skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Did any of the people commenting how complicated (and/or expensive) this looks actually READ the box titles before they ran to proclaim how this should all be replaced with a simple monolith on a single VM?

There is a TON Of stuff here that is not related to your application business logic, but still has to exist SOMEWHERE for a complete production application.

Let's go through what's actually here that your single VM/Rails application does not/cannot encapsulate:

* CDN

* Domain name and certificate management

* OAuth/identity handling

* File upload

* Workflow orchestration

* Facebook messenger/email integration

And for those complaining that this is untestable, it's...exactly the opposite. ALL Of this is infrastructure as code declarable in a configuration file. Which means you can spin up a beta environment as quickly as production, or hell every developer can spin up this entire environment in their account (FOR FREE i might add - because that's the whole value proposition with serverless which is that you don't pay for something if you don't use it)

What's inside these Lambda function is still standard code you can apply good software engineering and SOLID principles and unit test thoroughly and in isolation.

And if you think workflows, and asynchronous queues, and event buses are overkill - well maybe they are for your use case. If you have 1 API invocation per minute you don't need ANY of this.

But if you're handling any serious scale, this will scale elastically with minimal operational intervention.

Remember - your company is not just your devs but your ops people too. And this makes their life way easier.

I understand the frustration with the 'serverless' buzzword, but let's not miss the forest for the trees. This shit is REVOLUTIONARY. And all people can do is try to one-up how much they could replace it with a simple shell script. The lack of humility in this crowd is mindboggling.

Look I agree - at both extremes (very little usage, A LOT of usage) serverless architectures like this are either overkill or to expensive. But there is avery fat middle (I'd venture >90%) of software projects out there for whom this would be both the easiest and the cheapest architecture (in terms of total cost of ownership) to build and maintain.
Trump’s press secretary appears to have exposed president’s banking information
It's a really weird problem to have, I've had it in one of my products. Someone signed up and I was super happy to have a paying subscription. The first month or so I could see they hadn't yet made use of the service. No worries, maybe they just hadn't got around to it. Couple more months, still no use, what to do? Could it be fraud, but how does that work? No one gets anything from me, and I get all the money?

Do I cancel their subscription? Is that the right thing to do from a customer service perspective? I have no idea. Sending an email that says "Hey, um, did you do this accidentally?" is a bit unprofessional. I tried contacting them to no avail, to see if they needed help setting up to keep it professional but still remind them they have this recurring subscription they might not want. Eventually I ended their subscription and left a professional sounding "We noticed you're not using our service, so we have paused your subscription." email and ended it.

I still sometimes wonder if it wasn't a friend or friendly stranger who wanted to support me, and if it was I must sincerely thank them.
Which side is that?
google dgaf

There are only a handful of extensions that are deal breakers (the lack of which would send users to other browsers). uBlock Origin, for example. All the others can fuck right off.
I had no idea one could link directly to PDF pages. Thanks for the tip!
I am paying 13€/mo for 600M down, 60M up, unlimited (France). The plan is actually 1Gb but this cannot be reached in my flat.

But the Internet is slow and/or unreliable in many places in the country side, when available at all. We are far from having these speed on average across the country.
I don't understand how we've normalized Googles behavior to the point where this doesn't even shock me anymore. When I used Google Play Music a couple years ago there was a feature that was broken for YEARS according to the bug reports I could find, and in a classic Google move they shut the service down before ever fixing it.

That might sound like a non sequitur but it's ridiculous to me how little Google cares about anyone (users or the people who make content for their platforms) yet we still use their products. These days I try to avoid them wherever possible, not only for a small satisfaction of boycotting the company, but also because if I grow to like one of their products it will just shut down eventually.

What can we do about this?
> Meanwhile, Linux has made the lives of 4k display owners unlivable due to the lack of non-integer scaling.

I had no problems at all setting 1.3 scaling in monitor settings (Fedora/Gnome 3)
The idea of a large team is probably an oxymoron.
That sounds more like a "soft" disagree. :)
> What kind of programmers wrote such code that terminates account without human intervention? Please do not blame it on Project Managers.

One who gets paid half a million a year to not question the policies and their consequences and just does what they are told?
> I've now worked at several organizations where sensitive information was stored on air-gapped networks.

Then you won't be processing email on machines on those networks.
Are you certain about this? I think I was being conservative.

It's easy for us tech nerds in our little gadget bubbles to suppose that everybody is like us. But most people are simple browser users, and Office 365 and Google Docs have all but killed off office software on the desktop for many users.
> It's not wrong, just misleading. Seems overblown given that most practitioners know how to read this kind of marketing speak.

So basically whatever MongoDB was doing 10 years ago, they are continuing to do there. They did not change at all, yesterday or two days ago there were few people defending mongo that indeed in early years mongo want the greatest, but it is now and people should just stop being hang up in the past.

The reason why people lost their trust with mongo wasn't technical, it was this.
But it is directly internet related. If you check the actual paper [0] - I had to search for it - you will see this quote:

We demonstrate transmission over 75 km of fibre in the
laboratory as well as in a field trial over an installed
network in the greater metropolitan area of Melbourne,
Australia.

Technically that 75 km was between two different labs running on dark fiber. They state more detail in this quote:

These cables were routed from the labs access panels,
to an interconnection point with the AARNet’s fibre
network.

[0] - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-16265-x
Maybe we have too much reliance on proprietary technologies of our cloud host. More likely our problem has to do with the order in which we learned to build certain things relative to the growth of the organization. Or maybe we just haven’t tried hard enough to set up a local build of our system.
IIRC, some company wanted to use SQLite on an airplane, so they paid the devs enough to bring the test suite up FAA standards. IIRC, they have code coverage of every machine instruction.
[repost - asking for help] I am disappointed with the direction that MongoDB took this past few years. Going ACID shows in benchmarks [1] and it’s not advisable if you are using MongoDB for stats and queue. (No one uses MongoDB for financial transactions despite the changes.)

And the recent change to a restrictive license is worrisome as well. I have been thinking of forking 3.4 and make it back to “true” open source and awesome performance. (If any C++ devs want to help out, reach out to me! username @gmail.com)

[1] https://link.medium.com/PXIeZfhhH6
https://www.lysator.liu.se/c/henry/index.html
As an advocate of involving the FTC in such situations, done. Thanks for the reminder.
It's implicit declaration, which seems worse in some ways than implicit conversions. After a conversion you know what type you have even if not the type you started with.
I prefer numbers and measurement units to trademarked, fuzzy descriptions of experiences. Since we're talking about display density, DPI is the term I want to see used.
I agree. Its a weirdly divisive issue, but I think the market will continue to move this way.

The issue that all centralized systems will inevitably face is the requirement to blanket apply overly restrictive policies in order to head off legal issues. You see this in every massive, centralized system. Google Drive deletes files that trip a bandwidth limit. YouTube has algorithms which ban videos for even speaking about a topic. There's a lot of nuance in moderating content; that nuance gets lost in systems of massive scale, and this inevitably causes these systems to "implode" on themselves.

In other words: the legal system has a ton of nuance. Nuance defines our legal system. Its alright to kill someone in self defense; its not alright to kill someone in cold blood. But, Google (et al) cannot apply nuance at scale. No one can. Its physically impossible. The issue is not Google; its the Scale.

There are two possible futures: One where we continue down the path of centralization, the draconian policies continue to get worse, and our right to speech is increasingly eroded by private companies; another where we move to more peer-to-peer moderation, which will probably be in a more peer-to-peer like system. There is no third option. People argue this point like there is a third option: There is not. Distributed networks may not happen, but you will not like the world we'll live in if they don't.

This doesn't necessarily have to be a strict Peer-to-Peer system in the technical sense. Reddit is, to some degree, a Distributed, Peer-to-Peer system, whereby the moderators of subreddits get primary control over the content in those subreddits. There's a relationship large products like G-Suite could have with their customers, whereby they delegate the moderation of the majority of their users activities to the customer/IT, while still being capable of stepping in and remediating issues with problem customers as a whole. This is, actually, pretty similar to the relationship AWS has with its customers, and it works! But, G-Suite does not have this relationship with their customers; they blanket apply the same personal account policies to enterprise customers.

But, I also truly believe that no one at Google even knows what their system is doing anymore. Its probably billions of lines of code, systems, policy enforcement, tripwires, and circuit breakers that have long since spiraled out of the control of anyone who actually may want to improve their relationship with enterprise customers.
Very cool, I'll dig into this later. I've been meaning to gain a better understanding of dependent typing. Been working on an SML clone with first class modules (ala 1ML/F-ing modules), and I understand that the module language is typically modeled with dependent types. It's been challenging to try to enable modules-as-existentials without too much compiler-side hackery going on.
What I said is not complicated:

> I've never heard anyone make that point about pornography, only about restrictions on nudity and/or swearing on TV/movies.

Your DDG search provided an example of that, yet you seemed to think it proved your point about pornography.
I’m not sure what specific problem is being solved with the solution you’ve written. Also, I wasn’t building a web application.
Order-of-magnitude is extremely important. Frequently I find myself asking "So how much money is it going to save us? $100/mo, $1k/mo, or $10k/mo?" It's basically a nicer (and more concrete) way to ask "Are we sure that this project is worth the money the company's paying us to do it?"

(Unfortunately I don't always get a satisfying answer, but that's life...)
It does have a decimal type.
I understand that Triplebyte is in trouble due to Coronavirus and they will do anything necessary to stay alive. Even if their "product shift” actions are not ethical: they really have nothing to lose.

What I do not understand how this is legal? We have all these new laws ("California Consumer Privacy Act" of 2020, GDPR, etc.) and it seems like this kinda of actions are legal. The goal of these laws is to protect us against companies which have nothing to lose and they are force to do things which are considered non-ethical.
It needs to be intellectually interesting (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Most content marketing and marketing materials aren't. They're too focused on trying to sell something or get people to think or do something. HN readers immediately sense that and react aversely.

What I always tell startups who want to get attention from HN readers is: if you try to sell them, they will close the tab. But if you interest them, they will sell themselves.

Interesting them means that the reaction you want is 'huh, I never knew that', or 'that's interesting, I wonder if...'. The point is to learn something new that leads to an expanded, open response to the world. Hard-sell marketing material doesn't do that. Even when it succeeds in driving clicks or signups, it often leaves you with a slightly sordid feeling, like you got manipulated or exploited.

Still, some content marketing content (i.e. content that was produced to get attention or sales for a company) can be quite interesting if it's written with that intention. It's just rare, because most of the people producing such material aren't trying to produce that sort of interest, and aren't particularly interested in that way themselves. They're trying to drive a mechanical response and trying to get people to do what they want. A curious response isn't necessarily going to make people do anything at all, and if they do, it will be unpredictable. But that is the response that works for HN.

Previous comments about this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20617732

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20186280
Where exactly in Nevada? Close to the border at Lake Tahoe or further in some really small town?
I would recommend Erlang over Elixir. Rubyish syntax and leak of Erlang abstraction is a tough combo.
I did the same thing at a previous job. Got signed up for an 8 hour security training because of it - somehow I refused to go and they didn't fire me.
If your device supports OpenGL ES and is Android 6+ You can get signed APK for your phablet from here: https://krita-artists.org/t/making-and-testing-the-android-b...
In 4 years I haven't felt the need to look elsewhere.
I’m fine using a hidpi monitor with Linux but this is probably because I only really use about three programs:

- Chrome which you need to pass a command line arg with your (not necessarily integer) scaling factor

- emacs which just reads the dpi from xresources

- xmonad/xmobar which barely have user interfaces but where you can specify pixel sizes for fonts if they get it wrong.

- terminal emulator which I think just looks at xresources for dpi.

Maybe other programs don’t work so well.
The Ten Commandments were originally written in ancient Hebrew. They were passages in the Hebrew Bible, which the Christians later adopted as the Old Testament. It was the New Testament that was originally written in Greek.
I can't reproduce the exact test specified in the article:

$ echo $'#!/bin/sh\necho Hello' > /tmp/test.sh && chmod a+x /tmp/test.sh
$ time /tmp/test.sh && time /tmp/test.sh
Hello

real 0m0.016s
user 0m0.002s
sys 0m0.010s
Hello

real 0m0.006s
user 0m0.002s
sys 0m0.004s

I don't believe the 0.01s difference is long enough, and could easily explained by filesystem caching. The article says:

> Some people try to explain away the delay, e.g., "I would put the 300 vs 5 ms down to filesystem caching", but such hand waving doesn't stand up to further scrutiny.

...but does not provide any "further scrutiny", so for me, occam's razor applies.
The wrong one I suspect. An Airgapped machine is a term reserved for a pc never connected to the internet, hence the gap. Usually for extreme security concerns like managing a paper crypto wallet or grid infrastructure.
Turing Machines by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
I'd recommend trying this: Download a notarized Mac app, delete any stapled notarization ticket (.app/Contents/CodeResources), and then trace the launch. What do you see, and does the system let you open the app? Does it say it checked for malware?
I have done several multi-terabyte queries on it. One time I had a race with another dev to see who could get the right answer on a 3TB dataset. I was finished before his spark cluster had even spun up.
Sam's Laser Repair FAQ
Show HN: Book reviews to help people make progress
I’ve played with Elixir/Phoenix a little bit and was not very happy with a few things:

- Debugging is hard. You can’t throw a REPL wherever your want in your code and pipe states are hard to inspect.

- Serving static files in Phoenix is oddly super hacky.

- Deploy is hard. Mostly by the lack of support out there in term of documentation and services.
Agree, and the "Mongo and Jepsen" page isn't targeting distributed systems experts, most of them know to stay away, because even if there are things that mongo does right, other systems do it better.
America’s Next Crisis Is Already Here
I'm using broad terms like "workflow" for categories.
Tags in "workflow" are e.g. #shortcut, #vscode
Epidemiologists are battled today too! https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/22/us/politics/coronavirus-t...
Why not use PostgreSQL instead? It supports a JSON document data type natively. It also has exceptional stewardship as an open source project.

Mongo should never be a first choice, but a last choice for edge cases.
It would be very easy to regulate the ability to make money easily (platforms, payment systems, public websites/corps) producing this content and therefore decreasing the supply.

The bigger picture is the social/cultural conversation around porn usage. It is very accepted, promoted even, by many communities and elements within our society. If there was an honest conversation around this usage would decline. The "no fap" community is an example of this and I think they have had successes changing minds around porn usage as an unquestionable good.

This does also get into political viewpoints on public good and individual freedom, and where that line is drawn.

>not illegal only if you record yourself doing it, even child porn

Don't know what this means. Authorities cannot have knowledge of every instance of law breaking that occurs maybe?

Doesn't change its illegality or the punishment if this is discovered.
Overengineering
It seems like trying to build a business on any Google property is simply a bad idea. Or, if you do, have an alternative ready for when Google shuts down the product or cancels your account.
I recently interview with netflix and talked with the director that manages the subscribe/cancel flows. He said it's an absolute priority to keep the cancel experience as easy as possible. He even talked down an idea to add an extra content or modals before the cancel experience.

I was impressed.
You’re not “locked in” to Lambda. When you see that lambda isn’t the answer you deploy the code to a server or Docker just by making a few changes to your deployment pipeline.

If you use the standard APIGW solution where it routes to your various lambdas, you would have to rewrite code.
> We've entered an era where new languages are almost never used

I disagree. The same was said when perl dominated before Ruby and Python came along. And Pascal, C and C++ before that. Nowadays Nim, Crystal, Rust, Go, F#, D, Zig, JavaScript, Haskell, and more are all viable options for application development.

We have more viable programming languages than ever.
One thing I've noticed is that there are a lot of automated decision making going on. In [1], the ICO offers guidance around what the GDPR says in regards to this subject.

What I don't understand is why the GDPR doesn't enforce the following:

1: Clear and concise information about the action being taken, and clear identification this was done using automation and did not involve any human oversight.

2: A process the user can invoke to request human intervention, and a confirmation email that a human will review the decision that was made within 30 days

3: Public statistics and transparency - any decision that was made that did not involve a human must be published, with stats on % of decisions made, number of cases flagged to human reviewers, and the success/failure rates (for example, number of cases resulting in an overturned AI decision by a human).

This could also be beneficial in other sectors too, like automated credit decisions and insurance policies, to publish statistics and data to afford transparency and identify possible biases. It should also be a requirement in law to preserve any code or algorithms should they need to be audited, including an AI system to be preserved "in time", so that the 2017 version can be audited in 2020 if an investigation is launched for example.

Right now, it's a complete free for all, too many edge cases and ways to game the system if you can figure its loopholes, and no requirement in law to provide a fair basis for users to appeal to a human without causing a PR shitstorm.

This early adoption of AI is quite bad, and I suspect we'll see such developments in the long term future as it matures.

[1]: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...
I finally stopped using chrome and thanks to Brave, I can use almost all the extensions that I still am used to, since all of them are compatible with Brave.
It’s pretty apparent that they think people who don’t work for google are vastly inferior human beings. It honestly runs counter to their “social justice” facade.
I spent the first 10 years of my career working on and consulting with the open source CMS Plone. Consulting paid the bills. There were occasional paid projects for specific improvements to the core software, though mostly that was done in my own time. Contributing helped build up my skills and reputation which helped landing consulting contracts.

It was pretty awesome. For most of the time I was able to live somewhere fairly affordable and earn a comfortable income (though a long way from SV money.) I still miss that community and meeting up with them at sprints and conferences around the world.
a premium experience is their best defense against the competition, and they know this.