skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is mostly convenience (for me). I think most people talking savings are just trying to justify the toys.

I have a few smart switches that I can't say are anything more than convenience, but one smart plug paid for itself in 7 months and now saves me a whooping $4 per month on propane. A dumb timer would almost work, but the smart plug makes it so I can handle the exceptions to the rule.
I remember seeing the replay of PG writing an essay[^1] back in 2009. To me, this was such a strong way to show (rather than tell) just _how_ hard writing really is.

[^1] Here's the current link if you're interested so watch: http://byronm.com/13sentences.html (Thankfully re-discovered from one of PGs recent tweets: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1365425470318272514)
it's called 'tupperware'
My God says you have no rights except those derived from governments. Now what do we do?

"Rights" are more properly understood as "a social agreement among people of a culture". If a culture doesn't value something, no rights for it exist. When cultures intersect, "rights" get real muddy real fast.
Fwiw I personally quite like having function colors for async tasks and I/O, and in fact wish we also had them for purity (both read-purity and write-purity).
> 66% said Go is critical for the success of their company

That's way more than what I could guess!
Looks like this is the result of their 2019 acquisition.

Cisco to bring voice transcription to Webex with Voicea buy. The Voicea acquisition is part of a “cognitive collaboration” initiative as Cisco revamps its collaboration software and eyes new AI capabilities.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3430717/cisco-to-bring...
How to Create a Good SaaS Buyer Persona
SaaS inbound marketing is used to attract new users to your product and convince them to pay for it. Buyer persona development can help you do just this, but what exactly is it? How do you create one, and where do they fit into your SaaS business? We’re here with some insider knowledge about how you can use personas to take your business to the next level!
That is all until The Queen snatches up that reserved Liz@[crown].kz, after that the MI5 will buy and run the [union-jack].uk for all governmental parties and typing in very.important.person@parliament.uk istead of [serious-face-with-a-tie]@[big-ben] will be considered rude in high circles, believe me that!

;)
‘Never’ is an adverb.
The post we are responding to had only one smart TV element involved, and that was the door camera. The rest was about thermostats, light control, and window shades.

I think its fair to point out that those things don't have to be proprietary. Even the door camera doesn't really have to use a smart tv, though it probably does in that case.
Changing Paths. Any Advice?
I'm wanting to change paths in IT and I value the knowledge and deep understanding people here have in many areas, so I'm asking HN followers what you think.
I've been a sysadmin for 20 years. I work with everything from Linux, macOS, Windows Server, Windows 10, PowerShell, Bash. I run a Microsoft 365 system as admin as well as a Google Workspace system as admin. I've basically got all the tooling, etc., down pat. I'd like to get into data analytics and out of the user account, break-fix, machine down, keeping machines running mode and into something more interesting.
Caveat: I came into IT at 30 and am now 50. I have a degree and 20 years of experience, but am now just bored with VMs, servers, running email servers, and troubleshooting user data being lost, etc. I'm leaning heavily towards the Google side in terms of Google infrastructure, data analytics, etc., vs Microsoft because having worked with both ecosystems, Google's side represents less friction, it's truly federated, etc., and frankly the tools just seem to work better.
Google is about to launch a Data Analytics certification through Coursera. From what I can glean, I should also learn Python, Tableau, Excel very well (spreadsheets in general), and how to visualize data. Any thoughts or ideas, constructive criticism, whatever, is most welcome.
Being a developer of 30+ years I stick with C / C++. They give you the flexibility required for all use cases. They leverage the OS and hardware architecture by reflecting it appropriately. The desire to abstract away complexity is not possible given that the computing architecture is so fundamental to everything layered above it.
If anyone wants to try something less fantasy themed, I strongly recommend hackmud (https://store.steampowered.com/app/469920/hackmud/), in which you play as a recently sapient program in the ruins of a network long devoid of human users. The community is very savvy and have implemented some complex stuff in and out of game, including bridges between all the popular text channels and mirrors of them on Discord (https://discord.gg/h5K5fYuuMj), so you can monitor and even play the game without being logged in (to hackmud, you would still need to be on Discord).
I went down this exact same path. Started simplifying everything and it did wonders for my velocity. It took me a while to realize that we have teams and teams of people maintaining all this crap I was trying to spin up myself. It just wasn't worth it.

I went to basic principles, FreeBSD. systemd has taken Linux in the wrong direction in my opinion. I don't want anything fancy, I don't want to learn another persons resume building framework, I want to use technology that has proven longevity.

Our technology space moves so fast, for my personal work, I have to leverage the first principle technologies that I have mastered over my career. The latest framework may make some problems easier to solve, but I don't deploy technology without achieving some level of competency. That takes significant time. I'm getting wiser with how I spend that time, it's not always easy to know.

This process has also taught me why we have this proliferation of SaaS solutions. It's tempting, and maybe one day I'll be wise enough to realize that this is the route to take. However, I'm still able to leverage my core skills and open-source technology enough that SaaS solutions don't look attractive to me. I can see the benefits either way, so I suppose maybe in five years when I reflect I'll know if I made the right investment.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Pixels
Is there good tooling that's actually in between "just running a website out of my spare bedroom" and "kubernetes"?

I think maybe not.
If they were carrying a national security payload, then having a gps feed of the second stage trajectory and target orbit would be less than ideal.
My rescue dog was having trouble learning until I cooked her an egg for the first time. It's pretty hard to grow a brain out of whatever garbage she was finding to eat.
I think there needs to be more consciousness that the internet as a whole is a public commons, as public as doing something on the square. It's something I'm going to endeavor to teach my kids when they start interacting with the internet (a thought that already gives me great anxiety)
So I agree there’s definitely a need for more writing in this space (and you’d think it might be particularly of interest to incubating startups...)

My top level take on this is that the cues to take things up a level in terms of infrastructure diligence are when the risk budget you’re dealing with is no longer entirely your own. Once you have a banker, a lawyer, an insurance policy, an investor, a big customer, a government regulator, shareholders... ultimately once there’s someone you have to answer to if you haven’t done enough to protect their interests.

And risk management isn’t just ‘what will happen if the server catches fire’, it’s ‘how do I guarantee the code running in production is the code I think it is?’ And ‘how do I roll back if I push a bug to production?’ And ‘how can I make sure all the current versions of the code come back up after patching my servers?’

And it turns out that things like kubernetes can help you solve some of those problems. And things like serverless can make some of those problems go away completely. But of course they come with their own problems! But when those things become important enough that you need to solve for them to answer the risk aversion of sufficient stakeholders, the cost of adopting those technologies starts to look sensible.
I believe it has to be a GTK app - which almost none of the things I use on a daily basis are. Try in gedit or something like that.

My daily drivers are IntelliJ, Firefox, Chrome, and Terminator so it's not super useful to me... :'(
Good question! German Wikipedia says because it's got a harsher sound to it: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konzentrationslager#Nationalso...
Sounds exactly like the medical industrial complex in the US. Opioid crisis and general over medication and over treatment just magically happened / keeps happening. Surely no doctor ever thought let’s give the customer what they are asking.
Its not just engineers that want to build complex infrastructure though. This a massive misconception and shifting the blame to 'nerdy engineers' doing 'nerdy' stuff instead of solving real problems.

Startup that worked at raised whole bunch of money and hired tons of engineers. They were all tasked to "build something big". eg: it was expected of data engineers to setup "big data architecture" with complex data-lakes, job schedulers , spark clusters, streaming jobs and all sorts of weird stuff. No one really understood why we are building all this stuff but we never got real answers from the management.
Ha! C++ is not going away, probably not ever but certainly not any time in our lifetimes.

There is a LOT of code in C++ out there. I write in it every day. There are a lot of open source project written in C++.

C++ isn't even that hard to learn, at least to a basic level of fluency, but there is a lot to know to be good at it.
I regret looking those up. The titles aren't satirical.
I have to say that if you have difficulty with the definitions and basic intuition of fiber bundles, you probably don't have a great future in high-energy theoretical physics. Fiber bundles are the foundation of modern approaches to gauge theory, which is ubiquitous in high-energy theory. Any junior or senior math major should be able to grok them with little or no difficulty (speaking from experience: I learned them from a physics book as a junior). I can appreciate that an engineering grad might not have much experience with comparably abstract math, though.
Doesn't surprise me in the least. I've long felt that "journalism" has more in common with marketing and SEO than much else these days.
The weak and strong interactions have other properties that screen their influence at longer ranges (just like with the EM force due to objects being mostly neutral in case of the strong interaction for example), but the strong force is indeed much stronger.

The EM force between a proton here and at the edge of the visible universe is the same as the gravitational force between two protons at 1000 meters distance. The scale difference in the "hierarchy problem" is truly not graspable by human intuition.
>Google is famous for shutting things down

Google is famous for shutting down consumer services. It very rarely shuts down major business facing services.
Can you cite a source for this? the core claim is that coal ash contains more uranium and other radioactive metals than what a typical nuclear plant consumes in a year owing to the impurities of coal and the massive volume of coal consumed by a power plant in a given year.

As coal ash is typically disposed of via water or air it's an interesting discussion point.
Actually This is exactly how I accidentally started consulting on k8s. Three of my customers had engineers who advocated for k8s, did 50-75% of an implementation then left.

I have told all of my customers they don’t need this, but they are convinced this is the way of the future.
Speaking of creativity, the Beatles famously used a tape-based keyboard, the Mellotron [0]. For instance, in Strawberry Fields Forever, the spooky instrument heard in the introduction is a flute replayed in reverse on the Mellotron [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mellotron

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strawberry_Fields_Forever
> The await keyword can only be used inside procedures marked with the {.async.} pragma.

https://livebook.manning.com/concept/nim/await
This guy seems crazy about registering weird domain names. netflix.soy, google(.hebrew).. good to see him making his money back and kudos for doing the jokes so thouroghly.

I too have such crazy stupid ideas all the time, but it's one thing to think about it and another to actually finish it and start marketing it with videos on producthunt and tiktok.
Right. I said k8s is a way. Not the way. There might be others. They might have their own trade offs.
People have been running full simulations of SpaceX vehicles just of on-screen telemetry and videos [0]. In the past, SpaceX has been very open towards these kind of efforts, they don't seem to mind at all.

[0] Example for SN9: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeBtBidjlvk | https://flightclub.io/result?code=SN91
They restored a flat copy from archive.org

It looks bad. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt but... they either don't want to put it online for some reasons, or they don't have backups available.

My bet is that the entire IT service is subcontracted, which means burnt juniors deal with 99% of it, understaffed etc

There's this running joke in Spain about SEPE being useless and lazy, because of their "customer service", but much of the labor-related management and payments go through it.
The First New Shade of Blue in 200 Years Hits Shelves as YInMn Blue
Hassle-free quick loan offer based on your Stripe data. Stripe does it. Pipe does it. I might have come across one more lender in the past. Who else is out there?
Physician found a surprising health threat after studying Fukushima disaster
Bill Gates backs $1/kg green hydrogen water splitter technology
The Beginners Guide to Elasticsearch
Thank you for this!

What in your opinion is the optimal way to run "a couple dozen ec2 instances"?

I'm kind of in that zone.

I don't think "totally manually" works out very well once you are in even "one dozen EC2 instances", it's too easy to make mistakes, you spend too much time (with downtime) figuring out what mistake you made and what it was supposed to be instead. Generally too hard to orchestrate changes without downtime.

But is there anything in between totally manual and kubernetes?

I think that's one reason people are reaching for kubernetes, they actually are having challenges that need a solution, and can't figure out what the solution is other than kubernetes.
It’s a bummer the username can’t be an emoji, too. <money bag>@<rainbow><rainbow>.kz would be an awesome email address.
IIRC, at one point in time, there was a way to evade spam filtering by setting the “from” and “to” to the recipient. Maybe this has something to do with that
I sometimes run into sites that won't even allow a + in the name part of an email address.

And yes, I use gmail and the + functionality extensively.
Netflix should formalize this, things that move together, wear together.
I couldn't find the reference, sorry, however I'm sure I read it here from some user who wanted to keep offline his Smart TV by not giving it any encrypted WiFi credentials, but found it attempting to connect anyway through open ones.

Someone already found Smart TVs using hardcoded DNS addresses (although they obtain their own address through a DHCP request) which has the side effect of bypassing anti-adware/malware tools such as Pi-Hole.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25313480

Ignoring the user choice of keeping a SmartTV offline by looking for the nearest open network (or possibly using 5G in the future) would be just one step away.
I think there are two sources of confirmation bias here:

1. People on HN are already primed to appreciate this style of writing. Simple. Precise. Direct. It suits a technical literal mind to have less ambiguity and fewer flourishes.

2. On the web, where each individual piece of writing is not meant to last as long, the writing style has become more casual. Consider the difference between your average Medium article versus your average academic research paper.

Both of these points considered, I disagree entirely with the premise. There can be value to dense, even perhaps enigmatic writing. I would say that the greatest works of English literature tend towards that direction (James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace).
I find there's a bit of an "if you give a mouse a cookie" effect with this stuff.

I recently wanted to organize a data processing pipeline at our company. In the past, the system was: there's a bunch of scripts, some of them call each other, and sometimes a person logs in and kicks off one or more scripts without recording their inputs and sending the output to wherever they feel like. I thought implementing this on Argo Workflows would allow us to keep track of previous runs and generally clarify things.

Well, Argo runs on Kubernetes. Also, it kinda wants your data in a bucket. And argo kubernetes wants kustomize and skaffold and or / helm and soon I'm installing a package manager that manages package managers and I spend half my time managing systems we don't really need.

I'm learning I need to to draw the line and deny Argo some of the things it wants. No, we don't need to run minio and call our files "artefacts." The filesystem works just fine thanks, we don't need another layer of it. This means we can't follow some of the Argo examples and lose some of its functionality.
Bread made with yeast is an exception though. For most baking projects (cookies, cakes, brownies, etc), there are at least two very important things I know about (and I'm far from an expert):

1. The chemical reaction to make it raise. As I said, yeast is different; but if you're using soda, you need the right amount of all the ingredients (soda, acid, salt, etc), at the right time (water starts the reaction, which will fizzle out after a certain amount of time), at the right consistency (over-mixing will screw things up too).

2. You need to balance wet and dry ingredients. So you can't (for instance) just remove sugar or add flour without also removing or adding something "wet", or the balance gets thrown of and everything changes.

For yeast-based bread you're right -- I normally just dump in water until it seems about the right consistency.
A beautifully written personal narrative and your only thought it "Hah! I'm smarter than this guy!"

...ok
I ran my B2B SaaS on a single (physical) server for the first three years or so. I then switched to a setup with three production servers, and three staging servers (in a different data center), mostly to have the comfort of a distributed database, and a staging system to try things out.

Physical servers provide enormous computing capacity these days. And managing them isn't much different from virtual servers: you should be using a tool like ansible anyway. The only difference is that when I spin up my development cluster I use terraform to generate the ansible inventory, and for physical servers the inventory is static.

I do not anticipate needing more capacity or scalability anytime within my planning horizon.

I keep seeing people investing tons of time and effort into things like Kubernetes and I honestly have no idea why. It complicates things enormously for no good reason: the benefits, if you aren't Google, aren't interesting at all, and the drawbacks are huge. The biggest drawback for me (apart from the cost of learning, building, and maintaining the infrastructure) is the complexity and resulting unpredictable failure modes.

There are things which I'd say are really important for infrastructure, though:

* a working and tested backup strategy

* disaster recovery plan (what happens when your entire datacenter burns down)

* managing servers via a tool like ansible

* regular testing of various scenarios (including setting up an entire system from scratch on new servers, with data recovery from backups)

* a database that reliably preserves all of your customers' data when any one of your servers goes down (this unfortunately excludes many databases and makes the usual "just use Postgres" a poor choice, now flame me to high heaven)

I can't imagine a small business where Kubernetes makes business sense. Do people seriously have problems with scaling to hundreds of machines? Scalability problems with huge traffic peaks that actually cause server load? I'm having trouble keeping my CPUs busy for any meaningful amount of time, and I don't spend much time on optimizations, I just avoid doing stupid things.
In the real-estate world the "asshole" would rent it out to others (such as taxidermist or baker) for cheaper until She'll or BP would show up. I guess in the web world this is equivalent to the trashy ad-filled sites you see on parked sites. Why is it? I guess maybe taxidermist and bakers of the web are cheap and would rather pick another domain. Or is just not possible to legally 'rent' out a domain.
Or trademark a brand personally and rebrand your company to the trademarked brand by having your company "buy" it from you.

https://www.businessinsider.com/wework-ceo-gives-back-millio...
I wrote a frontend for CompuServe's British Legends using Crosstalk Mk.4's scripting language CASL. It had a complete dungeon map and let me navigate using the PC's numeric keypad for directions. An onscreen keymap with labels for each number key showed where pressing that key would lead. It even randomized choices, so if NW and W both led to the same place it would pick one randomly if you hit either key. (This was to confuse wizards who could tell who you were by your habitual choices.)
I used to mod /r/MUD on reddit - if you fancy getting back into MUDs that's a great place to start.

For my sins, I became very addicted to Shades on Prestel back in the day. Due to this, I prefer MUDs that are not deep on class progression, and just easy fun.

A lot of the still running MUDs have deep learning curves, due to some of them having been running for a good few decades. To the new or casual player, this makes them impregnable.

Whereas I don't think we need to change the beauty of the text based medium, I do think that the genre needs updating to make new MUDs more accessible.... Even D&D finally accepted it needed to simplify again to gain new players.
So basically the brutal Lord of the Flies-esque culture that dominates multiplayer survival games like Rust and Conan: Exiles is nothing new.

From the article:

> I worked out how to login (not easy), I worked out how to load the game and... I got killed. I tried again, I got killed again and eventually, when people were bored of killing me, I tried to talk to a wizard about how the game worked and was told to bugger off and then killed again. ...This was most people’s initial experience of MUD.
That's the best metric I've heard. When your Heroku bill is the same as what a full time ops person would cost, start looking to hire.
Amateur astronomers are very good at spotting national security payloads after launch.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/06/mappi...