skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My company cannot run our infrastructure in the cloud because we do performance/availability monitoring from ~700 PoP’s around the world.

Not running our infrastructure in the cloud is part of our value proposition.

Our customers depend on us to detect and alert them when their services go down. We _have_ to be operational when the cloud providers are not, otherwise we aren’t providing our customer with a valuable service.

Another reason we don’t run in the cloud is because we store a substantial amount of data that is ever increasing. It’s cheaper to run our own SAN in a data center than to store and query it in the cloud.

The final reason is our workloads aren’t elastic. Our CPU’s are never idle. In that type of use case, it’s cheaper to own the hardware.
Would 100% suggest going the basic OAuth route with FB, and not relying on their SDKs whenever possible. Been bit by Friday-afternoon-PST deployments that wreak havoc until work starts Monday too many times :/
The drivers don't know in advance what tip they're getting, do they? Doesn't seem to be the case on UberEats, anyway. Failure to tip will eventually result in fewer available drivers and later/colder deliveries, but it's a statistical thing rather than an individual consequence.

I live out in the middle of nowhere and consider myself lucky that they deliver at all, so if the food is a bit on the cold side I don't normally take it out on the driver. I've had other complaints with UberEats, but overall the service works about as well as can be expected.
Yeah, I tried evil (and variants that used it), but the slight edge cases where it didn't quite work like vim messed me up enough to undermine its usefulness. Both in that I actually used things that it didn't provide, and in that hitting some places where it didn't work cast uncertainty over the whole thing: In vim, if I know a keybinding or command, it will work; in evil there was always a moment of "will that work... okay, that does work" that broke my flow (or worse, "okay, let me just... oh, evil doesn't do that, now what?").
You can do IaC for bare metal home servers as well. And thats coming from a 90s kid. We run a few physical servers for a college society with proxmox on top, and all of our VMs are codified in Ansible
Never heard about this. I'm starting to read some things and it seems interesting. Thanks!

And about this:
> Or more specifically, just getting the term for it. I spent years trying to articulate in my own mind many of the ideas in Taleb's book, and once I had a word for it I could see it everywhere

It is called Hypocognition, I recently read about it here [1] and here [2], and that blew my mind.

[1]: https://aeon.co/ideas/hypocognition-is-a-censorship-tool-tha...
[2]: https://psyarxiv.com/29ryz
No they don't . Things you mentioned are very easy to deploy on-premises, and they won't take more than one man month to deploy and maintain.
>That definition is rather too broad. It makes basically everything spyware which dilutes the word too much to be useful.

I don't agree. I was very specific in stating that the practice of consuming a user's resources to transmit their information, without their explicit consent, nor an indication of the activity, for the sole benefit of Facebook and the software developer, can absolutely be considered spyware.
Data isn't insight. More metrics isn't more better. Most of these metrics are incommensurable across teams, people, projects...counterproductive to expose them. They aren't even robust to gaming.
My first thought was more sleep. Without a commute in the morning I have to imagine most people are getting an extra 30 minutes at least. Maybe even an hour.
It's worth noting that warehouses are indeed nice for constrained tasks, but they themselves are generally quite unconstrained environments, as they are generally constantly changing shape. In the context of mobile robots, mapping and localization without any kind of concrete features to monitor is a hard problem.

Just some food for thought, I suppose.
> And, what knowledge and/or credentials do you have to base the conclusion that "public health experts (and basically all medical experts) are in over their heads" on?

Nobody alive on earth right now has ever experienced anything like this before at this scale. So by definition, there are no "veterans", there is no one with any experience whatsoever, just people who did case studies of past pandemics when air travel didn't exist and people that ran some simulations. Inexperienced people, no matter how expert they are, are terrible at predicting the future (re: the last 20 years of climate change expertise). "Oops, the model was wrong again, but we learned more for next time!"

> Do you know what contained the outbreak in China

How do we know it's contained? China kicked out all western journalists and nobody can audit any of their numbers. China is not exactly a clean/sanitary place, I wouldn't put it past CCP to simply cover it up to save face. Or maybe they realized it's not really as bad as it seems and they just let it run rampant.

How is Japan faring so well despite not sheltering in place and not testing?
> keeping pizzas vertically in their delivery backpack

This is a failstate in the recent video game Death Stranding, which yes, sometimes involves pizza delivery.
They need to stop pushing to the HTML5 history. They should replace instead.
Github has made their pricing model and the motivations for it pretty clear. They subsidize their hosted service with enterprise self-hosted pricing to justify expanding their feature set. This has been true for a long time, well before the MS acquisition. The things that have changed are:

- Developments that were in place were released.

- The subsidization model made pricing structure changes possible.

None of this has to be a big conspiracy or a big change from Microsoft's acquisition. It's possible they just have a business model that's less nefarious than you're able or willing to understand.
You might feel like some guy, but be someone's brilliant teacher.
I was in manufacturing IT before moving to big tech. Our big campuses in the US & Europe had 40-80mbps internet circuits. The remote facilities in developing countries often only had 10mbps MPLS connections to a regional hub. To be 100% honest, we had 10x the outages caused by crappy local infrastructure than anything having to do with a SaaS service or IaaS/PaaS provider. Seriously, things like bad storms, a snake (cobra!) sneaking into the server room and frying itself and a machine it was snuggling against, utility workers accidentally severing cables, generators failing during power outages, labor strikes, and so much more. Moving to the cloud -- or even just hosting everything centrally -- was much more stable than maintaining a fleet of distributed machines.
Nowadays, lots of things are spyware. It's important that we acknowledge this fact. Back when the Internet had a more technical userbase, the shady nonsense software tries to pull nowadays would not have flown at all. Those people would be outraged, and they'd absolutely agree that things like Facebook, Spotify, and Windows 10 meet the definition of spyware.

But slowly, the Internet population grew to include the masses, and it turns out most people don't care whatsoever about what their software is doing or how it works so long as it gets the job done, whether that's communicating with relatives, playing music, or providing a platform for other applications.
https://hackaday.io/pokemongospoofing
> The Cloud is just someone else's computer.

Well, not if it's private cloud, and only partially it's hybrid cloud. Cloud is dynamic provisioning, public cloud is cloud that is also on rented hardware.

> If they're running those machines more cheaply than you are, they're cutting out some cost.

Economies of scale are a real thing.
Chloroquine a potent inhibitor of SARS coronavirus infection and spread (2005)
Interested, but your price point is way to high. It’s also pretty easy for me to go to each vendor you mention on the landing page and fill out the opt out request form they are mandated to provide.
Pokemon go spoofing iOS and Android
It has everything to do with it. Software engineers should take care to consider the risks and potential downsides to the shady products they build with that talent that aren't just downtime or tech debt but the larger impact to society itself. Silicon Valley prioritizes technical talent while completely disregarding strength and quality of character.
Black and Asian Groups More Likely to Die from Coronavirus
Why are you so unwilling to read anything on that page except that specific paragraph. The next paragraph says:

> Preferences cookies — Also known as “functionality cookies,” these cookies allow a website to remember choices you have made in the past, like what language you prefer, what region you would like weather reports for, or what your user name and password are so you can automatically log in.

and further down the page a little bit:

> Receive users’ consent before you use any cookies except strictly necessary cookies.

I sincerely hope that nobody reading this thread follows any of your terribly incorrect advice.
How can one developer have thousands of apps? It sounds just like a giant scattergun for malware. There are not 1000 distinct useful ways to use an iPhone.
Do you think automation doesn't exist with on-prem?
The vSphere terraform provider is very mature.

https://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/vsphere/index.html

You can build your own machine images with packer, and actually have more control by building them from scratch (ISO) rather than being locked into a selection of base AMIs.

https://www.packer.io/docs/builders/vmware/

You can launch HA kubernetes clusters with cluster API. vSphere, openstack and even bare metal pxe all have providers

https://cluster-api.sigs.k8s.io/user/quick-start.html

Cloud native is not just for the public cloud!
> Backups are still offsite, so if my place burns I'm just out on uptime

There are plenty of exceptions, but I generally find uptime is given way too much consideration for the value it gives. Most companies up to the national level generally only require about 12 hours a day of uptime from most of their software, more than that is a nice to have, but the company won't collapse if you turn off the servers overnight because no one is working anyway. Even a whole day outage of a critical system can just mean that work has to be delayed for a day and everyone has to work a bit harder the next day. Then as you move down the scale of importance outages can be much longer before people will even notice.

I've seen plenty of "5 nines" style requirements put forth but few that truly need it and even fewer that have considered the costs imposed by it.
Thanks for sharing us! We now feature recall pages and company contact information to help you get refunds on recalled products as well!
GitHub vs Gitlab best thing for this decade.
They don't need to be unemployed, just be paid much higher than what they make in their home country
> Those engineers' salaries almost always outweigh all of your cloud costs

I think there is a divide here. Most people in this thread that mention cost as an issue are running some serious gear, and that does not come cheap. Your parent is running 70 servers plus some serious networking equipment, which is easily a couple million dollars. And he said that a cloud provider would 10x that cost.

If all you need is a little VM to run a website, cloud hosting is cheap. If you are running real infrastructure, a couple hours of developer time will never out-weight the astronomical costs of cloud hosting.
<img src="img.svg" style="height: 1em; display: inline; vertical-align: bottom;" />
For hobby projects, I own a moderately outdated 1U "pizzabox" installed in a downmarket colocation facility in a nearby major city. Considering the monthly colocation rate and the hardware cost amortized over two years (I will probably not replace it that soon but it's what I've used for planning), this works out to appreciably less than it would cost to run a similar workload on a cloud provider. It costs about the same or possibly a bit less than running the same workload on a downmarket dedi or VPS provider, but it feels more reliable (at least downtime is usually my fault and so under my control) and the specs on the machine are higher than it's easy to get from downmarket VPS operations.

Because my application involves live video transcoding I'm fairly demanding on CPU time, which is something that's hard to get (reliably) from a downmarket VPS operation (even DO or what have you) and costly from a cloud provider. On the other hand, dual 8 core Xeons don't cost very much when they're almost a decade old and they more than handle the job.

There are a few fairly reputable vendors for used servers out there, e.g. Unix Surplus, and they're probably cheaper than you think. I wouldn't trust used equipment with a business-critical workload but honestly it's more reliable than an EC2 instance in terms of lifetime-before-unscheduled-termination, and since I spend my workday doing "cloud-scale" or whatever I have minimal interest in doing it in my off-time, where I prefer to stick to an "old fashioned" approach of keeping my pets fed and groomed.

And, honestly, new equipment is probably cheaper than you think. Dealing with a Dell account rep is a monumental pain but the prices actually aren't that crazy. Last time I purchased over $100k in equipment (in a professional context, my hobbies haven't gotten that far yet) I was able to get a lot for it - and that's well less than burdened cost for one engineer.
I found the tasks for alternatives (might be hCaptcha) hard to complete correctly even for a human.
Fuzzbuzz (YC W19) Is Hiring a Full Stack Engineer (TypeScript/Go) in SF Bay Area
What are educts?
Survivor effects like you're describing are controlled for in clinical trials for chemo and other drugs by comparing outcomes for the entire control and treatment groups.
I guess Hacker News loses its memory after a few years, but six years ago this item[0] hit the front page about using machine learning to train a filter for Hacker News. It is still running to this day[1]. I asked him if he could share his training set or code, but nothing happened. I think the training set may be showing its age, as there used to be more green items on the home page. Or maybe the quality of Hacker News has just gone down. (Perish the thought!)

"Enough Machine Learning to Make Hacker News Readable Again"

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7712297

[1] http://hn.njl.us/
Previously posted and discussed:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22953079
In that sense, any sort of client-originated telemetry is spyware. And there’s an awful lot of that, starting with ICMP.
His argument is faulty, but the fact of the matter is that Deliveroo owns the relationship with the customer. It's ultimately Deliveroo's job to make sure good food shows up in the right place at the right time. Failing that in a competitive market they will likely lose customers.

There's lots of examples in this thread and elsewhere that frankly most of these delivery companies aren't great at what they do.

Additionally a lot of them are shitty to their vendors (restaurants) - the post that spawned this whole debate being a perfect example. It's not necessarily Deliveroo's job to treat their vendors like royalty, but we give Walmart plenty of well deserved shit for abusing its vendors, no reason Deliveroo should be immune to criticism.
50 million dead that don’t have to be. Probably more by now.

Hypocrites.
Tada Operator VCNC Files Appeal Against Revised Transport Act
I don't think this (meaning the cursor) is "reinventing" anything, it's actually a work around because the iOS UX doesn't have good non-touch affordances. It will be dumbed down over time, and apparently you can turn it off.
Wasn't one of the primary reasons for the creation of git to be "decentralized, offline"?

This is counterintuative to that.

Call me paranoid, but you'd have to be a madman to

* Store all of your source code with Microsoft (GitHub / npm)
* Now start authoring all of your said source code online with yet another Microsoft product

That's a stupidly huge amount of trust to put into Microsoft.
A few years ago I was trying to start a company and get it off the ground. We had to make decisions on our tech stack and whether we were going to use AWS and build around their infra. Our business was very data heavy and required transferring large datasets from outside to our databases. Even in our early prototypes, we realized that we couldn’t scale cost-effectively on AWS. I figured out that we could colocate and rent racks, install HW, hire people to maintain, etc... for way less than we could use the cloud for. I was shocked at the difference. I remember saying to my cofounder why does anyone use AWS, you can do this on your own way cheaper.

Later I worked at a FAANG and remember when Snap filed their S1 when they were going public they disclosed that they were paying Google $5B and we were totally shocked at the cost compared to our own spend on significantly larger infra.

I think people don’t realize this is doable and it’s great to hear stories like yours showing the possibilities.
I got pretty excited about trying this out, since I've been using a no longer maintained (and pretty buggy) app called Sequel Pro.

But, Beekeeper kind of seems slow/clunky? I ran a simple query in our prod DB that returned 906 rows x 60 columns – the app completely froze up and I couldn't even scroll down to the next few rows...
> it seems to be over-attributed since many deaths are now being classified to Covid even if there are many other factors.

Citation?
"uwu" and "owo" are emoticons people started vocalizing ironically, not baby talk.
See also: Locus of Control[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_of_control
They shouldn't touch it at all.
For-profit US care homes ‘decimated’ by coronavirus
It is not clear to users which apps use the Facebook SDK, so they can’t avoid them even if they wanted to. And so many do include it that it’s hard to find alternative apps…
Best quote:

> "They still want patients to avoid hospitals yet not hesitate to go if there are signs of an emergency"
>Yeah, it seems like it might make more sense if they could figure out a way to use the RF fields to actually accelerate some of the ions in the plasma.

That's essentially what they are doing, but in an oscillating path rather than a continuous path:

In the waveguide, the charged particles in the plasma start to oscillate with the microwave field (aka: RF) while rapidly heating. The ions, atoms, and electrons collide with each other frequently, spreading the energy from the ions and electrons to the neutral atoms, heating the plasma rapidly. As a result, the researchers claim that the plasma rapidly heats to well over 1,000°C.

I don't know if you can rectify RF energy like you can with voltage. That might be one way to create a more continous path. They might also be able to add an electromagnetic field to create a net velocity out the provebial barn door as they do with ion thrusters, but I think the problem there is you just can't get enough free air path to accelerate to very high speeds...it'd be like trying to drive an F1 car at full throttle in bumper to bumper traffic. You could also pass a current through the plasma to generate lorentz forces like they do in plasma driver rail guns.

One huge advantage with this design is no moving parts and presumably extremely low manufacturing costs. So it might not be awesome for commercial airliners but it could be useful for high endurance UAVs. Pack a few dozen of them and use just the ones you need.
Show HN: Datawaves – Simple and affordable way to add Customer-Facing Analytics
>For the average user out there, the fact is, most people only care about privacy when there's a breach/outage/scandal of some kind. Otherwise, the average person is not going to have "zomg fb is spyware" on their mind.

Because they don't know.

Like every industry, there are practices involved to which the layman is oblivious. It is important to remind ourselves that the reason the majority of users aren't vocalizing their concerns with these unsavory practices isn't because they don't care but because they don't know.
This country absolutely has the resources necessary to shelter in place as long as is required. However, it lacks the political will to do so.
There should be more visibility on where a user's data is going. User's should be informed, similar to malware sites, they should be informed "this website is sending your data to the following companies" etc.
Now that I’m using the trackpad on the iPad for a bit I wish websites also had a way to make the cursor behave like this.

Maybe it could use role=“button” as hint?
This is weirdly deliberately misquoted, maybe as a joke? full: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2013/07/21/bayes-rela...
What’s most interesting to me vis-a-vis other GAN portrait generators is the range of illustration styles employed here. It’s like a GAN that generates both manga and western comic-art faces without any incongruous hybrids.
Gaming company senior reliability engineer/officer here, with the same tune. We're operating thousands of servers on three continents (NA, Europe, Asia), running our own game distribution network and basically doing as much as possible on prem. Every time we're trying to play by the cloud provider rules, we're getting stung with outrageous storage and bandwidth bills. I'm pushing for in-house k8s deployment to increase hardware utilisation and drive our price/performance ratio even lower, but even now we're much better financially purchasing hardware, putting it in leased racks, doing networking ourselves and going full cycle.
Probably, if we would be a smaller shop, we'd outsource networking . That's it.
How did I forget about Linux?
I haven't personally done detailed cost analysis lately, but if you have systems that regularly operate at 80+% of capacity, I can't see how the operating costs of any cloud operator can be cheaper than operating it yourself. Their whole pricing model is based on being able to over-provision compute and move workloads around within a datacenter. As much as people talk about failing hard drives and other components at scale, failure rates are still low enough that you could operate dozens of systems at full capacity for 3+ years with maybe a handful of legit hardware failures. To rent that same compute from any cloud provider would cost significantly more. The cheapest "Dedicated Host" on AWS will cost you almost $12k over 3 years if you pay for it on-demand, and it's equivalent in specs to something you can buy for ~$2k.

> am I missing something?

I'd want more background behind what you mean by "at least for business". What kind of business? Obviously IaaS providers like Digital Ocean and Linode are are type of business that would not use other clouds. Dropbox and Backblaze as well would probably never use something like S3. And there are legitimate use cases outside of tech that have needs in specific teams for low latency compute, or its otherwise cost and time prohibitive to shuttle terabytes of data to the cloud and back (3D rendering, TV news rooms, etc). If you're talking about general business systems that can be represented by a website or app with a CRUD API, then most of that probably doesn't require on-prem. But that's not the only reason businesses buy servers.
No, I'm suggesting those that are most vulnerable to covid-19 (old, immuno-compromised, etc) will die off in the first wave and won't be around if there is a second wave. You can't die twice. Thus the mortality rate would plummet.
Amazon/Azure/GCP - they're _businesses_. They charge you 50-70 points of margin in order to run your computers. If you're R&D-limited, that's not important to you, but if you're a more mature company that's cost-limited then it matters a lot. If it's a core part of your business, it'll never be cheaper to pay another company to profit from you. Period.