skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is factually correct statement while apparently downvoted. Linus Torwards is paid for his effort. Which is also actually right state of things, not an insult.
Although you are technically correct in that the cost of system calls on most systems is high, your post also implies to a casual reader that the cost is fundamental. This is not true. As demonstrated in the benchmark, the hardware cost of systems calls/trapping is quite low. Even accounting for hardware workarounds (which were not even known about when the common consensus decided system calls were slow), excepting the case of hardware virtualization which has much more expensive mitigations, the fundamental cost is a fraction of the actual cost.

The majority of the cost (~90+%) is actually due to software. In the system call case this is the implementation of the system call. In the context switch case this is usually the cost of the scheduling decision. These operations take material amounts of time and access memory which evicts user caches. It is in speeding up the software component that real gains can be made. This is not to say that system calls could ever be made "free" since function calls/loads/stores will still be ~100x faster, but the cost would probably be ~10% of the current cost if they software component could magically be made instant.

As an example of what I am talking about, there is this talk by Google from 2013 [1] which describes a "fast context switch" system call (benchmark at 18:40). This "context switch" knows what it is switching to which lets it bypass the scheduling decision in normal context switches. As a result it takes ~170 ns (which is pretty close to the hardware cost mentioned in the OP) vs 2000 ns of a normal context switch.

I could go into more detail as to some of the causes of the underlying software costs, but that is a discussion for another time, so I will just leave this off with summarizing my point.

tl;dr: System calls are slow. It is due to the software implementing them, not the hardware.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXuZi9aeGTw
For acquirers, it makes more sense for it to be some other company that wants to add 'cloud provider' to their list of services. To avoid losing their customers to amazon or google or MS.
In fact, there is a pretty good circumstantial case to be made that the true (but unspoken) purpose of the amendment was to guarantee the slave states the ability to forcibly suppress slave rebellions.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/24/opinion/second-amendment-...
But a lot of things that used to require custom software ... don't, anymore. I think what happens is that the kinds of jobs that are stitched together with Iftt/Zapier/Google sheets/whatever stop being classified as "software," so we've got an ever-moving-target.

There'll always be a frontier that requires deeper technical expertise. But that frontier will keep moving.
Do you have an example? My mother in law just got a big fancy windows laptop and the track pad is small and same old clunkiness.
> I'd rather see a website, some scripts on github, talking through a problem rather than a piece of paper saying you completed a course.

This is something that is feasible for someone who completes this course. If the job descriptions specifies that a github portfolio is preferable, then I would simply omit mention of the certification (it's free, so no big deal) and link to the profile instead.
Wow, this is news to me.
Here is another one then - Windows Calculator running in the browser. https://calculator.platform.uno/
Show HN: Windo, a Simple Timezone Tool
You'll need to prepare the team for when you get sick/go on vacation anyway so better start on that now.
Thank you very much, the message had no details, sorry, just that it was blocked. I assume overly broad rule not liking xyz domain.
I graduated high school in 2007. My entire K-12, we would occasionally go to the computer lab to do things. The lab had enough computers for everyone in the class to use one.

Granted, that's a lot different from each student having a computer in class all the time.

I think the school did actually buy a cart of portable laptops that teachers could check out for doing assignments in class. Mostly I found it to be unproductive. Then again, I found a lot of teaching techniques to be unproductive.
Hey hacker news, Alex here!

I created the timezone tool I have always wanted. Something simple, useful and shareable.

The application is URL based and saves to your browser's storage so you don't have to keep adding/removing timezones to compare.

Additionally, I wanted each URL to be shareable across many platforms. Windo parses each URL to generate dynamic open graph images and titles that unfurl when you post that link to different platforms.

There is a lot I still want to do, but I was curious if this is something you all would use and why?

Thanks a ton!

- Alex
> what's the effect on consumers?

Consumer-welfare standard is not the only concern of antitrust regulation.
According to [0] the limit in the US is 100Wh, so you could fit a battery that is three times bigger (assuming 3.3V). I don't know what the relevant numbers are elsewhere.

[0] https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/whatcanibring/...
Aside from ~UncleOxidant's really good reply -- to save as much as possible with a goal towards being financially independent by 50 -- there are a couple of other options which anecdotally seem to have worked well for a lot of people:

You can become an expert in a niche subject. The tricky part here is that it has to be a niche subject that pays well, with a lot of demand but not so much demand that newcomers are tempted to do the work to also become an expert in it. One example of this, that most on HN would like to pretend doesn't exist, is COBOL. COBOL programmers can command some pretty nice rates now, because nobody wants to work with COBOL but it still powers a lot of the world.

It's also a great time to start your own business. Maybe your kids are out of the house, hopefully you've become a seasoned industry veteran, you've seen other people make mistakes and you've gathered together a nice bit of savings and some excellent credit. Why not put those resources and that experience to use and start your own business? See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18212409
If you're smart enough to think about it logically, you're probably also smart enough to realize there's always a bigger fish.

The exception would be the fanatically oriented, as acting in opposition to logic is part of the basic premise.
I base my recession predictor on BS detection. The dot-com bubble and mortgage crisis were driven by lies, this time is no different with buybacks. You cannot outrun truth forever.
> I don't think either side is right here, but I don't think creating a public fork and building a community around that is an unbiased and neutral response

Linux distro maintainers routinely create "public forks" even of actively-maintained packages, and no one sane views that as a hostile move or something to complain about. It's part of curating a well-kept ecosystem around your solutions.
Can anything on the internet really be a monopoly? Can abc.com stop you from visiting xyz.com instead?
Agreed. In reality our time is zero sum, and if you could be doing something better with your time you should. Exercise has a whole host of mental benefits.
At least they know how to ask the important questions:

"Do you want fries with that?"
I used to work for a large (American) company where vacation days were traditionally accrued but there was a "cash-out vacation hours" button on the HR portal. It was just another way pressure people into working more hours.
> Is any tech worker seriously that desirable still that they are being hounded immediately after getting fired?

I get hounded constantly now, and I don't even do anything that interesting. Having a LinkedIn account and accepting connection requests from recruiters is a good first step.
Actually, you'd be surprised. Every mobo I've dealt with recently doesn't include POST beep diag code listings. Not ASRock, not ASUS, not Gigabyte, not MSi.

At least the motherboards tend to have screen printing that tells you which header pins works for switches/LEDs without the need for the manual.
I actually don't list that one anymore, misspoke in my post. I list the EdX and RedHat ones still though.
I think monetization is difficult IFF you don’t think about asking for money from the get-go. I’m actually of the opinion that open source projects are not well-equipped to build companies around, but can serve as an early guide to nascent market demand.

Monetization looks difficult because people keep building free things and then trying to figure out how to charge for them. From my perspective, the better bet is to build a free thing, prove the market, and then figure out what the paid thing might look like — even if totally different.

I think there’s a decade ahead of us where developers can start asking, “how can I turn this {useful tool} into a SaaS product?” We've been seeing this for years, I just think folks can start getting more ambitious about it. :)
Half (more probably 99% actually) of our critical infrastructure software use that wording (or an equivalent one), regardless of it is free software or proprietary software.

Yet most are maintained responsibly, if they are used for serious stuff and/or advertise in a way that suggest that kind of usage can be considered.
"My wife's job gives her seven days of vacation total."

That's just nuts. I had 15 for a while and it felt to me like I could never get a break and life was just a never ending string of work.
Companies manufacturing these type of machines get away with these insane claims by benchmarking probabilistic algorithms against exact solvers.
I agree with your analysis. Let me just add that Tesla keeping its profits high means it has more money to build new car factories and also expand battery production.
Amazon did not have a proper door-to-door delivery service until very, very recently. And even now it is limited to a few locations. The rest are hardly tech companies, Google Maps and Street View are as much about UI and implementation as the actual photography. Most of the other companies named would probably only sell raw data to law enforcement and finance, your average consumer would not be able to have access.
This assumes that men and women en masse want equal roles in raising children. I'm not convinced that this is the case.
> "Induced demand does not suggest that supply is less than demand - it implies that demand is "flexible" to meet any supply conditions."

that's the exact interpretation i'm refuting.

of course supply is less than demand. that's because the price of using roads is (perceived to be) zero, but the cost of construction on the supply side is high (and increasing, relative to inflation). it's impossible to meet the demand for free when costs are high.

my point is that this mispricing is a political and cultural choice, not an economic one explained by "induced demand". by using an economic concept for a non-economic market, we fall prey to misinterpreting and misadvocating.

we need to make the price of private transport much more transparent (e.g., real-time pricing) and rein in costs (land prices, legal/regulatory costs) so that we can make better choices in allocating our precious and limited resources (toward more mass transit for example).

(real-time pricing should also be progressive so that roads aren't just for rich people.)
It's biological (aka biological determination). There's the famous study of how judges handed out verdicts based on what or when they ate:

https://www.pnas.org/content/108/17/6889
Part of using any piece of software, professionally or privately, open source or commercial, is assessing how well if will meet your needs now and in the future, and possible complications you might anticipate.

Doing this well and thoroughly is extremely hard, and commercial enterprises spend a lot of time and money doing so (or pay the equivalent of insurance to not worry about it). Doing a minimal amount of research entails doing what you did. Look at the current and past state of the item in question, and decide whether it's worth putting the significant amount of time and effort into using it.

I can't help but feel the vast majority of people complaining failed to do this minimal amount of legwork. They're upset about their lack of forethought for what they view as a bad investment, but that's on them. Unfortunately, I find people often have a hard time accepting blame onto themselves, but feel there is blame to be assigned, and so it needs to be directed somewhere.

They say don't look a gift horse in the mouth, but if you are responsible for dealing with whatever diseases that horse might introduce to your stable, or even if you are just legally obligated to deal with the care and feeding or removal on death of such a large animal, you definitely look that horse in the mouth for red flags.
So I could just make a DDG?
See: Ad hominem (Latin for "to the person"), short for argumentum ad hominem, typically refers to a fallacious argumentative strategy whereby genuine discussion of the topic at hand is avoided by instead attacking the character, motive, or other attribute of the person making the argument, or persons associated with the argument, rather than attacking the substance of the argument itself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
Scrumdog Millionaire.
Their marketing got me. I was duped.
https://thestrangeloop.com/2018/shaping-our-childrens-educat...
I've tried the pads on the past few years' Dell XPS laptops, and the one on the MS Surface Book, and I can say they are definitely not as nice (physical touch-wise, ignoring the integration with the software at all) as Apple's.

Whatever process Apple uses to finish the glass touchpad surface must be hard to replicate, because I haven't found anything comparable.

Some are bearable, but not as much of a joy to use (compared to other input devices).
Would've been great if they had used a Thinkpad keyboard like on the Novena: https://www.crowdsupply.com/img/b4cb/novena-954-edit_jpg_pro...
> Extensive well crafted automation tools and massive economies of scale are the only thing that will save you.

Ironically, this same strategy is what makes cloud providers more interchangeable to their users, and drives down prices.
Profit margins back in the day were a lot better than they are now. I started a web hosting company back in 99' as a high school senior with a couple hundred dollars, bootstrapped it to half a million in a couple years, and then over a million by year 10 (and sold it!) At that point margins had gotten skimpy and AWS with all their backing was eating up the market.
Wait, there was something special about the Russian translation of LotR? I totally missed it then, because that's how I read LotR as a kid (translated Russian version), and I have never re-visited the book since then, as I was not a big fan of the movies (which, I know, is almost a sacrilegious thing to admit, given the reactions I've received for saying it irl).
From the rest of the discussion, it sounds like they're legally required to keep it so they have evidence that all their performers are of-age.
And today is that day.

cats -site:example.com works on both DuckDuckGo and Google, except... Google Shopping doesn't give a shit about -site when there are sponsored links to be shown.

Search for, say, Anker, on google and -site:amazon.com removes amazon, -site:bestbuy.com removes Best Buy (nothing against Best Buy, it's just the first result I saw not including Amazon, so the easiest to check).

Flip over to Shopping and it's wall-to-wall Amazon.

So I have a new skill, but at the cost of knowing I'm screwed instead of not knowing. Fuck.
It's weird because although I'm aware that the US Stock Market has been doing great, at least here in Europe it feels that for most people we still haven't recovered from the 2008 crisis.
if google can do it!
One of the interesting metrics from my time working in global escalations for one of the worlds largest electronics manufacturers is that most customers don't call in for support, but on average we get 3.5 calls per user per account lifetime.

The 80/20 rule in in full effect here. The 'needy' customers are extremely resource intensive.
Xenomorphs (or less exotically, parasitic wasps) reproduce just fine in that style.
This takes the idea of work being a queue of queues to the extreme: https://amontalenti.com/2019/11/04/work-is-a-queue-of-queues
stock vim or do you use plugins?
> definitions so bad that the authors belong in the Hague

As someone from nearby The Hague, um, what does this mean?
> I think this approach leads to sustainability problems, and discourages individuals from sharing their work in open source form. I make a project because I need it, and maybe it's fun to build. I generally share it because I think others might find it useful too.

I don't believe that every little open source project is automatically held to the rules I described. But once your exposure gets bigger, you suddenly enter different waters. Hopefully you might have maintainers of a distribution shielding you from the biggest impact.

> What I'm reading in your comment is that once it becomes widely used, it becomes my responsibility to meet the needs of these people and organizations who have started using the work I freely give to them. The act of having it used by other people obligates me to them.

That is precisely what is happening in many places. I didn't say I like it. In most cases people can move. Sometimes the "market" moves on or forks it. But this is what I have been seeing more and more.

> If the goal is only to build a thing and share it, there can be no such obligation - regardless of how popular it gets.

This is tricky. Viewed from the moral standpoint of the starter of the project, I agree. But once you got into the limelight with your project and other people started depending on it, every misstep suddenly becomes a jackass move. You essentially lost the project.
OP asked what to do with his free time at work, not how to manage his career
I partially agree. I _do_ actually think that you have a certain obligations to your users.

For Rust, my personal mantra was always that _usage is contribution_. Why? Because we have a high interest in adoption. It's literally one of our top-priority goals.

But not everyone taking part in these discussions is a user or someone I have some kind of relationship with. And a relationship goes both ways.

To take your example: if a kid showed up and was _constantly_ loud, didn't respect you or showed no interest in learning? What if _most_ of the kids were like this?

Would you still like to go every Saturday?

I do teach in similar settings (RailsGirls, RustBrige) and a crucial part of the experience for me is that many attendees have a progress that they are thankful for. The deal and the relationship works, even if it is just short.

My big frustration is that the debate is often "Maintainer vs. Users", but I don't believe that boundary is as hard as people make it to be. Still, user entitlement exists and is _very_ rampant and this is what people are up against, even if they put it less nuanced. (maintainer entitlement also exists, but that's a story for another day)
Yeah, but that energy dissipates pretty quickly. I took three weeks off recently. I came back very energized and upbeat. It took maybe 2 days to get back to "normal".
CuriousMarc [1] bought the clock at a space auction. We hope the clock still works. We plan to power it up and get it working, but first I needed to reverse-engineer the circuitry to figure out how to power it.

[1] https://youtube.com/curiousmarc
What does? I made a few claims.
It amazes me no end that when I turned 18 I was contracted to work on a Cray J90 with a staggering 128 Mwords of RAM at a financial institution, and that today 4GB is considered tight for running a consumer OS with a browser with more than a few tabs open.

I really cannot fathom what could possibly require so much memory. It’s just taking some hypertext markup, some scripts, and rendering a web-page.

I genuinely do not understand. I’m totally baffled.
> but there'd probably be a couple weeks of chaos. Does Linus bear zero responsibility because he's a volunteer

Linux Foundation would appoint somebody else on his place and have him sign similar contract. It would be likely a person that is already employed in similar capacity - one of current paid maintainers. No fork would be needed. Linus Torwalds is not a volunteer at this point.

Linus Torwalds will leave linux one day. He wont stay there forever - most likely to retire, but possibly to do something else.

Also, Linux is particularly bad example, because most contributors are paid for their effort by someone.
I wholly agree with your viewpoint in this comment.

There is a prominent "Fork" and "Clone" button in every GitHub repo. If you're so fucking sick of the lack of support from the maintainer, fork it, fix the flaws that you've found, and assume some of the responsibility for the project.

This whole situation is a bunch of people getting angry because of what they view as a lack of accountability. That's preposterous - the nature of GitHub and open source makes it super easy for you to assume some of that accountability yourself. The fact that so many people chose to get upset rather than assuming accountability speaks volumes to me.

Pull requests welcome, jerks.
I wasn't aware anti-trust extended to cover "creepy" behavior and "not offering support [for free services]".

Literally every Google product has a competitor and the cost of switching is very low unless you're talking about their hardware, which is hardly successful much less dominant.
The world is a big place. Consider a country or a business owner with limited IT expertise. Businesses moving at a fast pace in such environments have a way ( leaky albeit) to hire talent.
I personally have canceled a linode instance and replaced it with GCP free tier vm about a year ago.

I feel like GCP/AWS free tier have probably hurt the $5/mo hosting business a lot.
> ...surely there's some level of responsibility here?

No, there isn't.

> ...actively rejecting security patches is another level of irresponsibility.

No, it's not, because the project owner has literally no responsibility to you or anyone else in the context of this project.

If you care, you need to fork and patch the project. If you're feeling generous, you can share that fork and maybe others will use it.
The fact that your comment here hasn't been downvoted to oblivion suggests to me the only beef most people have with what you've said is that you criticized the Democrats. I find this really surprising given typical HN'er political leanings.

Is this an indication of some sort of tipping point being reached? Have most people regardless of politics come to the same conclusion about the reality of the silicon valley surveillance-fueled power grab?
Not during the night. When the satellite is out of direct sunlight, it also does not see any illuminated part of the Earth.
Sorry to nitpick, but I think you meant to use byte units (with a capital B), not bits (lower-case b).
For reference, I have a Thinkpad x200 with 8 GB of RAM (it has an Intel Core 2 Duo). I installed Debian with XFCE, and it idles at 300 MB of Ram, and I have yet to use more than 1.5 GB of RAM. I say that to say I think 4 GB of RAM is plenty if you use it for casual computing tasks.