skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I suppose so, but the term is typically understood in the software community as a pretty precise term of art, and people shouldn't try to muddy it.

It's still better than free software, which invariably makes the uninitiated think of freeware.
> It's not like this product enables speculators to hold on to water reserves better than they can currently.

The presence of a liquid market where they can sell at low friction at all times is a big incentive to speculate. It’s the difference between speculating on rare trading cards or exotic wines and stocks.
> this post quite honestly just makes me smirk.

It seems pretty callous to laugh at somebody else’s $72K misfortune, especially as they took reasonable steps to set a budget on the platform.
It's anecdotal, but I'm convinced I'm not alone here: we've had more Amazon-related failures/outages in 3 years with AWS than we had in 4 years of colo before heading to the cloud because of the exact fear you described.

Even a cloud setup needs good management and contingency planning, and in absence of such it can fail just as hard as a colo setup.
Hey HN. Author here.

I wrote this up because I very hesitant to run a black friday sale for my product and was blown away by how much it impacted the business. Hopefully sharing the story (and lessons learned) might encourage others who are worried about the "ickiness" of sales to try them out.

Also happy to answer any questions anyone has.
Excellent new mode. Leave it.
For Facebook, the breakup threat gets real
Author is an ex-Googler so he knew exactly how to speak to the system
No. You won't know more than the average web dev by a large margin. You will know very little of what is possible today and some things that are outdated and not relevant any more which are going to be useful in very rare situations.
It is because our eyes are also "incorrect". The cameras and processing and displays were engineered to match our eyes expectation. If some alien race with a sufficiently different physiology would look at our pictures they could tell that it is off. (and it wouldn't even mean that their eyes are more correct, just that their model is different.)
And for half the use cases you still need one. Unless you go full SaaS (which may or may not be an option depending what you are doing, and what's on offer in that field), you still get stuff which needs to be administered, updated, patched, etc.
Maybe not the OS layer (or maybe even that), maybe not the DB (but then it might cost more), but you're not getting away from that.

You only really start saving at some scale (get a small core of cloud-literate admins, and now you can have them run thousands of systems for effectively no incremental cost)
I'm not sure I want to know how much Azure and AWS revenue comes from people spinning up test VMs or a kubernetes cluster to work through a training, and then forgetting to turn it off.

I've spent thousands extra this year because people stood up 4 MB SQL databases and let them default to charging by vCores instead of DTUs.
The incentive is to start pricing water appropriately. When water is priced appropriately it will be valued. When it is not priced appropriately, it is wasted and misused.

We should treat water the same way because water is a human right, a commodity, and a resource. This discussion is prominent in the early chapters of Planet Water (https://www.amazon.com/Planet-Water-Investing-Valuable-Resou...)

By mispricing the resource, we've gotten to where we are:
1) Massive inequality
2) Bottled water has become the default backup system to investing in rebuilding the tap water system
3) There is not enough investment to rebuild the tap water system. The paradox is best seen at an airport where a bottle of water is $5 in a single use plastic bottle (that lasts for 450 years) and the water fountain which is "free."

As a social capitalist, I believe "free" water is bad for the marketplace. I've written about this more here: https://drinktap.substack.com/p/tap-june-2020-update
> The well off in these countries are much more well-off than they were before, but the poor are potentially in a worse/more inescapable position than they started.

Would you count this statement as falsified, if eg the median income in Bangladesh went up? (Or any other percentile.) If not, what would falsify that statement?

Singapore is an interesting case. You are right about ownership. I am basing my estimate more on eg the low rate of government spending compared to total GDP, general ease of doing business, light touch regulation.

Close to my heart (coming from Germany) is the absence of pervasive occupational licensing in Singapore. Similarly the absence of minimum wage laws.

> The rest of the paper goes into detail explaining how the government routinely intervenes with subsidies and tax policy in order to force the market into whatever shape it deems fit. So I think the fact that people view Singapore at anything close to a free market is more a testament to just how effective the propaganda that has been pushing free market economic thought has been.

I am currently living in Singapore, and so far the 'propaganda' has been so effective that even living here I still see that it's fairly pro-market.

And that includes talking to 'normal' locals, and also to people running businesses here.

Malaysia is useful for contrast. The government is a much bigger drag on the economy there.

The paper you quote is fairly old, and also doesn't seem to reflect the consensus of economists. (It's nonetheless interesting though.)
It's certainly the dominant trend, but it's not new.

Lenin analysed it more than a century ago https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/
How to add items to an Array in JavaScript
Aha what ? Where I live (Bordeaux, France) a quick glance through the job offers for full-time sysadmin are between 25 and 35k€ / year
Yes. CentOS 8 EOL is now the end of 2021: https://centos.org/distro-faq/#q2-what-about-the-other-relea...
I have tried it a long time ago (4, maybe 5 years ago?). Many, many things broke and I didn't have time to fix them all.

I already use the strictest Tracking Protection stuff in Firefox, for example, and I do hit sites that don't work correctly.

Maybe it's worth revisiting but something tells me that the web uses more JavaScript, not less, since I last tried this experiment.

And regarding the patronizing aspect, let's say your bank's website uses JavaScript, what do you do?

Edit, actually, sorry, I re-read your comment and you answered my question:

> I don't give a damn about other sites (and I don't browse intranet sites on my home machine -- if I'm in an office I use their office machine). If they don't work I don't use them except in rare cases when I really need to in which case they get run in a VM.

Q.e.d.

I'll just rephrase things to something less offensive: you're not "hurting" yourself, you're limiting yourself, sometimes with drawbacks not everyone is able/willing to endure.
Note: they actually included DLNA in their build, so this is moot.

DLNA is few notches below NFS in complexity. It has autodiscovery in the local network and optimized for library organization, control and streaming.

Using NFS instead of DLNA is much like what Russians call "sunset by hand".
What Is Your Time Worth?
From my point of view after doing this for 20 years, it's like seeing the past 12 years of the "put everything in the cloud" era, of new different people repeating exactly the same mistake over and over again.

It's like if you lived near a public park with particularly aggressive geese that return every year, and watched new ignorant groups of people get chased by the geese every spring.

It's not callous - it's the perspective of the people who are responsible for the hypervisors that run underneath the VMs and services that cause some of these massive billing outrages.
Better than cookies popups, at least it didn't create huge annoying thing.
> How many people can you reach with WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Messenger?

99% of all the ones I care about to be honest.

Maybe it's a function of me being an eastern-european expat living in London, but almost every here (Europe) uses WhatsApp.
$30k is a significant amount, especially in academic environment, I don't deny it. But it's not much for > 100 servers. In my previous job, I had licenses which were about 15k€ for one server (thanks Oracle...) and the Windows Server licenses were also pretty expensive.
$300-500 per server/year is not much more than a Photoshop license for one designer. And if we talk big business (1000's of servers and even more), you will get very special pricing anyway.
> The lack of meaningful observation in MI/PA alone, contrary to election law, would result in 100's of thousands of ballots being thrown out.

That's just not how it works. Even _granting_ the premise, it's not "You couldn't see well enough? Well let's disenfrancise a few hundred thousand people." That's not a reasonable remedy by any stretch of either common sense or law.

Then going back to the premises, isn't this in PA the one where they could see, they just weren't as close as they wanted to be, and they were exactly as close as the observers from the other campaign?

> Other times, e.g. Arizona, only a few were deposed unfortunately. Probably for time reasons? It took weeks to document the affidavits. I would have preferred that Binnall had chosen other witnesses/affidavits to swear in, but there certainly wasn't time to do them all.

Time reasons sounds reasonable to you? They have raised multiple _hundreds_ of millions of dollars, and the candidate has his own funds. They can't get more lawyers and assistants to help? This has been going for weeks.

You don't think it's more likely that the witnesses and affidavits they're using are subpar because that's the best they have?
Because compilers - apart from Pascal dialects - were quite slow. With Go, you aren't wasting time waiting for the compiler. So it feels like a script language, but gives you that extra security of a compiler.
And again Dr Michael Burry proves he was ahead of the curve.
I recently put the (soft) kibosh on a project in my stable trying to switch to FireBase at the last minute.

It looks attractive but the business aspects are frankly frightening, and I'm not even talking about the risk of a large bill. Getting your metrics 24h late sounds like a deal killer for me. So much for observability!
If you can wait for two months then just visit https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/ and you will find the results.
I think atmospheric water generation at scale is the solution
I know you are wrong (as in I have not seen the detection not beaten, it's probably hypothetically possible in some edge case - at least for a while), so you can only be speculating about the "many ways".
And... Why aren't there community done bulbs or printers or cars?

The pinnacle of technology is mostly free and open source.

Yet, I don't see this in any other industry sector.

So... is tech ahead of the curve of the most idealistic one?
> Had we chosen max-instances to be “2”, our costs would’ve been 500 times less. $72,000 bill would’ve been: $144. Had we chosen concurrency of “1” request, we probably wouldn’t have even noticed the bill.

> If you count the number of pages in GCP documentation, it’s probably more than pages in few novels. Understanding Pricing, Usage, is not only time consuming, but requires a deep understanding of how Cloud services work. No wonder there are full time jobs for just this purpose!

Great write-up - thanks for sharing @bharatsb! As you say, cloud pricing has become too complex for developers to understand quickly (they want to ship features, not calculate costs). Infra-as-code is great, but it has made it even harder to understand which code/config option costs what. `terraform apply` is like a checkout screen without prices.

We're trying to solve this problem with infracost.io, initially looking at Terraform. It would be interesting to get your feedback on whether such an approach might have helped you? Probably not as it doesn't look like you were using Terraform?
I meant that yes he travels a lot, but no that doesn't make it harder to know in which state he has been the most (or whichever rule applies in the US to determine in which state you officially reside) and thus to figure out where he should pay taxes.
I think a lot of the commentary is incredibly naive about the chain of events. It may be that this researcher was a complete arsehole, who despite this had managed to climb to a well respected position in Google and within the community in her area of expertise.

However, I think it's much more likely her toxic behaviour is a direct result of her being put into an extremely difficult position by her employer. Her job is to publish research on the ethics of the AI work that Google is doing. But by the sounds of it, Google want to block her from actually publishing anything critical. It would be one thing to say that her work was unsound, but that doesn't really seem to have happened. Instead there seems to be the classic corporate pocket veto. They don't want her publishing something critical, but they also want the PR of having respected AI ethics researchers. So they don't say she can't publish critical work, they just won't let her publish critical work. And when she asks why she can't publish critical work... well she can publish critical work Google has always been very clear that she's free to publish critical work. So she can publish the work? No. No you can't publish the work. That would make me pretty crazy too. I don't she's handled it well, but at the end of the day she's a person and she's facing her job basically being taken from her (and arguably finding out she's been a useful idiot for quite a while).

It's pretty clear here that Google wants to have its cake and eat it too. It wants to tell the world that it's got respected scientists doing research into the ethics of their AI work, but they don't actually want researcher to do research about the ethics of their AI work because a lot of what they're doing is unethical.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55087054

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-web-serv...
A sane implementation would default this to a low value
Just because you use "the cloud" doesn't mean you don't need backups. "the cloud" also have downtime and other failure. When deploying to the cloud you have to factor in the cost for moving to another provider if/when it will be needed.
Revealing the Company's Wireless Network with Kali Linux and Raspberry Pi 4
Dell 1U servers on eBay right now for under $500 with 128GB of RAM

In part 2 the author says "Had we chosen max-instances to be “2”, our costs would’ve been 500 times less. $72,000 bill would’ve been: $144". In other words, that $500 server is several times more expensive than it would have been if Firebase and GCP had saner defaults.
Interesting link, thanks.

It's curious that Wine outperforms Windows on some CPU-intensive tasks, but is far slower for certain others. The article just gives the numbers, but doesn't give a deep analysis. Perhaps cache issues?
I'm just trying to explain that server cost is more than just the hardware.

In most cases cloud computing is actually still a very cost effective solution to infrastructure. But with infinite scalability also comes responsibility.

In the case of the OP, had they had their own hardware they would have noticed that had written bad code (it would have crashed or become very slow at least), but the cloud just scaled up and processed their code.

I'm not trying to defend Google in this case. Billing 72k when a 100 USD limit is set sounds like a scam.
Ah fair enough. I saw Adobe flash and assumed it was YAPA* so clicked the left hand button.

* Yet Another Pointless Update
> On Dec. 5, Frances Watson, the chief investigator for the secretary of state’s office, said in an affidavit that after reviewing the video and conducting interviews, her investigators found “that observers and media were not asked to leave” but “simply left” after they saw workers, whose job was to open the ballots, leave.

That's a futile affidavit. Where are affidavits from the investigators and the precinct staff members themselves, where they say that observers and media were not asked to leave.
Some mention about nostalgia. I'm afraid whenever I think of flash, I think mainly of "punch the monkey" and dodgy .so files in my browser. I won't miss it.
Right, I feel this is just a new source of income for governments. They seem to be too keen on handing out fines in those areas where it‘s simple to do so, but fail to act in other areas where the consumer is constantly being hurt e.g. right to repair, warranty laws, right to return digital products.
What about throttling?
Since you ask, I care about cookies.

If I visit a website like say, Instagram, they shouldn't leave any tracking before I've had a chance to read the privacy agreement, decide it's not for me and navigate away.

Sadly, that's exactly what they do and it's about time they were made to follow the GDPR, at least within the EU.
You confuse cost with salary.

Someone who makes 35k a year costs much more. Think about office space, training, insurance, payroll costs etc.
Yet that is exactly how propaganda and mis-information works.

How exactly do you think antivaxers became antivaxers? They weren’t born like that, they were exposed to propaganda and eventually fell for it.

I know several wonderful, educated and otherwise reasonable people, who have fallen for antivaxing, antimask, covid-is-a-lie conspiracies. This includes two teachers in the public school system. The same people who are supposed to teach critical thinking to the next generation. Think about what that means for a moment.

Propaganda works. Stopping propaganda, highlighting “fake news”, debunking conspiracies, and teaching critical thinking is essential.
A lot more than with SMS. You can send someone an SMS but they are not going to respond because either they cost money or they have some tiny allowance of them.
He is usually right, but tends to be right a bit too early.
HiFiBerry OS runs mpd and supports adding networked sources such as a NAS.
I'm just a student but I've spent about 10 hours trying to figure out why Azure has been charging me >$5/day for their "basic" database @5DTUs, 2gb max storage. This morning I was so exasperated I sent a letter threatening to report them for fraud if nobody could tell me why I was being charged 30x the listed rate, which so far no one has. This is an extremely cathartic post to see that I'm not alone, thanks for sharing.
Being incredibly boring and old ends up being a beautifully stable foundation to build on. The idea is to pay the debt as an organization on a fixed schedule that allows for years of stability in between. For larger organizations, this can be far less work and less strife than a rolling upgrade would, as the resources to test such upgrades are often unfortunately limited and expensive.
The cookie banners being annoying is because these companies want it to be annoying so you don't pay attention and just click accept without actually learning what they do with your data.
Jinx Debugger
Yes I would agree that having automatic-scaling set to effectively infinite by default is not the best choice for the end user who is paying.

But for the cloud operator, when somebody's runaway application results in a $15,000 bill that has to be paid, sure...

As to whether letting people's runaway things scale up infinitely is an intentional choice, I couldn't say.
Apache Flink 1.12 with a batch execution mode in DataStream API, K8s HA released
Hunting for Ideas
So, it was my understanding that Fedora was the beta/testing upstream distro for RHEL. Features and development would go from Fedora -> RHEL -> CentOS, previously. With CentOS moving upstream of RHEL, it seems a bit strange doesn't the role overlap with where Fedora already is?
Linking directly to the repository is very confusing. I was seriously wondering what the point of this was until I saw the actual website.

"We are putting a new lease of life into vintage B&O speakers, upgrading them with wireless capabilities, utilising the latest in open source technology."

Basically they are trying to turn old dumb speakers into smart ones. It has to be opensource because a conventional IoT vendor would not only try to sell you a new speaker, you would also be tied to their online servers. The hardware they offer is expensive but it is far more likely to keep its value after 10 years.
I was thinking the same thing. How many of us blindly save contact data to our phones or other PIM software, then back it up online to a Google, Apple, or Samsung service? Do they need my contacts' consent? If I were to ask my friends, "Is it okay if I back up your contact informarion to Samsung's online service?" they would think I was weird for asking.
This week I was listening to the radio and the host said (live) that he could not see the script (he made a bigger than usual pause) because of a flash update. I had to laugh. Other members of the show referred to "remind me later" as "kill me later".

That evening, watching some movie online it suddenly stopped. I check and it is the same flash update. I guess Flash updates bring us together in a bonding experience.

A pity for the environment that enabled so many media experiments and animations. I won't miss the memory leaks or the updates, though.
I'm my own boss in a red state, so more concerned about getting pounded by spammers and weirdos than professional repercussions. Just don't see much point to the pen pal project.

Lift regularly, free yourself from the HR fatties, start a business, spend half the day filling out forms for every nickel-and-dime tax/license under the sun, and you will also want to get a helicopter license (to celebrate Pinochet's birthday in style!)

I say this as a former Bernie supporter.
What even...? Three lines of goodbye message, where the last line has the bottom cutoff by a huge ad? https://imgur.com/a/ooJI79Q
well as it says in the article "[with CentOS] you basically get a free Red Hat Enterprise Linux with same packages and same updates." - I assume that don't sit well with IBM, the owner of Red Hat the owner of CentOS.
Monads and GATS in Nightly Rust
That sort of crap is the reason we host all our stuff on root servers.

Even trying to read the amazon pricing for their instances, hours and what not, drives me insane.

Seems this is done on purpose. no wonder they make so much money with it.

So i have never seen a reason to move any stuff to the cloud.

Just grab a dedicated server for a few bucks and put a bunch of docker containers on those.

Its way cheaper, usually not more complicated. Just use a CI with Gitlab runners or whatever and be done with it.

Most apps don't need scaling anyway and if you do, just put that app on bare metal fitting your requirements.
Arctic Seismic Work Will Not Hurt Polar Bears, Government Says
You're saying Apple has better privacy brand than DDG? I'm not so sure about that, I don't think most Apple users connect the brand with privacy at all while DDG's brand (while much less familiar obviously) is all about privacy.
>"Jinx was a concurrency debugger that deterministically controlled the interleaving of workloads across processor cores, focusing on shared memory interactions. Using this deterministic approach, Jinx aimed to increase the frequency of occurrence of elusive shared memory bugs, sometimes called Heisenbugs."

[...]

"Jinx was implemented as a hypervisor, giving it the ability to observe the effects of all elements of the software environment on thread interleaving. Jinx operated independently of any programming language or threading libraries or tools."
Which is moot if you're just going to burn the 72k by shooting yourself in the foot.

And the way these cloud services go, the 72k was only detected because it was an one-off event. Turn that into a base-level inefficiency that costs that over a year and what have you then.
Waiting for that Notion-based CMS for my JamStack website in 3, 2, 1...