skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I often see these comparisons done to try to discredit the use of cloud computing resources, often comparing single cloud entities to bare metal one-for-one comparisons.

But that's now how compute is delivered in projects any more. The value isn't on the box, it's on the platform.

I'm personally about to bolt together a solution that will need to scale significantly, that uses complex message queuing, enormous amounts of object storage, expose set of APIs, and require a highly available distributed document store. And I'm going to personally do it by myself without having to hire 14 SMEs across each of the domains.

The value isn't in a cheaper linux server, or less expensive bandwidth. The value is me being able to develop a solution from the ground up by bolting together Web services, Amazon S3, SNS/SQS, Lambda and DynamoDB from a menu of integrated services all by myself. Period.
Nah.. VR will do just fine.
>I also remember a case where a microcontroller would try to brick something when it detected a counterfeit cable

You might be thinking of the big FTDI scandal where they published a driver update for their chips that would attempt to detect a counterfeit FTDI chip and if it found one it would reconfigure the counterfeit chip with a bogus VID and PID thus rendering it essentially bricked. Bricking the cables using counterfeit chips wasn't the worst of it though, some of the chips in question were integrated into expensive equipment and rather than the manufacturer trying to use counterfeit FTDI chips they very well might be the victim being unwittingly sold counterfeits while paying the fraudster full price.
Self-hostable, yes. Idea is to pay the bills through a hosted offering and vertical integrations, but to provide a high-quality, does-the-right-thing platform for general use.
There's a massive difference between 'develop technologies which are indistinguishable from magic to people who don't know how they work' and 'completely simulate the informational complexity of the world using the human minds and computers with comparatively limited information processing capabilities.'

I'm not sure the second is even a logical possibility, never mind a practical one.
Lying/deceiving about what?

Also: what does "we recorded many participants performing tasks involving deceptive walking" mean? Does this AI detect those who perform deceptive walking, or people who are actually deceptive walking?
Mozilla has said they thought it was too difficult to monitor and moderate. Could that have been solved by moving to Freenode? Probably, but there are other issues with IRC.

Having to run your own IRC bouncer increases the barrier of entry, as does nickserv based auth. Modern people also expect to be able to seamlessly post images, large code examples, files, etc. Some people also want support for threaded conversations. None of this is offered by the typical IRC setup which Mozilla probably thinks that it scares away users. I do not think Matrix solves all of these yet, but it solves some of them.
There's no big conspiracy here. Passenger planes have actually gotten SLOWER over the last 20 years because it's more cost efficient.

Supersonic flight is fun, but borderline nonsensical. The cost is outrageous, it's incredibly inefficient, and the damage to the environment and local ecosystems is terrible.

Supersonic flight is the future for the 1% who can afford it and don't care about the costs they don't have to bear.

Honestly, I'd rather see Zeppelins come back before supersonic planes.
AWS charges you for storage, so even if everything is turned off you might have an old snapshot hidden somewhere racking up a few cents a month.

I've found AWS billing to be annoyingly opaque when you're trying to figure out what a service will cost you next month. I guess people who use it a lot have a system, but as a small fry newcomer they seemed really shy about what stuff cost.
Or almost as if the traffic were rerouted to other links as the article explains. That's the beauty of the IP.
Drugs I guess
I don't like the term "trafficking" for this reason. We have better terms, and criminal charges available for people who force or pressure someone into sex work against their will, including slavery, rape, and coercion.
> NOWHERE IN THE SOURCE CODE IS THIS FACT DOCUMENTED.
The referenced commit (https://github.com/golang/go/commit/675eb72c285cd0dd44a5f280...) has /* SIGSETXID; see issue 3871, 9400 /, / SIGCANCEL; see issue 6997 */

> The way things stand, nobody would ever know why the signals are set up the way they are unless they trawled through 40,000 commits. Yes, 40,000: git log --oneline | wc -l.

git blame exists. 675eb72c285 src/runtime/os1_linux.go (Austin Clements 2014-12-19 16:16:17 -0500 417) var sa sigactiont
AMD Ryzen 9 3900X wrestles wPrime world record from Intel Core i9-7920X
Speaking of rounding errors, you shouldn't vote, either.

In fact, even literally throwing up your hands is a waste of energy.
Because there is no easy way to pay for it that competes with cash -yet.
Negative feedback is far more valuable to the receiver then it is to the giver. In fact the giver is often punished for his presumption.

Therefore its no surprise negative feedback is not a popular concept among the plebs.
Costs $2 to sign up to that site.

At first I balked but then I realized somebody would probably enter every single person’s name and address in the country if they didn’t have some kind of cost associated with it.

Still stinks to pay someone not to harass you. But I guess that’s been common throughout history.
At first glance it seems to be much simpler, less complex, and therefore less features than Vagrant. Depending on your requirements, Vagrant may be a better option, but for me Multipass looks great.
Can we please just force the measure on to phone makers? You could solve this in one firmware update to add a white list. In my contacts? You get through, if not? You go straight to voicemail.
Oceans Apart
That's an interesting fix although I'm unsure about the sense in discouraging pushing changes.

It seems like the chief benefit they tout - clean history - is already handled by the auto-squash-and-delete approach. The real problem is the difficulty in cleanup of secondary or undeleted branches.

It isnt' really what I was asking for, though. What I want is a "soft-squash" where the intermediate commits aren't deleted, rather they're just hidden from history. The ability to draw a dotted line around a region of the DAG and say "treat this blob like it was one commit for all intents and purposes unless I say otherwise.
Apparently “the internet” to you is just hip startups if your name call outs are things like slack, trello, and lunch ordering. The startup echo chamber and the AWS echo chamber have a lot of overlap due to the elasticity you highlighted. That still doesn’t mean it’s representative of internet services.

When an AWS outage stops wire transfers, airline reservations, robot surgeons, etc, then it really will be “everyone”. Until then, try to give yourself some perspective so you can recognize when a product is mature enough that it’s time to start moving away from AWS.

> I have been in this space professionally for going on 13 years with nearly all of it in the startup space

This is why the siren call of instant infrastructure is so alluring to you. While your depth of knowledge for startup infra requirements is there, it does not transfer to large enterprises/campuses/etc where demand is very predictable and involving another company (Amazon) in your operations is nothing more than a liability.

Before you bemoan on-prem competing with Amazon’s world-class engineering org, consider that their priorities are spread across thousands of products all interacting with millions of customers. An outage that could destroy your business means nothing to them other than some reduced KPIs that month. While an on-prem solution might be worse in throughput, global latency, etc, the fate is in control of the org that can make sacrifices Amazon can’t (e.g. planned nightly outages).
I started my career at the peak of dot com, and remember one of my co-workers leaving. He’d been early at Wizards of the Coast. Someone else said he was “calling in rich”.
If a pond is glowing blue it's safe to assume there is far more radioactive contamination laying around than there is near the Chernobyl elephant foot. In a reactor it's contained but sitting near some random army base is bit different...
I'm curious what those toxic attitudes are. Surely the "we already invented it and you're reinventing it" can't be the only case.
I'm also curious if it's in an academia or in industry.
UPS and FedEx charge too much, and I do regular media shipping, so No, do not abolish them. If I could direct all of my tax money that goes to the US military into the USPS I would do that. Give them more money.
WebAssembly follows the unfortunate C paradigm that no checks are done at runtime, only these that programmer requests explicitly (and only if no undefined behavior is involved), to improve speed.

The WASM sandbox can call only set of specified host functions, but I expect so much functionality snowballing inside sandboxes that we'll have to allow everything including unsafe ones, anyway.
Source on this?

You couldn’t pay me to use a voice assistant, much less would I ever have a voice assistant in my home (Dear God, it scares me that people do this) - but AFAIK Siri doesn’t do this like Google does.
The Afsluitdijk
Yep, that's what I was thinking of. F5 for refresh is another artifact from that time.
Mechanical Mirrors
You're making the perfectly informed consumer argument? They don't exactly put warning labels on the packaging. "The company which produces this product does disproportional damage to the environment."
You don’t have to update to every new teensy release immediately. But do update dependencies regularly (at least once or twice a year). Once you’re in a hole deeper than a year it takes a LONG time to climb out.
Right, I guess I had it in my head that the Rust 2015-vs-2018 divide was that deprecation cycle.
So how do you do routing? I have an old Linux machine that I haven’t been using and don’t know how I can securely and efficient route that into the internet (don’t want to use my ip for connecting to Redis for example) which is why I as thinking of using some vpn hosted on gcp.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Can’t handle the monthly payments to gcp only to get a raspberry pi level of compute.
OFC the NSA asserts he didn't, but why would you trust the government to tell the truth? James Clapper flat out lied to Congress and got away with it. Why wouldn't they (the NSA) claim he didn't? They have an incentive to lie; They're not accountable to anyone. Snowden has no incentive to lie. And I assert it confidently because he did:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/news/edward-snowde...

https://time.com/53666/snowden-nsa-vanity-fair/

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mb9mza/exclusive-snowden-...

You can find many more articles stating that he did.
All of my signal desktop clients seem to update automatically, downloading new code and prompting me to restart the app to run it.

With such opaque, basically-RCE privileges assumed by the app, I am not sure what would stop a malicious insider from sending an update to silently replace the sgx keys or certs (or shipping any other targeted secret exfiltration code).

Seems to me that with the client autoupdate, this would be a much easier nut to crack than the secure enclave (not to disparage the work on the defense-in-depth). It just seems like a ton of work and complexity to me for not a ton of benefit considering the existing threat models.

Good on them for making the attempt, though.
Don't most (if not all) auto headlights turn on when the wipers are on, though? So, off if just cloudy, on in snow/rain.

I know mine do turn on, even at the lowest intermittent setting. I thought I'd read somewhere that that was typical, but... maybe not?
I guess I'm somewhat dependent on them. I don't use many Google products, but the two I do use (Gmail and YouTube) have a large enough effect on my life that I'd be in real trouble if I lost my account.
Hi, I'm the PM for Java at Microsoft. You can see this slide I presented at MS Ignite couple months ago:

https://twitter.com/chanezon/status/1192140812718657536

Happy to point you to the presentation if you are interested.

But in short, we use Java at some places like (there's probably more):

- Azure runtimes for end-users (App Service, Functions)

- Azure runtimes for other services (Azure HDInsight aka Big Data)

- LinkedIn backend

- Yammer backend

- Mojang Minecraft

- SQL Server Big Data Connectors (JVM is embedded in the DB)

- Internal Android and Xamarin development

Best,
Bruno
Reader did have social features which differentiated it from other feed aggregators. The power was in the network effect; if your friends used Reader then you would use it too. Without the social features it was not that great; just another aggregator.

To some extent Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc. have replaced this need, but with a lot of other noise.
This exists as an iOS feature. Not sure about Android.
This would only cause more apps leaking contact lists. It's a temporary patch for you, but it wouldn't actually punish the callers or force them to stop in any way.
Thanks.

But doesn't that lead to systems with infinite numbers of axioms?
Checkout datomic, you can query for facts given a certain point in time. This is common among customer preference storage too, like, "what's your favorite song or movie can change easily over time." Being able to query the state at a certain date can be helpful. Some predictive analytics can also be done like people with these preferences, how did they change once they had a family, or moved to another "life stage".

Though you probably don't need datomic, it would be not too complicated to model this in neo4j or some other RDF graph that supports arbitrary sized tuples. Datomic just supports this feature as a first class value offering.
Judging by this[1] graph, the federal government spends like 10x on renewable energy subsidies vs nuclear. Imagine how much more developed the nuclear power capabilities of the US would be if it received similar attention.

[1] https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2019/09/23/energy-subsidies-re...
Quick solution: fine phone companies instead, since it's easy to collect from them. Give 'em 6 months notice and I bet spam and scam calls are nearly eliminated before the notice period's up and you barely end up collecting any fines.
> The value isn't in a cheaper linux server, or less expensive bandwidth. The value is me being able to develop a solution from the ground up by bolting together Web services, Amazon S3, SNS/SQS, Lambda and DynamoDB from a menu of integrated services all by myself. Period.

Cool. It sounds like money doesn’t matter to you because you’ve identified a really high margin business and time to market is critical. This doesn’t match how 99% of businesses work though.
So besides the fact that this tool has exactly the same “problems” you describe in the first two points (see another sub thread for MacOS vs Linux host running this tool - different images are available; and you’re just trusting that “bionic” is a “solid reliable” image to use), the rest of your complaint is: “I don’t want a file that defines my one or 100 vm setup so I can commit it to the project. I want to run a command and define the same attributes over and over again every time any person on the project needs to use it”.

Also I don’t know why you mentioned “vagrant destroy” and then went on about “toil through your provisioning”.

If you want to use cloud init, there is a vagrant provisioner that supports it. If you don’t, you can use another one like shell scripts or chef or salt or puppet or Ansible or whatever.

If you destroy the machine the provisioning will need to run again - yes. But why would you destroy the machine if you don’t want it to start from scratch? But what toiling is there? Once the provisioners are defined, you just let them run - how is that different than a cloud init provisioned vm?
Because they are making something you want?
An Update on Cdnjs
The costs and efficiency can probably be improved. But I still agree it would be for the <1%. Probably a more rarified offering for those who buy whatever the highest class seats are in a plane today. Say $5-10K for a NY to London flight in all probability.
All that is missing for me is a active library of machine images like vagrant cloud. That would be amazing!
Already done, see here:

http://techlib.com/electronics/roberts_radio.htm
Bit of a stretch
Yeah, it has a very small number of instructions and is still Turing Complete. The Brainfuck code gets compiled to bytecode so I guess technically I could have used anything. The underlying VM was created with BF in mind though.
Facebook does not use any meaningful amount of D.

Source: I worked at Facebook for four years. My first diff at Facebook was even in D, in a project that was already effectively abandoned by the time I changed it.

It's really a tiny, insignificant minority of actively running code there, possibly zero by now.
Are there any reasons for going bare metal today? Does it lead to competitive advantage in some scenarios?

Imagine if Netflix or Twitch were founded today - two businesses with demanding media-hosting needs. Would they be better if they used Amazon infra or built out their own data centers and CDNs?

I'm really curious about this because I'd like to get into the space and I'm mulling over bare metal as a competitive advantage vs a barrier to scaling. I've seen how difficult it is to provision and upgrade machines. At the same time, if you were to make it to scale, it seems like having the bare metal and the talent to manage it puts the ball back in your court. Am I wrong?
Dittos. Rather philosophical, but definitely worth working through.
Tell HN: Planned Mandrill outage for almost 6 hours
Wow, just received this email from Mandrill where they will be doing a planned upgrade but will have a 6 hour downtime. Yes, 6 hours and nothing will work including APIs, SMTP etc. This is a big deal for companies relying on Mandrill. So plan accordingly.

https://mailchimp.com/planned-mandrill-outage
I doubt anyone could accurately price CO2 emissions.
I don't believe Ruby has ever endorsed 4 spaces...
I currently can't do that. I can turn on DND and miss every notification, but I can't filter my calls with a whitelist.
Except if a driver is performing the same task over and over then they will eventually get bored of it as well, leading to the same distracted end result.
An event like this, where multiple fibers are disrupted and magically fixed less than an hour later just smells like the NSA, one of the other five eyes or a friendly telco installed a fiber optic beam splitter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beam_splitter
Precisely. APIs and ubiquitous services across providers has made multi-cloud possible.
> if the brain's computational model is Turing complete, it will follow that we can simulate a brain inside a Turing machine

I don't believe this is correct. If the brain's model/the brain itself is Turing-complete, that doesn't mean a Turing machine can simulate; it means that the brain's model can simulate any Turing machine qua Turing machine. This does not imply the reverse, that any Turing machine can simulate it.
I'm convinced their goal is to leverage GitHub to win the cloud wars and that they'll keep porting all of their Azure products onto it until GitHub is the cloud provider.

I bet we'll see a click to deploy button on github for most common web frameworks soon.

Having your git history hooked up to your deployed infrastructure will allow them to do some amazing things around live debugging. (similar to what google is doing with cloud source repositories https://cloud.google.com/debugger/).
Don Knuth on General Principles
Interestingly, in the 3rd post in the submission, Pike specifically avoids mandating a style guide.

> I would rather not turn this into rules and style guides, just a widespread understanding that a changelist description is worth taking some time to write.
And an industrial mining dump truck with 14 ft wheels is a superior tool to a cargo bicycle. Doesn't mean it's the right tool for the job.
While I don't really understand the appeal of social robots beyond being sophisticated toys, the failures of Jubi and (I think) Anki have given me a strong reason to avoid them -- they depend on an external server, and so if the company fails, the robot becomes junk.
Having worked at Google, agree 100%. I think people at Google expect people to look at the commit message more than at other places because it's so easy.
I'm not going to wish for Boeing's demise, just that they (or anyone else) buys Boom once their XB-1 is feasible.

Need that competition. :)
I was once waiting in a doctor's office about ~4-5 years ago, and sitting close to me was an older lady, perhaps around 60.

A commercial came on the TV in the waiting room for SAP, and this lady started cursing about what a piece of trash it was. I was really shocked. She was not someone I expected to even know what SAP was, but I guess she was an unfortunate user stuck with having to use it in an office somewhere.
My CS teacher told me that in the Good-old-times(tm) they archived not just external libraries; but a copy of the compiler with the source code for any given release.

Still wonder how they actually did it because storage was expensive as hell.

Probably everything was backed up on a tape.
The fact that you personally use a heavily subsidized, underpriced service is not really an argument for keeping it on a national scale.

"I personally use and like a service" is a different statement than "it's in our national interest to continue gifting that service $10b per year in subsidies and benefits".
Vivaldi to change user-agent string to Chrome due to unfair blocking
I start work before sunrise, and don’t get off until nearly sundown. In the winter months, I can’t really avoid driving in the dark.

I could take the bus but the schedule is so sparse where I’m going it would be quicker to walk (almost an hour). There’s no great options.
Not a product, but I won't leave vim because the keyboard shortcuts

Gmail has vim like input too. Since I mastered that, my time to process email is like 20% of what it used to be. I live in an inbox zero world, it's great
Wuffs v0.2: memory-safe, 2x faster vs. C giflib, 3x vs. Go GIF, 7x vs. Rust GIF
I just remember wishing it was faster. Now that it's faster I still wish it was faster.
Usually taillights turn on automatically when dark.
(As someone who drives a truck in an area much like yours)

This works, until you realize that because you're higher than everyone else, they all think YOU have your high beams on. And then you get flashed and honked at on a regular basis (at least I do). Then I actually turn on my high beams to show people what it could be like and they take theirs off.

But even then, you're still right. The worst case scenario in a truck is still nothing compared to the blinding light of a lifted F250 with upgraded HIDs when I'm in my fiesta.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/28/apple-apologizes-for-listeni...
There is.

https://github.com/alphapapa/matrix-client.el/
Why does the title not contain "to ensure he gets new work"? The original title was 2 characters too long for HN, but could have been edited to contain that information. For example: "Contractor admits planting logic bombs in software to ensure he’d get new work"
multipass supports two hard-coded remotes, `release:` and `snapcraft:`. It should be feasible to be able to launch any of the VM images from LXD (i.e. https://us.images.linuxcontainers.org/), as long as there was a way to add a new _remote_.

edit: there is a pending issue https://github.com/canonical/multipass/issues/307
Danger of using fully homomorphic encryption: A look at Microsoft SEAL
Seems like something you wouldn't want to maintain, especially on day 1. It's always something that can be built and transfer over to after the business has grown and developed.