skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm a solo founder who's bootstrapped a saas that's in one state. I'd started out with the cloud then moved to a private cloud in a colocated data center. Saved more than 80% in monthly costs. Got faster speeds, better reliability and a ton of extra compute and network capacity. I just bought used servers from eBay that are retired from big corps. Nothing significant has really changed in the last five years on compute so I'll happily take their depreciated assets :)

__Modern__ servers are really awesome and I totally recommend them. You can do a ton remotely.
How do you do kernel updates without a reboot?

I've looked several times and found different technologies over time (kexec, (Oracle's) ksplice, kGraft, kpatch, livepatch). They do appear to have some use-cases, e.g. delaying the need for a reboot by being able to install a critical vulnerability fix/workaround so that the reboot can be done at a more convenient time. Because many of the patch mechanisms are function-based, they don't appear to solve the general problem in such a way that reboots can be avoided all together for arbitrary large kernel changes. From my reading of the solutions none are at the level of unattended upgrades using apt/yum-cron or similar in a way that "most" can benefit from them without worrying too much about it (ksplice might do it, but not sure how much you need to pay for it for server use and therefore how accessible it is). kexec helps with skipping the bootloader/BIOS, but I'm not sure if it ends up restaring all the systemd services or going up/down the runlevels, some places suggest it reduces downtime but doesn't eliminate it. I've not experimented with any of these myself yet... so I'd be happy to be proven wrong and in any case learn more!

References:

- http://jensd.be/651/linux/linux-live-kernel-patching-with-kp...

- https://linux-audit.com/livepatch-linux-kernel-updates-witho...

- https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Kernel_live_patching

- https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Kexec

EDIT: forgot to mention livepatch
I was looking (at the time) for something that would allow me to develop windows applications from a Linux machine.

Sadly I'm still falling short. :<
Offsite AWS Glacier backups, as well as a warm redundancy in another DC.
> The load now rebalanced to four remaining machines is just far too big, and they all die as a result.

Perhaps I'm missing something terribly obvious here, but why would that happen?

I can understand requests being dropped and processing-times worsening, but a full system-wide crash?

edit My bad, I'd missed this in the article:

> they could have rewritten their web site code so it didn't send the machines into a many-GB-deep swap fest. They could have done that without getting any hosting people involved. They didn't, and so now I have a story
But you don't need any of that. A static HTML page and a bit of CSS for styling and you have a web site.

If you don't think package management or transpilers makes your particular project simpler, then don't use them. They are tools.
Fancy Indian restaurants in the West as well as back here are almost certainly using ghee. Cheaper places might use vanaspati (a ghee substitute made with palm oil) or oil. In general, though, you can never tell for sure unless you're doing the cooking yourself.
Netflix does not push their videos streams out of AWS (because that would be stratospherically unaffordable for them). They run their apps and systems on the cloud (search and preferences), but the video bits come from Netflix racks distributed to a variety of DCs and ISPs.
Lua - the language JavaScript should have been.

It's really nice to see projects like this, as IMO the only thing keeping Lua from seeing wider use is that it lacks JS and Python's userbase and libraries.
A really small but still slightly annoying thing:

Your website states "Your download will begin automatically.", but it won't if I have third party javascript blocked.

Please also provide a (if it doesn't click [here]) option.
The GitLab license is really tough. We use GitLab internally with about 1000 users, but only 50-100 are developers. The rest are analysts and data scientists who either edit doc files or push their R projects so other people can see them.

25 of those are willing to pay for the advanced features at $100/month, but the entire instance has to be upgraded. It’s frustrating because there’s no way to pay $100/month so 950 people can view a private repo or edit markdown.

If we could enable features for just the devs who need it, we could. The GitLab folks were nice, but the only workaround for this was to have multiple instances that people would connect to depending on their need. That’s confusing for non-devs and also many projects have a few developers but 3x as many people who just edit markdown or view CI status.
> Here's where the PDF map says is the WHCDC offices. This is incorrect, isn't it? Both of the offices are not "across the street", but at least 3km away.

It isn't incorrect. The Baidu Maps link[1] shows the WHCDC office also shown at the location in the PDF map, next to the hospital - a few hundred meters from the seafood market[2].

[1] https://map.baidu.com/poi/%E6%AD%A6%E6%B1%89%E5%B8%82%E7%96%...

[2] https://map.baidu.com/search/%E6%AD%A6%E6%B1%89%E5%8D%8E%E5%...

> Yes, but not in the two buildings you're linking to.

I have no source that either proves or contradicts that - do you?
This is called a cascading failure. It's also a problem with the electric grid, and more terrifyingly with global finance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_failure
For Java you can actually control a lot of this through a security manager: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5401281/preventing-syste...

And I think you can even control the loading through a custom class loader.

It's a bit of work but it should give you decent oversight over the dependencies you really don't trust but have to use.
There were a lot - a lot - of competing units that were also priced right, or even righter than the Roland gear which was never bargain basement.

Rattly cheap drum machines were all over the scene in the late 70s and 80s. None of them had the lasting impact of the 808 and 909.

There's a reason for that - the same reason that explains why the Jupiter-8 and Juno series synths are legends, while competing synths from Kawai and Korg are mostly forgotten.
At least they moved fast.
Apple WWDC 2020 Conference Will Happen Online on 22 June
Counterpoint: The OP is saying they spend 1 day a month managing servers. It's ridiculously little. The servers might as well be unmanaged.

That's not enough time to keep OS or software up to date, or to monitor hardware usage, or to replace failing hardware and deal with spare parts.
Avoiding cloud works well for small requirements too - worked for a company that ran a global store; we've opted for dedicated servers on OVH, all together had about 40 of them. It was 1/10th the price of running the infrastructure on AWS. We still used S3 though.
The main thing to understand is that is infection fatality rate, not case fatality rate. IFR being the portion of the people who got the disease that died, and CFR being the portion of people who the medical systems finds out has the disease who die.

The 1% number if support by a pretty wide variety of sources and studies that have all been relatively consistent in the 1%-0.1% order of magnitude - more recently they seem to have been converging on the 0.5% to 0.25% range (though I haven't been thorough enough in reading the literature to want to state that range confidently).

A relatively recent and good example of such a study would be this one [1] from Germany. They sampled 600 people relatively randomly from the population, tested them all, and looked at the outcomes.

[1] https://www.land.nrw/sites/default/files/asset/document/zwis...
Can someone give me feedback on this?
How the coronavirus pandemic relieved Amsterdam of overtourism
There is extra complexity with managing cloud based solutions. Logging in, setting up ssh keys. Ok it's all automatable but if I want a basic server set up for doing a simple task quickly it's often a lot easier to run it on an internal server.
Using Hetzner for many years. Their unmanaged iron prices are unbeatable, and I haven't had any significant issues.

They also have a pretty decent cloud offering as well.
A better solution would be to simply configure the loadbalancer to have a maximum number of requests per second per endpoint and then to drop any requests over that.

An even better loadbalancer will poll a load endpoint, representing CPU load, queue length, percentage of time GC'ing, or some similar metric, and scale back requests as that metric gets too high.
Not only to a novice. I was recently contracted to update a client from rails 4 to 5.2, which included updating sprockets, which ended with us downloading the source code of all the gems to because nobody could figure out why the html would contain the correct url for the asset, but rake would first produce the file during asset precompilation and then later delete it during cleanup. 2 days wasted on broken magic...
Wait, why are the servers “crashing” when under too much load in the first place?

If there’s some sort of natural limit to how many simultaneous connections they can handle, why can’t they just return some 4xx error code for connections beyond that? (And have clients implement an exponential back off?)

Or if that’s too difficult, the load balancer could keep track of some maximum number of connections (or even requests per second) each backend is capable of, and throttle (again with some 4xx error code) when the limit has been reached by all backends? This is pretty basic functionality for load balancers.

You’re going to need actual congestion control anyway, when the number of client connections is unbounded like this. Even when your servers aren’t crashing, what if the client apps whose clicks you’re tracking becomes suddenly more popular and you can’t handle the load even with all of your servers up?
was it just a cost thing that would prevent people from just adding another server in to the mix? given that 4 was the magic number, add another server or two to add buffer to time between servers dying and 'it all breaks'? I'm realizing the cost factor may have been it, depending on size/location/etc. - would there be any other reason?
The inverted scrolling direction is now standard on Windows precision touchpads I believe, as well as Macs (i.e. two fingers upwards scrolls the page downwards).
My story as a web developer – mid-senior level
AI Generates Creeper Face
I'm having nightmares about a dystopian future in which I scream into the void of a Facebook chat bot and hear a response from the voice of a billion anonymous redditors.
Same here on Chrome on Android. I thought it was me
Which languages are you using?

In my experience, the main problem with expressing your algorithms in that way is "What do you do when the primitives you are suing (e.g. maps and scans) do not produce optimal code?".

For example, suppose that you are doing two scans with two maps, whose efficient implementation does a single memory traversal with the two scans and maps fused into a single kernel. If whatever abstraction you are using isn't able to do this type of kernel fusion, then you easily bump to a 4x larger memory bandwidth, which might be translated to 4x slower performance.

I don't know of any language or optimizing runtime that's able to do these transformations and match the performance of the CUDA code one would have written by hand.
Your costs are going to skyrocket in a nonlinear fashion as you exit the beta stage.

That’s the biggest counterpoint to using the cloud as a initial setup.
I will chip in here. Although I agree with all that you guys have said. Your comments seem to be skewed to a perspective that all companies are being run in U.S.A, Canada, Germany, etc very developed countries where power is constant and can be relied on. The skilled labor to run these servers is available for hire. The parts and infrastructure are available to rent or buy. Majority of the world is not like this but there are formidable companies all over the world running, and for them, this is one less unreliable aspect of their company.

To give you an idea, if you want to run a data center or your own servers in some countries you need a standby generator (because electricity is not a given) and the Diesel used to run these generators are imported and the economy of these countries is shaky so the exchange rate fluctuates, so suddenly the cost to keep your site up becomes a variable and is now subject to government announcements (not even in an evil authoritarian way), policies and import taxes. In the face of all of this, having a steady AWS bill with reliable infrastructure becomes priceless to these companies
How to Create a JS Choropleth Map Visualization on Covid-19 Data
GDPR, cookie consent and how to fix the broken web
It's malicious compliance.

Sites were supposed to stop using a shotgun method of grabbing all data they can, sharing it with everyone that will take it, and hoping something will stick. They were supposed to take responsibility for data they collect and share.

But instead of changing anything, sites went for the laziest workaround (which apparently isn't even legal), so that they could ignore the legislation and keep business as usual.
So what are you saying, that Trump is doing a good job?

CNN: Kaibeezy wants COVID-19 distributed across America, advocates jailing workers
So, to clarify the number refers to the whole EU (without UK).

Currently there are little bit more than 0.1 million reported deaths across the EU.

And as I was saying, in the best case scenario, based on the current data [0] 1 million more could die if people would live their lives normally.

But people would not live normally as they do not in Sweden or Belarus and economies would be in downfall anyway.

The difference would be in the number of deaths, long term health issues, as well as in the length of the crisis - probably more like 2 years, or until herd immunity trough vaccination.

[0] https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*G6ql9WUz114Mdwktyp53Mg.pn...
> If there’s some sort of natural limit to how many simultaneous connections they can handle

Yup, it's pretty much a DDoS. It's simple to test. Spin up Wordpress + Woocommerce (a common ecommerce stack) in a Digitalocean 1 GB droplet.

Now ab -n 1000 -c 30 the home page, that's 30 concurrent clients

Watch MySQL die, Apache get killed because out of memory, and...

root@wootest01:~# reboot

-bash: fork: Cannot allocate memory
There's also Talkyard Blog Comments: https://www.talkyard.io/blog-comments

GDPR: People can download their personal data, and delete their own accounts, via their user profile pages.

No ads, no tracking. Open source. (I develop Talkyard.)
So far the only times that the discussion has come up, they state that their target market won't buy something else and there are sanitizers anyway.

Quite strange for a device whose sales pitch is security above anything else.

Yet notice how the "The Seven Properties of Highly Secure Devices" story doesn't mention anywhere the safety of the programming languages.

Meanwhile on another side of the computer campus we have Microsoft Security Response Center writing such blog posts https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/2019/07/18/we-need-a-safer-s...

If you dig into developer requests, there are several posts regarding this, for example

https://feedback.azure.com/forums/915433-azure-sphere/sugges...

Note that I am not advocating that C# would be viable option on Sphere's case, just the absence to acknowledge C as being the platform Achilles' heel in the security story that the team selling.

At very least also do hardware memory tagging like Solaris SPARC, iOS and Android (as of 11) are doing.
Clearly, on a community-driven site, the appropriateness of a given story will be determined by the community's sentiment.

Nobody said the Kobe story wasn't important in the grand scheme of things; just not of particular interest to this community.

Whereas it's not hard to see why, on a site called Hacker News, the community would find noteworthy the passing of a pioneer of music produced on computers.
Why Startups Should Generate Crazy Ideas Every Single Day
This association is likely some variation of Solovay-Kitaev, where imprecise, linearly independent gates can be combined to produce more precise gates, with polynomial resource utilization.

The paper isn't formulated with respect to universal quantum computing which frustrates confirming such a claim, but here's a link, anyways...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solovay%E2%80%93Kitaev_theor...
I've always wondered why Mozilla doesn't make it easier to embed Gecko everywhere it possibly can. If Electron was built with Gecko, it would go a huge way towards preventing Chrome from becoming the de-facto way of accessing the Web.

As you said, this is too little, too late. I'm a Firefox user, but Chrome has pretty much won the browser wars. The only thing preventing it from achieving complete market dominance is the existence of Mobile Safari.
> What doesn't make sense, at any scale, is renting VMs.

I disagree. The big cloud providers will let you rent VMs across multiple availability zones in a single geographic region. That gives you better redundancy than you could get by renting one or more dedicated servers in a single data center. Yes, those same cloud providers offer bare-metal instances, but those are absurdly expensive for a company that only needs small-scale computing power but still cares about uptime.
I hope they have a very good story around patches and updates...

Web browsers need patching pretty much every week, and having every app developer needing to re-release their app every time isn't practical. The alternative is a world where my phone can be compromised because an ad rendered in an app using a 3 week old build of gecko had a browser exploit in.
When I was ten I memorized “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll for performance. Still remember that frabjous poem!
"Long term consistency beats short term intensity"
It's not exactly what you want, but just yesterday I made AccountsJS work with Facebook OAuth.[1]

I was glad today when watching this newsline, to have avoided the facebook SDK.

I think OAuth is usually better because every major provider has some version of it and so you basically can implement them all the same or at least in a really similar fashion.

1. http://www.accountsjs.com/
The non-stupid behaviour for the printscreen key is also only switchable from W10's accessibility settings
You could subtly vary these factors remotely (and per shop), then use a customer feedback form per shop to see which one makes people most happy. Perhaps you could combine this with the hardness/composition of the water so you get the right coffee every time.
For true beginners to programming (e.g. my elementary age kids), I found these resources to be really effective at what I think of as the most important lessons in programming:

* it's okay to try things

* you can't break it

* programming is very literal and precise

* there's syntax, there's structure, and there are operations

https://github.com/Akuli/python-tutorial/blob/master/README....

This one is the best, it is aimed square at anyone whose only experience with computers is typing and web browsing.

https://github.com/eka-foundation/numerical-computing-is-fun...

Also great for the leveling down, but you also have to teach some math and some concepts around functions and algorthms, which can definitely feel a little boring / pigeonhole programming as mostly a fancy calculator.

Use sparingly and wisely.

https://www.pythonforbeginners.com/code-snippets-source-code...

This is just one example, but the code snippets at Python for Beginners are well documented, designed with simple constructs, and are a great way to see "applied programming" / provlem solving to achieve an outcome.

One useful technique is to give your student the "problem" the code snippet solves and ask your students to describe how they would code it in words and you transcribe it as some pseudocode on a board, and then "debug" it together to address input validation, logic, efficiency, then they write it.in Python, and then compare your code to the actual snippet.

When their code is basically spot on with the snippet it's like they've won the lottery, I definitely had forgotten that magic ...

I should make a YouTube playlist of thr videos I've shown them, here's one they liked

* 15 Sorting Algorithms in 6 minutes - https://youtu.be/kPRA0W1kECg

I paused at each one and we broke down how it's sorting, by the 5th or 6th it only took a few seconds to figure out the algorithm, and then theyre just fun to watch.

For you as a programming educator, this is essential viewing

https://youtu.be/azcrPFhaY9k
Show HN: RemindMe – A PWA Showcasing Notification Triggers
Maintenance of Homebrew Formulas by Vendor
RemindMe is an experimental app to showcase background notifications in the browser.

It makes use of Notification Triggers, an experimental API to schedule local notifications that don't require a network connection. Currently Chrome is the only browser that has an implementation of Notification Triggers.
AI devising a more equitable tax system
So, maybe fix that?

Why is Apache continuing to fork new workers ad infinitum? That’s a denial of service attack waiting to happen, and the answer surely isn’t “oh let’s just automate the rebooting”...

Edit: you’ve edited your comment to say it’s a DoS as well, so looks like we’re on the same page here, the software is garbage.
He's right and he's wrong: Graphs are wonderful datastructures to mimic/simulate complex phenomena realistically. Also, simple computational rules, especially with feedback-loops, may yield complex output of intriguing complexity. It's very seductive reductionism.

But from most simple observations in nature, there's no direct causal link between the two, . Intuitively, we "know" everything originated from a "Big Bang", but we don't have proof how or if complexity arose over time, or was it always intrinsinct to cosmos, and wether the question itself have any measurable implications..

So graphs and computational feedback remain interesting and time-consuming avenues for research, but it's a big leap from superficial studies of outputs ("how") and finding a graph-formula that would explain all possible universes ie. from a "Big Bang" point ("why").

A solid unchanging theory would need to address enough "why"'s in order to be properly backed up by predictions explaining the observable physical universe, to be relevant. If the theory can include new hypothesis and rules at any time, it's not a theory, but a container for information and rulesets (ie. a Turing-complete system).

Of course, you can "curve fit" anything inside a graph. They're great at it for simulations and games, and are already used everywhere you do computationally interesting complex stuff. There's just no indication or proof that the physical world matches any model created by humans living within the universe. Maybe someone humble will stumble unto some simple explanation, but so far, the deeper we go, it seems even experts get lost in the tough complexities and unintuitive laws we assume govern microcosmos and energy.

It seems to boil down to difference between theory and practice. Pure mathematics and observations are theory, while how to simulate and mimic, is more engineering and providing interesting outputs. If we combine the two, we can build universes.. (ok, off the pipe for now :)
That comparison wouldn't be as bad you might think.

The first functional Diesel engine for example had about 13kW of power and was only about 5x larger than a modern car engine.

This was in 1896. From 1923 onward, the engine type was small and powerful enough to be used in lorries (trucks).
The first petrol engines compare even better to modern engines (in terms of power-to-weight ratio).
I've been using hostwinds for years and has been very satisfied with them.
So You Want to Do a Website to Help the Homeless