maintaining throughput? I think when enabling replication, users will assume that recent writes are safe. This bug or whatever you want to call it, seems to allow data to be unsafe as long as the high load persists.
I've had problems with that level of use due to cold-starts. It was mitigated by pinging it every 10 seconds with CloudFront.
Who are also first in line to collect when the company goes into bankruptcy and there is still money somewhere.
That's still not the fault of capitalism, but of the people opting for the cheapest solution. To introduce change, some kind of force would be required, which I strongly advise against. As soon as the self-interest of all actors is concerned things will change on their own.
For some reason I’m so much faster on a calculator than with Matlab or something. RPN is designed to get you answers quickly, while Matlab.. not so much.
I agree with your main points, even though I'm unsure of the time scale.

However:

> But this can go even a step further, rather than producing sheet music, an algorithm can generate the audio directly.

Even if this is a cool idea, I don't think it ever will be deployed large scale. Good quality beats/samples and increasingly even software instruments are becoming cheap. Working with raw audio seem like the wrong abstraction layer for music, almost like working with pixels instead of characters to synthesise text. While limiting - working with raw audio can possibly create completely new sounds - it will probably always be cheaper and yield better results to work with some representation of the music instead.
Sure, and hope that you aren't on a strict budget and the return flight doesn't cost a lot more. Oh, and that the credit comes in a timely manner and you aren't waiting until monday/tuesday because friday evening isn't a business day.
I think the problem is that moving from Lambda/FaaS to a container-centric alternative (ECS and friends) requires a complete re-architect of your stack. Whereas starting with a simple, single container solution and organically evolving that into container-orchestration is much simpler - because the fundamental building block hasn't changed. It's all just containers.

Personally I'd like to see the industry coalesce on "serverless" containers rather than FaaS which are organised around functions being the fundamental blocks. Please just run my Docker container(s) like a magic block box that is always available, scales as necessary and dies when no longer needed.
2018, Amtrak had $3.4 billion in revenue
2018, Uber had $11.7 in revenue
>> Ease of configuration and maintenance is the metric.

This way provided with many alternatives before systemd.

>> I would prefer that the different parts of the systemd software suite be split into programs that can be installed and run (or not) as the user pleases

Are you contradicting yourself? You say you like all of it after just pointing out its biggest flaws why systems engineers loath it.
Alsa and JACK when appropriate
I see, but what I know is that it's allowed to use multiple banks for the purpose of increasing the amount of money under FDIC insurance (which is more like $100k/bank, not $10k/bank).

There are services that split your money between multiple banks just for this reason.