skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Computer World was used for the opening theme of the BBC’s ground breaking Computer Programme[1].

My family were lucky enough to have a BBC model B, a home computer developed for the show and the eventual proving ground for the ARM processor.

Kraftwerk and the Beeb were bound up in my head as a child.

For me Kraftwerk sound like the white hot future rushing into our world (...and also playing Chuckie Egg and Elite with my Dad!).

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Computer_Programme
Show HN: E-Commerce brands show higher success rate that SaaS
It's funny to see you downvoted into the light gray at the time of reading. I mean, You did say "may turn out to be".

It seems as with any partisan issue america jumps on, the party lines are quickly formed, and it's now black or white, you are either for or against.

Your nuance is not appreciated.
How unfair indeed of them to release the model as open source with an accompanying freely available paper explaining all the details of it
A famous golfer once scored a hole-in-one after not playing tournaments for some time, only focusing on training.

A reported asked "Surely that was luck? You cannot train for a hole-in-one reliably."

To which the golfer answered: "Yes. But the more I train, the luckier I get."

That has stayed with me. Whenever I complained about bad luck (at least in my internal monologue), I started wondering what would have happened if I had trained more, be better prepared etc. Really helped me to shift a bit towards growth mindset.
Disclaimer, not in the mechanical engineering field.
That's said, its ironic that you use "actual engineering" as that "actual" bit is why, as I understand it, engineers primarily use imperial units in the US—most people who do the making know imperial. I can't speak for every industry, in fact I know machinists make plenty of things in metric, but that is my understanding from talking with Engineers here.
Every bad thing has its uses. If an SDK author wants to be a responsible participant in the app's startup path, it will defer its own setup to the app.

`__attribute__((constructor))` is most obviously a hack – like any great hack, it is useful enough to be implemented everywhere, but it will never be standardized because everyone acknowledges that it sucks. I used to use it! But it is extremely limited in its usefulness, and there are always better solutions to the problem.
Wow, a great hack and profound insight. How did no one think of this before now?
Keep it simple for the win (an IT project war story)
I've absolutely had gtags+semantic on remote C++ projects working just fine with Emacs and Tramp. Python+Flask, too, come to think of it. Oh, and Ruby, including full projectile integration along with automated test execution integration.

The key is Projectile+Tramp; I suppose you coulde use EDE, but I prefer Projectile.
You posted on the wrong thread.

NixOS discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23087197
I thought you might like to see this email that an earnest user sent us this evening. I got permission to share it anonymously:

So qdot handled this thread beautifully today. I don’t know who this person is but they managed to simply handle all questions, openly and without being rude. They spun gold from snark, they gave the childish a mature reply, and this post’s comments were a joy to read for how worthwhile they were.

I assume that the mods had some hand in this as well, because the chances of this ending this way without someone helping to ensure that seems near-zero to me. It’s not that I lack faith in HN, it’s just that human beings reliably go off course on this topic. And today, they didn’t.

Thanks for your efforts, whatever they were, and my hat is off to qdot for their stellar participation here today.

Since we didn't do anything, I'm signing our portion of this praise over to you. Bravo!
Those are not opposing viewpoints though.

Given what we saw in North Italy it would have been foolish not to go to lockdown imo.

But with hindsight we might still assess it was the wrong measure.
In a related article: "Tackling bioinformatics as a Webdev: Why is it so hard?"

Maybe Webdev is just complex? But tbh, as a bioinformatician (in Next Generation Sequencing mainly) I actually find Webdev easier. I mean, we face Bam files, Sam files, Cram files and annotate them with Bed files (with many different poorly documented standards) or GTF files depending on your Ensembl or UCSC references persuasion... Some file types are 0-based inclusive, some are 1 based exclusive, some call chromosome just ints (1,2, and then error when X, Y if you really assume they are ints) some call them chr1, chr2, chrX etc. We have fastq files with different quality encodings depending on their age, I recently had some strange errors, turns out the R2 of a fastq file is reverse complementary from the standard (why?!)... It's a mess and many people that spend years in the field still don't know more than just "choose one side and stick with it"... We also have a huge amount of frameworks for data analysis pipelines, Snakemake, Bpipe, Broad's WDL, etc, etc, etc. Not to mention the insance amounts of read mappers (BWA, RSEM, Tophat 1 and 2, Kallisto etc). Need I go on?
Similar Brain Glitch Found in Slips of Signing and Speaking
Florian left Kraftwerk years ago though, you weren’t going to see him anyway :)
I share the same feeling, even though didn't own an iPad before (I knew I needed something with less limitations). The new tablet mode they did is better (https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2019/08/29/annou...), however the biggest deal breaker for me _is_ the on-screen keyboard. Try using Slack in tablet mode, it's impossible: every time you go to a channel, the on screen keyboard pops-up, the animation to open/close takes 2-3 seconds each time: it's frustrating to the point I just plug the keyboard back on and use the surface in laptop mode.
I don't think the author is saying "why front end application development hard?" so much as "why is setting up a website hard?".

On one end of the spectrum, simply putting content on a website isn't so hard, right?
On the other end, making a web application is understandably difficult.

Features like users, payment forms, and email confirmation (so e.g. the website can be used for a course) sounds like they ought to be as simple as the former, but are closer to the latter.

Is the value proposition from the website building websites like Wix that they take care of the hard stuff?
> about 700 rented dedicated machines to service 70k-100k concurrent players

Slightly off-topic, but it sounds like a single machine can't handle more than 150 concurrent players. How is this so?

Is Hypixel Minecraft that resource intensive?

What's the bottleneck — it is the CPU, or RAM, or the network latency(?) per machine, or is it something else?

> We push about 4PB/mo in egress bandwidth

With 70k players, 4PB / 70k is approximately ~57 GB per player per month. That divided by the number of seconds in a month (2.628e+6) is: 57 x 10^9 / 2.628e+6 = ~21.7 kB.

Over a month, on average, a single player consumes a bandwidth of ~21.7 kB/sec, or about 174 kbps. This is an extraordinarily low per-player bandwidth consumption. At 150 players, each machine would average 26 Mbps of network traffic. This is fairly low as well. Of course, the machines have to be capable of handling of possibly much higher peak usage, but even an order of magnitude more — 260 Mbps, is something a Raspberry Pi 4 (which support full-throughput Gigabit Ethernet) can do.
Having done quite a bit of HPC in my research career, the usually best approach is (IMO) to:

* decompose the problem data to the subsets handled by each machine

* within each node, use pushing. this allows walking the node-internal data structure sequentially, thus is very cache friendly

* for the boundary cells, use pulling

edit: I should add, it may also make sense to do pulling between the cores, otherwise you need locks which could hurt performance as well.
Finding an sha-512 collision is not a problem that quantum computers can help with, even in theory.*

Anyways, if you want something that can be verified on a classical computer but cannot be done on a classical computer, see google's recent Quantum supremacy experiment. However it is extremely contrived. I think the most likely non contrived thing will be simulating simpilish quantum systems (to help with chemistry experiments and the like), but its probably still going to be a while before we start seeing that i think (IANA quantum scientist).

*Edit: to clarify, quantum computers can speed the process up of finding a collision in theory, just not enough to help. Normally you would need O(2^256) operations to find sha512 collision (Birthday paradox), quantum (BHT) gets you down to O(2^170), which is better, but still way to high. Most crypto assumes anything greater than 2^128 is secure by a comfortable margin.
Looks cool. I haven't taken an in-depth look yet, but what I noticed is that when I press CMD+W it closes the whole window, rather than the tab I am in. This will land me in some trouble if I ever decide to use it as my main tool.
"103459" in 100ms is a horrible, horrible result.
There are like 64 primes to try. That's 64 32bit divisions - around 30cycles per division, make it 50 with all the checks.

Run it at 5GHz, that's 10ns or so for divisions. Less than 1us for 64. We are talking 5 orders of magnitude.
There is something similar to Tay on Facebook/Instagram but it's not as "offensive" so the problem with Tay must have been in the dataset or something. It's basically a bot attempting to be a social media influencer.

See: https://www.facebook.com/brit.o.tara/
Since it's a technical cookie that's required for ads/marketing, it very much falls under marketing, I believe. Imho "technical cookies" are e.g. Cloudflare's __cfduid or your framework setting a session cookie because it wants to be stateful.
Hi @agentK20 , I agree with you that cloud providers should not take the skin out of you.
I work for Sardina Systems, an ISV, and it is very frustrating for me to hear your high costs feedback more and more often everywhere.
Please drop me an email at mconstantinescu@sardinasystems.com about your cloud details and I will make sure to provide you the best cost for it, very competitive in the market, as we are very flexible to adjust to any workload size and personalise the offer accordingly.
Thank you,
Mihaela
Wildcard DNS records (i.e. `*.example.com`) are your friend in situations like this :)
It is so so so much cheaper. We moved to AWS and tried setting up our servers with specs that were comparable to what our physical servers had been. We just about died after the first month. Our bill was higher for one month than for multiple years running our physical servers. We had to way dial them back to get the run rate down to a reasonable number. Now we have serious buyers remorse. Performance is terrible. The cost is still more per month than we ever had with our physical servers by a large amount.
i am not underestimating it all. just because other animals are violent doesn't matter or contradict what i said. additionally, a lot of what we see in the animal world in terms of violence is fighting for food and survival. yes, nature has a lot of violence, but is often reasonable violence. other cases of it not being reasonable pale to that seen in humans, where humans showcase violence against non-competitive species and against other humans.

there is lot of evidence that homo sapiens' early dominance over other hominids was due in no small part to violence.
No, Apple accepts white label applications. Their requirement is that if you're going to release a white label application, then it should be released under the customer's own individual Apple developer account rather than having them all under one developer account.
It is not the same argument. Money is fungible, you know exactly what you are paying and the cost to you, how the money is used is not usually your problem [1]. In this case you have no idea how much and with what you are paying. The app could be exfiltrating all kind of information and you have no way of knowing.

[1] although people might have issues with unethical or illegal uses.
Yes. And it's one of the most important reasons OOP is so bad at multithreading.

You want "pretty" OOP? Tell Don't Ask.

You want performance and reliable multithreading? Command-Query Separation. Which is basically the same as functional programming :) Make all the functions pure except for a few clearly marked ones with side effects.

It's especially visible in gamedev. After a decade of trying to make OOP work with multithreading people moved on to Entity Component Systems (which is basically imperative programming with some relational and functional aspects).

It's also why functional programming is getting more popular - because it is pull by default. It's also why almost all graphical shaders are functional even if they look like C :) Many inputs one output and no side effects :)
Unless that's capex for building, or includes server capex that they depreciate, that seems way high given Uber's scale.

A pretty dense cabinet should only cost ~$1400/mo at wholesale (1MW+ rooms) rates, and $200M is 143,000 cabinets.

And it's public that Uber uses multiple clouds as well.

Disclaimer: I haven't reviewed public Uber filings, would be very interested if there's any data that indicates they're really spending $200M on opex for real estate (which would be equivalent to $400M/year on cloud, which is either opex or potentially mix if there is some reserved instance-type cloud spend).
They tried that in Waco. Didn’t work out so well for them. It turns out that you can’t really escape the tyranny of the government. Might as well suck it up, and have strong property rights. At least that is a check on government tyranny.
Uber 10-K has operating lease payments in 2019 of $196M and in 2020 of $216M. That's not all data centers but a lot of it is data centers.
Can't really agree on that, looking at Github Actions for example.

It's such a lack luster offering with severe limitations that make it almost unusable for any sort of serious project (no support for private Docker repository, no manual steps, yaml support is abyssmal, ...)
I second this.

I have some experience in both web development and scientific computing in various fields (not bioinformatics). Things felt just as hard at the beginning in all cases—I don't recall things being any better in scientific computing compared to web development.

I agree that documentation is terrible most of the time, but that's not something limited to web development in my own experience. (On the contrary, check out the documentation of the website in question in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23031408, it's absolutely fantastic).

Some things become second nature when you have developed expertise in that field, and it's easy to criticise something that you have comparatively less knowledge in and pass it off as "too difficult", particularly when the web development part seems to be a means to an end (which seems to be the case here).

Edit: missing conjunction, tidied up the last sentence for clarity.
Nick Carraway, is that you?

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, " just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."
Your comments have been breaking the site guidelines badly, not just in this thread but unfortunately in other threads too. Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the spirit of this site to heart?

We're here for curious conversation, not smiting enemies. If you want the latter, please do it elsewhere.
We install in to remote locations - you can't access the cloud if your connectivity is down so local resources is a hard must.

Though we have adopted something close to an "Edge Computing" solution... I guess it comes down to "Why not both?" :)

I think it also depends on your definition of "server"
C, LISP, Python
> Actually my understanding is that that is

That is not my understanding, but I'm willing to be convinced otherwise, given a statement of hers to that effect.

> Guangdong and Wuhan are similarly distant from Yunnan

Yes, but Guangdong and Yunnan are bat country, unlike Wuhan.

Could it have spread through other wildlife? Yes. I'm not ruling that out at all, I never have. I'm pointing out that somehow the dominant narrative is the one that appears relatively unlikely even in the assessment of a leading expert.

> I made the claim that the transmission vector for Cov-1 and cov-2 were similar. That they both started in Yunnan and travelled east hundreds of miles via some method, likely a combination of bat migration/movement, civet/pangolin migration/movement, and human movement of captured animals.

As a reminder, this is your original claim:

"Bat caves in Yunnan are full of potentially dangerous coronaviruses, but the farmers living close to the caves are already immune to the strains they're in frequent contact with, so the only way for an outbreak to get big is by long-distance transportation carrying the virus somewhere else."

> If you read the updated article, you'd find that she no longer believes the virus could have leaked from her lab

It may well be true that it didn't come from her lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is several miles away from the seafood market.

However, the Wuhan CDC is right next to the seafood market and they performed experiments with hundreds of live bats there[1]. A likely vector could've been improperly disposed lab garbage.

[1] https://img-prod.tgcom24.mediaset.it/images/2020/02/16/11472...
>used to be straightforward

As someone who remembers having to do weird CSS tricks for really basic layouts (negative margins? hidden extra elements that don't make any sense, but cause other elements to move?), manually modifying the UI made up of jQuery plugins that require a very specific prescribed HTML structure to even work, or doing significant adjustments for 3 or 4 different browsers, I definitely dispute that claim.

Web development right now (at least the frontend for sure) feels like a breeze compared to about 10-15 years ago.

Steps 1 and 2 of the whole process may have gotten more difficult, but steps 5 through 100 are a lot easier these days.
noprocrast: yes
If it’s your cup of tea Senior Coconut provide a range of “latin” Kraftwerk covers too. Here’s Showroom Dummies[1]

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=buh8YnTwppM
Your comments have taken a noticetable turn to the trollish lately. If that keeps up, we're going to ban you again. Can you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and course-correct?
I will say it would be nice to review a PR while standing in line for groceries.
> Their efficiency is their profit margin.

Last time I checked, AWS had a profit margin in the 40%-50% ballpark.

Sorry, but the semiconductor industry doesn't operate with any kind of markup that would allow such profit margins from "getting better deals on hardware". The only one able to make that kind of profit used to be Intel on high-end server CPUs, and even they are now pressured by AMD and custom ARM silicon options. Anything else needed for a server, RAM or flash chips or whatever, is usually selling on thin single-digit margins.

Cloud provider profit margin is perfectly logical and explainable through lock-in effects keeping their customers paying big markups to stay in AWS infrastructure. Be it software that was built against AWS proprietary services, be it having the necessary engineering skills to manage AWS infrastructure in the team but lacking the skills to manage on-prem hardware, be it the enterprise sales teams of cloud operators schmoozing CTOs of big corporations and making them jump on a "going into cloud" strategy as some kind of magic bullet to future-proof their corporations' IT, be it the psychological effect that makes "using the cloud" apparently a mandatory thing to be "cool" in todays' silicon valley culture, and therefore by extension the whole worlds' IT engineering culture.

The most ironical of them all is this weird effect that drives people to rationalize these things, writing comments like yours, because nobody likes to admit they've painted themselves into a corner of lock-in effects. And of course there's the irony of this all being history repeating itself: anyone still remembering when IBM dominated the IT industry?
No, license is a brand [1], I don't think they have anything like what you described

[1] https://www.lovense.com/
1. That getting good at something can sometimes be quick; if you have the right background. But when it's not quick - that doesn't mean you can't get good. It simply means it's a process. Experiencing the part where I'm bad at something as simply the "beginning of a progress bar" and knowing it's going somewhere, and that practice is necessary allows me to persevere and not experience frustration or a feeling of inadequacy.

I would tell this (along with a real life story to match about myself) to my employees whenever they got discouraged. As a team lead, I would often do the same work they did, so they compared themselves to me, thinking something should be easy for them just because it's easy for me at this point in time. I would tell them it's not a fair comparison to make - I have several years of additional experience doing this compared to you, and I've done this a thousand times, while they're doing this the first time. Of course it appears easier to me - I've had practice, and that's all the difference between them and me, not intelligence or some other trait they have no direct effect on.

2. Evaluating my own and others' ideas through a set of explicit criteria (asking yourself "what does the solution to this problem need to solve in order to be considered adequate?") keeps me from falling in love with my ideas or solutions to problems. For example, my specific implementation for some software might look good to me. If someone else shows up with a different solution (e.g. during code review), then those criteria are the questions I need to ask them to verify that it is indeed a better solution, and that it doesn't overshoot what's needed. If it is better by those criteria, then there's no reason not to toss my idea aside and use theirs.

Of course, this concept also applies to the criteria themselves - someone else might convince me that my criteria are wrong, by noting that some of them are not explained by a greater goal (such as the larger task at hand -- the company's mission, turning a profit, etc.), and so on.
This is absurd. If anything they should be looking for people in good health who gave already had it.
But what if all the stuff that you've described is the most fun part of writing software?...
Our software runs in core (mobile) network systems, but that's at our customers. We ourselves have a rack in our office that runs things like Git repos, project management, virtual machines for development / testing, build servers, and instances for trainings.

We're concerned about corporate espionage and infiltration, so we can't trust our servers being out of our sight. Most people don't have the code on their physical machines either; I'm a cocky breath of fresh air in that regard in that I prefer my stuff to run locally instead of the (slow, underpowered) VMs, I trust Apple's encryption a lot.
Can you clarify this? When you said this I assumed it was allowing internet random's to post to GitHub under a single account owned by the site or the project, and I totally get why GitHub is going to pull that ASAP (have seen that and got in rows over that before). But I just checked and it looks like you have to authorise the app and hence Utterances is posting under your GitHub account?