skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Using customer service to learn about your product and make it better
On-prem can make sense where your computing needs are constant and predictable. You can arrange to have exactly what you need, and the total cost of buying and operating it may be less than it would be to get comparable resources in the cloud.

If your computing needs vary over time, then provisioning on-prem for peak load will mean that some of your resources will be idle at non-peak times. It may be cheaper to use cloud resources in cases like these, since you only need to pay for the extra capacity when you need it.
“The internet is going to be a big deal”
We are pretty far away. Perception-based manipulation is a very active area of research. It will help a lot of underfed grad students get their PhD's over the next decade.
Did you ask anyone if they would be willing to pay for the product before creating it?
And maybe it failed to make money, but did it solve what it was trying to? If it did I don't think it failed, you just decided to make a product that wasn't commercially viable.
> Not everybody has JS enabled (your content site shouldn't require it)

It is just as true that not everybody has cookies enabled.

> If using localStorage, users can write their own data. Depending on how you store data, this ranges from "not a problem at all" to "serious attack vector". At the least, it increases risk if an attacker gets XSS.

Users can write their own cookies as well: document.cookie = "whatever"; Users should have control to access and edit the data they are storing on their own devices.

> for e.g. auth, this is pretty bad.

Any data that is embedded in dynamically written HTML is fully available upon page load, so you don't need cookies or any other storage mechanism to solve that problem. You only need a way to send the data in the HTTP response.

> They are different technologies: localStorage & sessionStorage are not a full replacement for cookies.

They are a full replacement unless you lack confidence writing the necessary mechanisms in JavaScript that are typically left to Spring MVC for Java developers on the server.
> Do you have a better plan than what a group of public health experts have come up with?

As far as I can tell, public health experts (and basically all medical experts) are in over their heads on this one. It's like 1970s computer scientists issuing guidance on a stuxnet-esque infection. Sure, they are the experts in that they know more about computer science than other people, but they also have no experience with something like stuxnet-esque worms and so... how valuable is their expertise? "We recommend turning off all computers until further notice to stop the spread of stuxnet. Meanwhile, we will take 6-12 months or more to try and reverse engineer it and then we will issue further guidance." Except... "turn off your computer for a year" isn't going to fly with the general population. After so many months there will be riots and people will start disobeying.
How about tungsten coils?
Thanks, yes it looks like recent weeks are weighted for under-reporting (how to figure out the weighting with so much chaos is another question), and they're estimating that a little over 60% of excess deaths in the past few weeks were caused by COVID-19.
Ah, yeah, that's a better metaphor than what I gave there.

I'm also a bit divorced from the customer perspective in this situation because I've been working on the industry side for so long, so I have different expectations and views.

That said, as an implementer of technology of this type, my point was that I feel like live verification gets EXTREMELY INVASIVE in this context. Once you start bringing biometrics and really, hard numbers in general into the voyeurism of camming, it turns into this weird fractal of objectification that I haven't really had time to really unwrap in my head yet, which I'd kinda wanna do before even touching implementations of the tech itself.
This isn't exactly the first time Facebook has been called out for poor engineering practices:

https://www.darkcoding.net/software/facebooks-code-quality-p...

https://blog.timac.org/2017/0410-analysis-of-the-facebook-ap...
I'm sure that would be considered a viable option if we had the tech, but brain-in-a-jar feels more achievable in the nearer term to me. It also allows for continuity of self/culture, which is important to a lot of people.

The idea of infants being raised to adulthood by machinery in unknown conditions to start a new civilization seems more like branching into a different species when you really think it through. I have greatly enjoyed this story line in fiction, but I honestly don't see it as remotely realistic for many, many decades if not centuries. Unless we stumble across the Singularity or something, haha.
I think your question conflates the primary and secondary markets. If you start a company and sell all or part to Buffet, that would be a primary market, and money goes into the company which can be used to grow. Same for YC. On the other hand, if you buy stock from another private investor, the company sees no money
We are a research group at a company with 2000 or so employees. We have a few GPU machines to train models, which are utilized nearly around the clock.

AWS and co’s GPU-enabled servers are exceedingly expensive. Most of the GPU models on those machines are also very old. We pay maybe 1/3 or less to maintain these machines and train models in-house vs paying AWS.

Mind you, we use AWS for plenty of stuff...
I find it on-topic because every time someone submits an archiving project like Neocities, there's always someone scoffing and saying 'burn it all down, throw it away, who cares, it's all worthless; this is better off forgotten'. And yet, look what a treasure trove a child's drawings have become for linguists.
Theories that reproduce things we've already observed are a dime a dozen. The test is whether you can predict new things. And Wolfram's theories don't even predict what we already see. And sorry, but complaining about the "corruption" of the peer review system that you refuse to engage with (and it does have problems) is the calling card of the crank. It's just that this crank happens also to be, or have been, a genius of some kind, so he's never completely ignored.
Thank you for that Lincoln quote. I went to a very diverse University (Upstream, Red Team) and one of the hunches I've walked away with is that at the core of prejudice is a missing friend on the other side.
Or formulate it differently:

1. Trust a provider which whole existence relies on trust and which you can audit or at last cross-check the audit and security processes (as a Bank you are normally not a small customer).

2. Trust a provider which might 1st be a potential competitions in some business fields. 2nd is so big that it can easily afford losing you. 3nd for the same reason doesn't allow you any insights into there internal processes. etc.

Plus many of the banks having their own hardware also have their own IT team. So it's often about trusting your own people. I mean either you keep your it or you outsource _and_ go into the cloud. Keeping local servers but outsourcing IT at the same time seems kind not very clever tbh.
You're not missing much.
You have no idea what you're talking about. Apps use the Facebook library because a good portion of end-users want to be able to login with a Facebook button --or Google, or whatever that doesn't require them to create a user/password account. It's just that simple.
It's already happening across social media, just with software a whole lot more advanced than this.
Thanks, I was looking for a practical book like this!
>the government could (if it were so inclined) pay people to stay home indefinitely

I'm a bit skeptical, and would be even if instead of "indefinitely" we were just talking about a couple of years. I'm not necessarily disagreeing, but I'm curious about how the math would work out, in your opinion.
The Decentralized Web Could Help Preserve the Internet's Data for 1k Years
What does one do now when we can't fly to the other town and take them out to dinner?
> asphyxiated brain cells actually never die and there is some base level electrical activity

What you're describing is physically impossible and has in fact never been observed by science. Electrical activity implies chemical activity and an active metabolism. Dead brain cells lose their electrical potential, eventually the cell walls break down and spill their dead biochemical machinery, effectively liquefying the organ. Our cemeteries are not full of intact, electrically active brains somehow.

When a neuron is deprived of oxygen, it shuts down. Some intracellular processes run until their educts are exhausted, and then come to a stop. When an anoxic brain cell is then re-supplied with oxygen after this shut down has progressed too far, the sudden resumation of processes means that these previously accumulated cytotoxic reaction products are now suddenly disrupting normal biochemical processes - this disruption leads to the death of the cell after it has been re-supplied. We call this category of damage reperfusion injuries.

Reperfusion damage is perverse in the sense that, while the neuron was damaged during anoxia, its actual death only plays out once its chemical programs start running again. But in a way this is also promising, since in the future we should be able to prevent this kind of cell death, effectively prolonging the time a patient can survive anoxia without brain damage. There are drugs that we give stroke patients today with this mechanism in mind, but so far the results have been mixed.

> stroke or in coma and have large areas of the brain with dead cells

In a live body, dead brain cells quickly break down and are resorbed. There is nothing left to fix there. The correct time to take action is while cells are still intact, in the delicate stage before and shortly after oxygen supply is restored.
Yes indeed. They were national socialists.
The harm that can and most likely will be done by under-regulated trade of peoples intimate information is far greater than the harm of showing them ads. Targeted disinformation has already made a huge mess of US politics. Turning "personal computers", phones, and IoT junk into surveillance devices a la 1984 was either profoundly short-sighted and stupid or a very clever attack on individual liberty and agency, depending on intent of each actor involved. To the extent that knowledge is power, people are being tricked into giving up far too much. I say tricked because of what isn't immediately obvious when transacting with some tracking system on an otherwise free website:

When you give up a small piece of seemingly insignificant data about yourself a million times per year, the aggregate is wildly more significant than the sum of those pieces. When you and everyone you know give up the aggregate of each persons aggregate information, again, its value is compounded. Finally, since no one has any insight into nor control over where their data ends up or how it's used down the road, the danger of sharing is even less evident.

Good can and does come from transparency, but this is one-way transparency. It's top-down and is begging for abuse. If we had a truly voter-representative government, it would have already created laws to mitigate the easy-to-anticipate problems that arise from massive accumulations of personal information, and we would no doubt have a better, if less profitable, WWW as a result.
I just want to say kudos and well done to post the diff here.
Self-driving company here. We're doing on-prem because we have a clear projection on the amount of data we'll need to injest, store and process using GPUs.

The advantages of running things in a cloud are clear -- and as an infrastructure team we have challenges around managing physical assets at scale, however it's clear with the cost of cloud providers that eventually we would have to pull data into a datacenter to survive at some point.

Co-location costs are fixed, and it's actually easy to make a phenomenal deal now-a-days given the pressure these companies are under.

The real trick of it all is that regardless of running on-prem or in the cloud, we need to run as if everything is cloud native. We run Kubernetes, Docker, and as much as possible automate things to the point that running one of something is the same as running a million of it.
For me, the most life-changing idea I've been exposed to continues to be from Bret Victor's¹ 2012 talk titled "Inventing on Principle"². The idea is that in addition to the two well-known paths to live one's life, there is also a third, less well-known path.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bret_Victor

[2] https://vimeo.com/36579366
POV-Ray is not yet open source, although the remaining authors hope to be able to solve that problem soon. (Its license contains a field-of-use restriction.) Also, I don't think BubRoss was claiming that rendering CSG directly was impossible, just that it's a bad tradeoff.
Surely network latency (and perhaps throughput) is just as relevant to IO-bound and transactional workloads though? At least if they need to be served by a multiple-node cluster.
matrix 4 (or 100 for machines)
Everything is temporary.

This is a central tenet in a variety of approaches and philosophies, from religions (it's one of the Marks of Existence in Buddhism) to cognitive behavioral therapy — but few ideas have changed my thinking, resilience, self-control, and happiness as much as this one.
Hot food that arrives cold is the same thing as cold food that warmed up. I wouldn’t expect to pay for late food that arrives cold any more than I’d be expected to pay for a melted ice cream cone.
If the brain is anything like computer hardware, the actual physical connectivity likely matters quite a bit. Consider what would happen if you randomly removed a single transistor on a CPU. Even though the transistors are very simple, virtually identical constructs the effect of taking any individual one out varies a great deal depending on what the transistor represents to the workings of the CPU. If it's involved in thermal regulation, it might result in spurious thermal shut-offs, performance throttling at incorrect times, bad fan control, or other problems. It could be involved in advancing the instruction pointer, which means that software on the affected core most likely wouldn't run correctly whatsoever. If it's part of a cache, you may get memory corruption problems that could be extremely difficult to diagnose. If it's involved in a rarely used calculation, you might never even notice that there's damage!
If they have doubts, they'll ask you about it and you'll have the opportunity to clarify what the role entailed (which should be clearly conveyed in your resume anyways). Companies use titles differently so all they're trying to do is match up what you actually did to the corresponding level in their own org.
It's difficult to argue about whether it's "surreptitious." It's certainly no secret. I think this is why you need organizations (perhaps government or otherwise) to establish standards for what is and isn't acceptable, so we don't have to quibble over words like "surreptitiously."
The (startup) Oxide podcast has good history/stories about on-prem servers, from veterans of pioneering companies. They are fans of open-source firmware and Rust, and are working to make OCP-based servers usable for on-prem. In one podcast, they observed that cloud is initially cheaper, but can quickly become expensive with growth. There is a time window where you can still switch from cloud to on-prem, but if that window is missed, you're left with high switching costs and high cloud fees.

https://oxide.computer/podcast/
Totally had the same experience. Ordered Starbucks and they forgot the coffee. Was 3rd order in a row that was messed up. It's a cluster of mismanagement over there.
GitHub Issues Integration
How long does this OS take to boot? This seems like a way too simple task for a Linux equipped Raspberry Pi.
One thing that’s been super meaningful for me is the notion that if you don’t put something into words, either in speech or in your head or on paper, you don’t know anything about it, even if it’s a feeling or a belief or an intuition deep within you that you’ve held for as long as you can remember.

The act of simply putting a thought into words makes it immediately obvious to you if you really understand it or not, and if not, where your blind spots are.

If the thing you’re concerned with is an unresolved problem or a question, simply articulating the problem or the question can make the solution or the answer obvious. Just going through the process of putting it into words, one way or another, and being sure you’ve settled on the most concise and accurate description of it you can muster, will often make so many things that were hazy obvious, and can reveal to you areas of haziness in your own thinking that you may not have been aware of.

Rubber duck debugging is one result of this. Rubber duck debugging is based on the observation that by the time you’ve explained your bug to someone, often times you figure out your next steps before they even respond. Just articulating your problem in the form of a question asked to someone else will sometimes reveal the answer to you.
I consider VPSs to be cloud servers. Is this not common?
What are the poems?
Why stay on premise?

Cost. On-prem is roughly on-par in an average case, in my experience, but we've got many cases where we've optimized against hardware configurations that are significantly cheaper to create on-prem. And sunk costs are real. It's much easier to get approval for instances that don't add to the bottom line. But for that matter, we try to get our on-prem at close to 100% utilization, which keeps costs well below cloud. If I've got bursty loads, those can go to the cloud.

Lock-in. I don't trust any of the big cloud providers not to jack my rates up. I don't trust my engineers not to make use of proprietary APIs that get me stuck there.

Related to cost, but also its own issue, data transfer. Both latency and throughput. Yeah, it's buzzwordy, but the edge is a thing. I have many clients where getting processing in the same location where the data is being generated saves ungodly amounts of money in bandwidth, or where it wouldn't even been feasible to transfer the data off-site. Financial sector clients also tend to appreciate shaving off milliseconds.

Also, regulatory compliance. And, let's be honest, corporate and actual politics.

Inertia.

Trust.

Risk.

Interoperability with existing systems.

Few decisions about where to stick your compute and storage are trivial; few times is one answer always right. But there are many, many factors to consider, and they may not be the obvious ones that make the decision for you.
Show HN: JavaScript library for extracting emails from an arbitrary text blob
Yes, I think so. If the frequency is high enough so that it's not the limiting factor the size would mainly depend on how much power you can dissipate in a given volume.

The highest power RF amplifiers I've ever seen were the klystrons used for the LEP and ESRF accelerating cavities. Those were large in part because of the relatively low frequency of 350 MHz but I believe there was also a large water-cooled absorber that dissipated whatever power was left in the MW+ electron beam given the conversion efficiency.
Perhaps, you're right (or maybe not :-). Frankly, all this stuff, while interesting and eventually useful, is a bit low on my current priority list ... Re: certificate - You're welcome.
Azure storage is definitely the black sheep. They cleaned up the VM/compute layer a few years ago with the introduction of Azure Resource Manager (ARM), but storage hasn't gotten that big an overhaul yet. And it shows. They seem to be slowly improving things under the hood though...
That's true only if they reach all destinations
Also Netguard, pay 6 euro or greater 1 time donation and monitor all outbound requests, among other things
If you get banned from UberEats do they blacklist you from Uber as well?
The other side of the coin being we haven't developed access to it yet.
Either way, an interesting perspective, thanks!
It's not about treating it correctly, it's about worrying about vageries in the law and complying with them.

Of course information should be protected, but there are all sorts of compliance procedures and processes that significantly increase complexity and cost.
COVIDSafe is noncompliant with privacy policy, ignored infosec and didn't fix
it's doublespeak - they weren't socialists

>The term "National Socialism" arose out of attempts to create a nationalist redefinition of "socialism", as an alternative to both Marxist international socialism and free market capitalism. Nazism rejected the Marxist concepts of class conflict and universal equality, opposed cosmopolitan internationalism, and sought to convince all parts of the new German society to subordinate their personal interests to the "common good", accepting political interests as the main priority of economic organization,[9] which tended to match the general outlook of collectivism or communitarianism rather than economic socialism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism
Show HN: Sci-Hub Scholar – Firefox Extension, Google Scolar Links – Sci-Hub
Hey Everyone!

This is my first submission! I've been trying to get into making small browser extensions (that probably could just be userscripts, but reasons) to work around some of the rough edges of the internet.

Sci-Hub Scholar is a browser extension that takes Google Scholar search results and tries to point them at Sci-Hub, where they can be read freely. The main selling point for this extension versus others is that it works right on the results page, rather than the article page at the paywalled website.

One night I decided I was going to do some research, only to find every Google Scholar Result behind a paywall. Trying to find the link on Sci-Hub, I ran into a bunch of issues:
- https://whereisscihub.now.sh/ is down
- Annoying to copy/paste title to Sci-Hub
- Didn't want to be presented with another set of search results from my search results.

I've seen some other Sci-Hub extensions here on HN, most notably https://openaccessbutton.org/. Unfortunately, it didn't fit my needs, and thought I could eliminate one step in the process.

Issues:
- Currently I can't validate that the article exists on Sci-Hub, due to the way Firefox handles website permissions for extensions. I do not want to request permissions for all domains, but since the Sci-Hub domain can change, this is difficult
- I'm afraid to port this to Chrome, because I don't want to lose my Google Account over something like this.

I welcome any feedback or recommendations on the issues. I also have planned features, and am open to contributions! The extension is all open source and can be found at: https://github.com/djfdat/sci-hub-scholar

I hope this helps some people get access to the information they need!
I you like RSS and want to find more content related to your feeds, maybe you can give Aktu a try (https://aktu.io).

It's an online RSS reader that i built, and one of the features might be of interest to you: It automatically aggregates news articles to items in your RSS feeds.
That means that for most articles in your feeds, you have the original item from the website you subscribed to, but you also have a list of articles from different sources talking about the same story.

A nice side effect is that it can help avoid filter bubbles by giving more context to the stories you read.
Having a government full of technical lot illiterate politicians regulating digital advertisement - what could possibly go wrong.
Sure - I'm just venting. I found something trivial that makes a small difference, but the contribution process was overly cumbersome.

To the parent poster's point, I feel if I could easily submit even a small subset of the trivial changes I have sitting around in local forks, it'd greatly improve several projects.
Countries where that isn't the case are seeing a big drop too.
Surface Book 3