skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A better analogy is entertainment: it costs nothing to create another copy of a blockbuster film. But that doesn’t mean it cost nothing to produce to first copy.
Counterpoint... Use CloudFormation!

Managed services offer big benefits over software. With CF, new stacks, change sets, updates, rollbacks and drift detection are an API call away.

Managed service providers offer big benefits over software. With CF and AWS support, help with problems are a support ticket away.

Using a single cloud provider has a big benefit over a multi-cloud tooling. I only run workloads on AWS, so the CF syntax, specs and docs unlocks endless first party features. A portable Terraform + Kubernetes contraption is a lowest common denominator approach.

Of course everything depends.

I've configured literally 1000s of systems with CloudFormation with very few problems.

I have seen Terraform turn into a tire-fire of migrations from state files to Terraform enterprise to Atlantis that took an entire DevOps team to care for.
Risk is what you can put a probability on (i.e., quantify). Uncertainty is what you can't. Uncertainty encompasses unknown unknowns. See Knight[1] and Keynes[2].

Good rule of thumb even if it sounds overly simplified.

[1]: https://www.econlib.org/library/Knight/knRUP.html

[2]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4538116
The truth about Retr0brite – busting myths with science [video]
In the US, I've even had bank representatives during a fraud alert call tell me I always need more than one card in case one is restricted in any way. (Presumably from different banks/issuers, too, but even a single issuer is also better than nothing.)

What would you do if you need to rent a car, but your bank is down, and cannot authorise the payment?

The cards I have actually pay me back in rewards for having them. Why would I NOT have as many as they'll give me?

Most of my 20 cards come from just 3 issuers (Chase being the one who gave me the most cards), so, it's not even like it's even an issue from the management perspective, because each card is free (or even net negative cost) to own and operate, and it costs about the same amount of time to service them by the dozen as it would take to service just one of them.
Yeah, importing existing resources into Cloudformation is a nightmare in "Am I going to break everything? Fingers Crossed".

It is also very possible to get into very bad situations if your settings drift and you attempt to reconcile those changes.
Sir (Madame?), I ask you one simple question:

Was Twitch built in 10 years, or over just a few?

Steam was built since I was in FUCKING high school. Im old now, well over 30.

Apples, and blueberries.

Bluebarry, Drewbarry, tomato, ToMaHtoH.

Fuck their stupid ass streaming code, it’s a giant crud app, only their devops team can take credit for scaling, everyone else is not worth a shit, sorry, thats life, I gotta Leetcode too, and ur code isn’t worth me reading it, leaked or not).
I'm a PhD student in robotics at Carnegie Mellon working on exactly this. It's extremely challenging for a few reasons:

- the dataset is a mess. The experiments that have been conducted on the tokamak that we have access to were done for very many different reasons and under many different configurations of the machine so there is not a clear method for disambiguating what dynamical changes are due to differences in the system vs underlying dynamical truths

- the simulators available are very slow and not that accurate

- the physics is hard enough that it's not possible to develop a controller in closed form (obviously)

This implies that we need a version of reinforcement learning or model-predictive control that is substantially more robust and sample-efficient than currently exists. We're working on that but obviously it's an open research problem.
Notion seems like an interesting data storage problem. The vast majority of the data is in the `block` entity, which are organized into a sort of nested set, written/updated individually (user edits one at a time) but read in ranged chunks (a doc).

Off hand this seems like an almost worst case for PG. Since the updates to blocks could contain large data (causing them to be moved often) and there is one big table; it seems likely that the blocks for a single notion document will end up being non-continuous on disk and thus require a lot of IO/memory trashing to read them back out. PG doesn't have a way to tell it how to organize data on disk so there is no good way around this (CLUSTER doesn't count, it's unusable in most use cases).

Arm chair engineering of course - but my first thought would be to find another storage system for blocks that better fits the use case and leave the rest in PG. This does introduce other problems, but it just feels like storing data like this in PG is a bad fit. Maybe storing an entire doc's worth of block entities in a jsonb column would avoid a lot of this?
I picked it as a single role that requires lots of customer interaction and social cues, it could be lots of stuff, customer service or others. That was just 1 example.
I looked for a long time, but to no avail. Broadcom are notoriously tight-lipped when it comes to their intellectual property.

Some have attempted to reverse-engineer... This was a good read: https://blog.quarkslab.com/reverse-engineering-broadcom-wire...
The relatively minuscule resources "wasted" on this project could eventually solve the "climate crisis" in one fell swoop via delivering nearly inexhaustible sources of clean energy. So inexhaustible, in fact, that we could reduce CO2 by entirely engineering-driven (rather than ineffectual policy) means. And fusion would do so while also _increasing_ not _reducing_ everyone's standard of living. You could even use your gas guzzler still, by making gas from CO2 and water, and it'd be "carbon neutral" even if it belches a column of black smoke straight into the air. And this gas would be like 50 cents a gallon, too.

I'd rather spend a trillion on fusion and get it done Manhattan project style than continue droning children in Afghanistan or funding $3.5T in pork barrel bullshit here at home. Just drown it in money completely until it's done. Put the very best people on it and let them have at it for real. We've done it before, several times, it worked. There's no reason why it wouldn't work this time. If there is any 21st century "Moon landing" type goal, this is it, and the United States is still best positioned to accomplish something of this magnitude. For how long that will be true I do not know, but it is true now.
I really loved Ra [1], another of his books. It starts with "Magic is real in the modern world, and a subject of engineering", and it gets much, much crazier from there. It's my favorite of his books/stories.

What I particularly liked about it is that it followed this geek's impulse of "yeah but why/how?" and answered it. Then answered the question after that. And after that. It was an exponentially wild ride.

It's not a perfect book. The characters are, honestly, kind of weak in an overpowered kind of way; it's more an idea-driven book than plot- or character-driven.

But I think the HN crowd would really like it, and it deserves wider recognition!

[1] https://qntm.org/ra
I thought the design of the Wendelstein was actually to be able to control the plasma more completely by leveraging modern computing. Its design allows for a lot more input than a simple Tokamak would. But I only have a very superficial understanding of this.

I don't understand why you're saying the Wendelstein follows the path of the plasma, it's not like plasma has a shape it wants to be in, you just sort of push it the way you want it to go, and wherever it goes you try and push it the other way again, to make it go in a circle.

What other shape than the Stellerator would someone choose if they wanted to use even more fine control over the plasma?
> 20% of Norway's GDP comes from pumping oil out of the ground and selling it for others to burn.

To be precise, it's 14%, down from 26% in 2008.[0]

[0] https://e24.no/norsk-oekonomi/i/dOXzd1/norge-er-mindre-oljea...
A distributed locking library built on top of Cloud Spanner and TrueTime
If the world remains able and willing to pay it back. It's mostly invested abroad.
I signed up for Schwab (and numerous other financial institutions that were not "banks" per se) without having to go to a branch in person. You usually just submit photos of documents and, in some cases, have your picture taken at your computer.
Autistic people also often have capabilities that neurotypical people don't. So treating them would also be denying them opportunities. I think any treatment would have to be taken on a case by case basis. This particular one sounds like it doesn't work anyway.
Bad billing practices like the NYT's impossible-to-unsubscribe bullshit is not Apple's responsibility to fix: it's the market's first, the government's second. A corporation having the power to control/regulate society to such an extent is like textbook dystopian hell-hole stuff.
Why would you want to make manual work for someone who just wants their account deleted? You're possibly better off offering an option in the delete flow for them to "talk with you to see if you can work something out" versus manually processing deletion requests.

Effort on those requests might recover some users which may be especially valuable if you are a subscription business. If you can't benefit from interaction then immediately imitating deletion from an API seems the only thing that would pass muster.
I know plenty of companies not using third parties for security or ideological reasons.

Code is code: both models (3rd party vs no 3rd party) can work and the time spent reinventing the wheel is not necessarily business breaking.
I agree that the social media monopolies need to be busted. All I'm saying is that I don't believe in privileging a credentialed journalist class.
Because I spent years researching my conditions. A lot of people on the forums have as well. Plus some treatments show up again and again as “this worked for me”

For example I was getting up 10x a night to pee for years. Kept seeing post to try aloe Vera freeze dried pills. $$$

Finally tried it. And I slept through the night now.

Understanding test is another one.

A crap ton of doctors will see a negative test and automatically declare you don’t have X condition even if you have every single symptom. Eventually you learned that a large percentage usually get negatives on that test. That there are alternate test that can be run.
But most doctors aren’t even aware they exist.

Oh so a lot of the moral and legal support. Imagine having the flu for 30 years And trying to live a normal life. Everyone calling you lazy and a whiner and if you try and do something about it you get labeled as a hypochondriac and it all being dismissed as anxiety. Some diseases take on average seven years or more to get diagnosed because because of these problems; mine took 20 years.
The most successful salesperson in the world Mark Zuckerberg has some form of mild autism, in my opinion (which is shared by some Facebook employees and on autism forums).

He sold the world and the investment community that he's selling communication while he's really selling digital crack cocaine.
Are they? It's not the best metric but China's GDP (PPP) Per Capita is about $16,400.

Contrast this with the US at $60,235.73 and Germany at about $51,000.
It adds a layer of indirection which helps prevent moral hazard. If the company pays taxes to the local government, and the local government pays the police department, AND the company is not allowed to pay the police department directly, there is less possibility for the company to incentivize particular behaviors.

The police budget should be set by the local government, breaking protestor lines should not come with rewards provided by a private company, that investigating regular public crimes would not have.
IT is a cost center here
This really does frustrate me - that racism is usually seen in the spectrum of the "whites vs blacks" narrative - but Asian-Americans are usually disregarded, or it's not "real" racism.

Sure, they don't have the same pay disparity as blacks (although there is still inequality within the cohort itself) - however, that's largely been a result of higher educational attainment, and the work ethic of Asians - and ignores the barriers they've had to overcome to get to that level.

However, there is still a level of casual racism - and even in the last year, a lot of anti-Asian assaults across America.

Also, this is an anecdote, in many places I've worked at, it's very common that management and above are mostly white males, but all the Asians are non-management. I've wondered how much of that is due to some cultural issue, versus how much is due to some bias in the system.
Honestly though, I can't even begin to evaluate the validity of the study because they locked it behind a $125 paywall.
Archive of the original 4chan post from this morning: https://archive.is/8rQNK
Do that to a gym and they'll sue you for not paying out your contract.
I've always wondered about the whole cold lowering your immune system thing. On one hand, I've read that studies have shown this to be the case, but on the other hand, doesn't subjecting your body to moderate levels of hormetic stress actually make you more resilient? It seems like there should be a noticeable increase in sickness among people who take cold showers if this were true, the opposite of what they tend to report.
I can believe simultaneously that FB as currently structured is net negative and also that legal prohibitions on algorithmic feeds are net negative.
"Employee hand books" are useful to employees as it defines what various procedures and rights are.
Can anyone archive this from the other side of the paywall?

Seems like a good read
I know at least two swiss banks.
I agree, and have the same experience. CDK is so much easier, much less verbose, and unit testable (at least to some degree).

Since resource importing is possible in CDK (not nice, but possible) you can even start using it if you already have resources that you do not want to recreate.
That's right, don't use CloudFormation. Use CDK which will generate and obfuscate CF for you and you won't have to worry about it.
ITER has zero chance of solving the climate crisis. Anything derived from it will be far too large, expensive, and late.
@irthomasthomas - How did you come across this?

His other piece is fascinating. What else am I missing?
If you buy your subscription as an in-app purchase, you can cancel it easily from your phone. Say what you will about the app store and in-app purchases, but when it comes to cancelling subscriptions they've eliminated the dark patterns.
Nearly 40% of adults from 25-54 are unpartnered [Pew Research]
Alaska, Florida, and Louisiana purchases were contracts between colonial powers, not the indigenous peoples of the respective lands. Not quite comparable.
That's off. A typical new EV gets ~250 miles of real world range on a full charge and has a battery with very similar chemistry[1] to what you have in your phone. So over a putative 200k mile lifetime, it's going to see about 800 cycles (2e5/250) of battery usage.

800 cycles is about what a typical mobile phone sees in two years, after which most are seeing some moderate degradation (70% of new condition is fairly typical) but are still quite usable. And in fact a car spends much more of its time being recharged well before reaching full discharge (where consumer electronics runs dead a lot), so it would be expected to do somewhat better.

It's not really a problem, basically.

[1] Though we're seeing an increasing number of vehicles delivered with LiFePO4 cells. This chemistry has somewhat lower energy density and higher internal resistance, but has the advantage of an estimaged hundreds of thousands of cycles lifetime. Those will never wear out until long after the mechanical parts are dust.
I will admit that troubleshooting permissions-related deployment issues in StackSets are a super nightmare inducing events.
Unlocking the Qualcomm Snapdragon Sensor Core
Near as I can tell, as long as they don’t have an estate to sue you it’s a-ok (based on current media cycles anyway). Only mostly sarcastic.
It's not about science figuring it out. It is about selling scientifically unproven treatments to desperate parents.
Geezus, must be nice to have that kind of rainy day fund. Grossly over-simplifed: "Shut down the economy? Oh well, here's 80 billion dollars to keep everyone fed and warm."
And Android copied windows phone. ;) Windows phone had some of the best power settings for a long time, turning into a dumb phone when the battery got low.
missing the point much?
Any measurement of "code complexity" is relative to some particular computational basis; which one do we choose?

In APL sorting the array P in ascending order is just

P[⍋P]

which result you can optionally assign back to P by prepending "P←". So, by the APL measure, none of these algorithms is "as simple as" invoking the builtin sort operator. (Which is probably also faster.) APL doesn't actually have any 'syntax that's basically "for i = x to y".'

If we take Perl golf as our measure of "code complexity" you can't use a for-loop for dumbsort, because zeroing the ostensible loop counter doesn't reset the loop; there's a hidden loop counter you can't alter. You have to use an explicit while loop, which makes the cantbelievesort much simpler. Smalltalk and Python are the same way. But of course the shortest way to sort in all three languages is to invoke the built-in sort function: sort @p, p asSortedCollection, p.sort().

(You're right about FORTRAN and BASIC, though. You can futz with loop counters in those languages, just like in C.)

That's why I chose C and machine code as my metric. Smalltalk and Python maintain this hidden loop counter in the implementation, and also do garbage collection behind the scenes (which you might think was irrelevant, but the write barrier can significantly slow down heavily mutating algorithms like this one) and bounds checking. Numpy and APL additionally do implicit array broadcasting. All of these languages (except FORTRAN and BASIC) have built-in sort routines that are simpler to invoke than writing your own sort function. So I was looking for the language that would keep me as honest as possible.

But of course in a different machine language the answer might be different. For example, I haven't seen an instruction set with dedicated looping instructions that support nested loops, but make it inconvenient to clobber the loop counter in the middle of the loop, but it would be easy to design one, and there might be some advantage to doing so. (Code density, maybe, or unrolling iterations of the loop into a pipeline.) Then dumbsort would lose, because as in Python, it would have to be written as a regular while loop, which usually costs four instructions: an increment, a compare, a conditional jump, and an unconditional jump.

I think the i-=2 tweak you suggest converts dumbsort into gnomesort, which is just a sort of pessimized insertion sort. As your "saturating" comment suggests, gnomesort needs an additional operation to avoid running off the beginning of the array; some instruction sets do provide saturating arithmetic (it's often useful for DSP and graphics, even if it's not as often useful for indexing arrays), and many others provide a binary "max" operation (SSE's PMAXSW and friends, as well as, say, APL ⌈) which could convert an ordinary subtraction into a saturating subtraction.
Isn't this almost necessarily true for any system which needs an auditable history?

Just thinking out loud, of course cascading deletes will fail, so I guess you could avoid using true foreign keys to the user table for things which are truly related, and then you'd know what the user did but presumably no PII... Seems insanely sketchy though. Way cleaner to soft delete if you ever need to recover history, which the fintech context amongs many obviously requires
while we are fighting over gender and race gaps, we fail to notice the gap between tech salaries and salaries of marketing and sales executives, C level roles, lawyers and so on.
If I understand this right, the problem is "twitchsalt" has to be known so that you can generate the same hash for future logins. So it's just one iteration of hashing more for a brute force attempt (modern hashing algorithms already use multiple iterations of hashing to make brute forcing harder)
Absolutely.

This could be fixed. Android doesn't behave like that, and it's not too far from the mainline kernel nowadays.
Wallaroo started as a company that was building high-performance data processing infrastructure for real-time trading and adjacent systems. Wordpress wouldn't really cut it.
> kind of weak in an overpowered kind of way

I mean many of the characters have forgettable personalities, and react to situations like they have superhuman intellect/foreknowledge.
I cant wait for some to look at the experiments they ran.

I imagine something like:

commit b160b523b0fa6a747fd217fed778f281334ee64f (HEAD -> master)
Author: john smith <john@twitch.com>
Date: Wed Oct 6 17:41:42 2021 +0200

exp_promote_gambling

make experiment to promote gambling content for kids with loot boxes to see if they donate more money, if not we will try to show them promiscuous content.

I think developers should be personally responsible if they knowingly act against their fellow men. Its not facebook or twitch or tiktok that are magically stalking us and making us addicts, it is the hundreds of thousands developers that are taking 5x salaries to (very knowingly) do so.

The engineers of nazi Germany spend time to make gas chambers that use human fuel..

Now developers are literally and knowingly making addict kids, teen suicides, depression, finding more innovative and creative ways to stalk us, etc etc.

I recently interviewed a person who was working in a gambling company, and they knew very well what they were doing there, who were they hurting and exactly how much. How is that different than selling drugs to addicts?

We are engineering the next gas chambers, and we have to be held accountable, and we have to be able to say 'no, i am not going to build this feature' without losing our job. This is extreme statement, but things can not stay like this.
What's new in murex $SHELL v2.3: improved interactive terminal
In other words, the market is saturated?
AT&T is partly responsible for rise of One America News Network, report alleges
The UK and Norway found oil in the North Sea around the same time. Norway used that revenue to create the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund. The UK squandered it on tax cuts.
They plan in 2025 to be where fission was in 1942. Only a small matter of engineering after that that can't take very long, right?