skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Once you have committed to a certain way of doing things, the transition costs can be very high.

Let's consider RockCo and CloudCo. They both provide a B2B SAAS that is mostly used interactively during the working day, and mostly used via API calls for the rest of the working week. Demand is very much lower on weekends. Both RockCo and CloudCo were founded with a team of six people: a CEO who does sales, a CTO who can do lots of technology things, three general software developers, and one person who manages cloud services (for CloudCo) or wrangles systems and hosting (for RockCo).

In the first year, CloudCo spends less on computing than RockCo does, because CloudCo can buy spot instances of VMs in a few minutes and then stop paying for them when the job is done. RockCo needs a month to signficantly change capacity, but once they've bought it, it is relatively cheap to maintain.

In the second year, they are both growing. CloudCo buys more average capacity, but is still seeing lots of dynamic changes. RockCo keeps growing capacity.

In the third year, they're still growing. CloudCo is noticing that their bills are really high, but all of their infrastructure is oriented to dynamic allocation. They start finding places where it makes sense to keep more VMs around all the time, which cuts the costs a little. RockCo can't absorb a dynamic swing, but their bills are now significantly lower every month than CloudCo's bills, and the machines that they bought two years ago are still quite competitive. A four year replacement cycle is deemed reasonable, with capacity still growing. And bandwidth for RockCo is much cheaper than the same bandwidth for CloudCo.

Who's going to win?

Well, you can't tell. If they both got unexpectedly sudden growth surges, RockCo might not have been able to keep up. If they both got unexpected lulls, CloudCo might have been able to reduce spending temporarily. RockCo spent more up front but much less over the long term. CloudCo could have avoided hiring their cloud administrator for several months at the beginning. RockCo's systems and network engineer is not cheap. And so on, and so forth.
The vehement defenders of AWS are starting to remind me of the cryptobros
> software developer for about 12 years, the last 8 of which I have been the CTO

As others have pointed out, you can't really be CTO and a software developer unless you're at a tiny company (like 3 people tiny) and you claim that you're "growing like crazy" which implies that you couldn't have been CTO at a small company for long.

This then means that you've been a software developer for 12 - 8 = 4 years. You're not and never have been a very senior IC, and there's nothing wrong with that if you're in a CTO role. You're probably not a bad developer, but you don't have the experience and skills of a really great senior IC. The skills required of a good CTO have almost nothing in common with those of a strong, senior IC. The only reason it's useful for CTOs to have developer experience is to help communication, but nobody looks up to their CTO for advice on solving day-to-day software problems.

My guess is that if you're worried about your developer skills you might be lagging in some of your CTO duties (totally possible I'm wrong here). I would first make sure you're providing the high level leadership and support of that role. It's also possible that you don't really want to be CTO, if you want to be developer you can easily find a place where you can transition into an IC role.

Overall it sounds like you should reflect a bit on what you want, where you currently are, and how to get to where you want to be. Do you want to be a great CTO? do you want to be a great developer? or is there something else you're looking for?
Disclaimer: I'm the engineer you are commenting on, I just want to straighten out one mis-understanding.

> This quote especially seemed childish and immature to me:

>

> > "And this one makes me actively angry, because both Microsoft and Apple will happily throw away portions of your files and not tell you about it"

>

> No, this is NOT Microsoft's or Apple's fault. It is 100% HIS fault for not understanding what's going on. Even if a file flush is correctly requested

Several times you seem to jump to the assumption that I don't understand fsync and disk flushing and that is the core issue. You aren't understanding what I'm criticizing. Here is an example of what bothers me:

You take a picture at your wedding, and you store it on your hard drive. You like the photo, it means a lot to you, and you use it as the background for your desktop FOR FIVE YEARS. You have rebooted hundreds of times, and it's always the background for your desktop. Then one day 5 years after your wedding, you reboot your laptop, and it seems to take a little longer to boot, and then after you sign into the laptop half the image you use for your desktop background is scrambled. The middle of it looks like dirty snow. You didn't get any reports of any issues from the OS manufacturer, but now one of your photos is corrupted.

This isn't because the software that wrote the photo 5 years earlier forgot to flush the picture to disk. It just isn't. Behind the scenes, as your laptop was booting from an aging drive, it probably encountered some issue, and it went about fixing the problem as best it could - which I have no problem with. My issue is the drive lost some data, and if the OS manufacturer would let you know this occurred you could take useful actions like order a new drive, prepare a restore from a few weeks ago before that issue occurred, etc.

> No, this is NOT Microsoft's or Apple's fault.

It isn't their fault that the drive is going bad, I agree. Drives go bad, that's why we have backups. My issue is the OS manufacturer try to cover up too much, keep too much hidden from the user, and didn't let the user know data loss has occurred (or might have occurred). And yes, I hold them accountable for not telling customers what is going on. It isn't anybody's "fault" that it occurred, but there is a responsibility to let customers know about it so the customer can take appropriate actions so they don't lose data (or more data).

I try to write incredibly paranoid software. Part of the reason is that is the "average" environment the Backblaze client runs in is more unstable than what most software developers are used to. The whole point of backups is to run when the computer is going sideways, it has bad RAM, it's losing disk sectors, or a customer's cat likes sleeping on the keyboard because it's warm, and the fans are clogged with cat fur. And because the family has teenage children that don't know about computer security problems, they download and install unstable junk from all over the internet because why not? That's the environment my software runs in, and I take my job of trying to protect my customer's data very seriously.
What happens when prod is a few hundred terabytes or you use logical replication to stream changes to handle major version updates? The GP’s point was shipping 100% of a large database isn’t feasible.

You’re conflating dev environments with restoring backups. Those can be the same thing but are often separate.
Now, make a notebook capable of accepting this form factor and we'll have something more upgradeable than the framework notebook.
Fermi paradox: advanced civilizations discover time travel and generate paradoxes that erase the timelines that led to their creation
The Numbers Behind Log4j Vulnerability
I downvote two things:

- Comments that seem to be trolls or low effort jokes.

- Such outlandish comments that I can't even bring myself to reply to, as I can see no timeline where value can be added in the conversation chain.

Otherwise, I make an effort to reply if I disagree.
Reminds me of what Jeff Bezos said about Type 1 and Type 2 decisions. Type 1 decisions are one-way door decisions that needs to be deliberated deeply and consulted on with higher-ups. Type 2 decisions are two-way door decisions that small teams can be empowered to make.

There is a balance between empowerment and the higher-ups taking responsibility. I've been in an organization where-in the higher-ups just abdicated all responsibility and avoided making any technical decision (maybe for fear of making a wrong decision) and so the small teams had to make every decision which led to chaos and lack of direction.

Sometimes, it is the job of the architect or CTO to make those big decisions; their job is not to code, their job is to weigh the possible options and make a decision to give direction to the team.
The definition has changed over time, but you have reduced the definition to a single component. It is true that an element of the ethos is to improve the outcomes of your descendants. The American Dream can be reduced simply to mean America exists as a place where you can live a better life. This concept is predicated on the statement in the Declaration of Independence that "all men are created equal." We may agree that this statement was not enacted with sincerity, but we may hope that is will be.

Much of the world views the American Dream as America as a place where one can come, work hard, be treated fairly and be rewarded regardless of social class or circumstances of birth.

The extrapolation of this concept into a larger ethos that includes upward, inter-generational class mobility makes sense, but is just one element of an ethos based on the basic principles of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
That’s still a much better world to live in than “let’s make it OK for people to think they can deploy scanners to users devices”. My device is mine, their servers are theirs.
>I wonder if AWS will make more or less money from these outages?

There is no possibility that outages are good for AWS. Nor is there more money to be made from "publicity" of the outages.
The HN title dataset is public. If anyone can come up with software (ML or otherwise) to detect baity titles and/or debait them, we'd certainly be interested.
Ironically enough, Tesla Model 3 emergency mechanical release on doors is positioned so technically “well”, passengers not familiar with how the door opens in a standard way from the inside (by pressing a glowing button on the door) tend to pull on the emergency release first (which is located on the door right next to the standard release button).

Happened to my friends at least a couple of times when giving them a ride. Imo, not a bad situation, because the worst case scenario here is that they will accidentally use an emergency release instead of the standard one on their first try, which will only trigger tesla to make a warning sound that the emergency release was used. Definitely works out better in a real emergency situation too, compared to cars with difficult to find emergency release handles, given people not familiar with Tesla doors tend to reach for the emergency handles in those by default at times.
It's awesome (and horrible).
Needs 'cherry MX blue' sounds too...
I've got an RSS aggregator of sorts that I love adding good feeds to that I can get to online (more as a start page of its own)

If you have a way to share you list, I'd love to see it :)

I take it newsboat doesn't have a way to export its list of feeds?
Premature Flexibilization Is the Root of Whatever Evil Is Left
I had my booster this morning at a dedicated vax centre, there were two lines outside, one for pre-booked and a huge one for walkups. The whole thing was very slick, and extremely well marshalled by the volunteers, but you could definitely see a throughput issue with the waiting area - the movement of the queues wasn't constrained at all by the number of jabs they could give, but by the very large post-jab waiting area capacity. From entry to jabbed took maybe 3 minutes, but they couldn't move the queues any faster because of the backlog in the waiting area.
They explain part of that in the article

> Today, however, it’s recognized that what’s needed isn’t necessarily negative mass or negative energy; that was simply the way that Alcubierre recognized one could induce the needed “opposite type” of curvature to space from what normal mass or energy causes.

There's other options, and also we aren't 100% certain negative mass/energy can't exist (but probably not...)

Edit: changed my tone because I was being a snarky jerk.
Spamhaus et al. (corporate subscription), but same thing. If there's a noteworthy new domain, we'll check and whitelist it but otherwise silently disables phishing attempts. The one we have (which I don't know which specific lists) also detect new GitHub, AWS (S3), Azure (Windows Blob), and Google (Appspot et al.) subdomains.
But that's a virus that can cause cancer. You could theoretically get a cancer vaccine and still transmit HPV if you have it.
This creates some really fun failure cases on the form of "I need to enter the building so anybody can enter the building".

Depending on the cloud is certainly a very stupid decision. keeping everything inside the building is better, but still not ideal.
I only managed a BSc in Physics, although I did get to take grad-level G&R. My stance is the following: I do not care what your proposed method is for FTL, tell me how the paradoxes allowed by closed timelike curves will be resolved. No, just bundling all of it into a black-box general AI "cosmic censor" is not sufficient, that's just an abstraction saying not to worry about it.

Yes, it ruins most of our fun space opera. Oh well.
Come on, you've been here for 14 years. It isn't time to start vandalizing the place.
I was still able to reach our service running in us-west-1 when the connectivity issue was still on-going, so I don't know if it was a full interruption.
Being a Java programmer without being a "real" Java programmer would be a feature, not a bug.

Imagine being able to enjoy the Java syntax without feeling the need to write everything with a minimum of three levels of abstraction!

Break free of the tyranny of getters and setters! Make that integer public!

No more oppression from type introspection! Hang Spring and Hibernate from the gallows!

The Java revolution starts TODAY!
Sure. And I'd rather win the lottery than have socialized healthcare. Obviously it is better to be the beneficiary of income inequality in a country with large disparities of income than it is to work a "normal" job in a more equal society.
Mail Integrations Magento
What GP means I think is the decisions that need to be made at CTO's level are generally going to be tough ones by definition. This is after empowering engineers etc... so easy ones are handled by them. Otherwise the CTO would be swamped.
Ask HN: How to built a HIGHLY scalable API monitoring tool?
I am looking for best resources to get started with to built a HIGHLY scalable API monitoring tool. I did some research to use Hangfire, AWS SNS/Lambda/SQS, couldn't figure out the best possible solution. There will be thousands of APIs and minimum interval could be 10secs.
I think GP has a point with,

>Or will smaller players go from single-AZ to more expensive multi-AZ?
We all know who it was -- NCMEC was getting on Apple's case because their CSAM reporting numbers were orders of magnitude lower than the other big tech companies. Someone in NCMEC upper management even wrote Apple nauseatingly perky congratulatory letters celebrating Apple for actually trying to save the children, and calling detractors braying mules or somesuch.
Perhaps its a matter of perspective. The hand holding many people require just to put text on a webpage seems pretty entitled considering what developers are paid. This especially rings true at the hostility and crying that appear when that hand holding goes away. Its like withholding sugar from a child like you ripped their heart out and watching an emotional tantrum unfold, and of course the child obviously believes they are a tortured victim of an arrogant oppressor.

Stepping back from the nonsense I believe this is a training disparity.
Personally I went into software because it has the highest pay/effort and I think this is becoming even more common for younger generations.
It appears AWS Status Page is hosted at AWS [0].

Seems like a really bad idea.

[0] https://hostingchecker.com/
You can't be that naïve?

> Update: Apple spokesperson Shane Bauer told The Verge that though the CSAM detection feature is no longer mentioned on its website, plans for CSAM detection have not changed since September, which means CSAM detection is still coming in the future.
It’s still useful if you remove units from the graph and treat it as a sparkline. If there are reliably ~100 Xbox Live complaints on Twitter per hour, then suddenly there are 3000, that’s an outage.
You are right, it was a poor decision. The format is not C compatible, and using the same sigil is dangerous when switching and this library's format is passed to standard printf. This started out as a drop-in replacement, but it isn't, and cannot be. The library should not encourage, but avoid accidental format string mistakes.

So thank you, this is fixed.
1. It's really not about business autonomy. In many states businesses don't have the option to bring everyone back to the office unrestricted. Getting everyone vaccinated is just the path of least resistance within legal limits.

2. I can't believe people still parrot the "choice with consequences" argument. If abortion is persecuted in Texas, is that just a choice with consequences? The only premise that matters is whether threatening someones livelihood -- which is quite frankly a nuclear option -- is a fair and proportional response.

3. Last but not least, vaccine precedents cut both ways. Measles and smallpox don't mutate and require new vaccines. Covid does. Measles and smallpox don't discriminate by age. Covid does. Measles and smallpox vaccines don't have notable adverse effects on young people. The Covid vaccine does.

Covid has little in common with measles and smallpox, which are mandated. It does however have a lot in common with the flu, both the disease and the vaccine, which is not mandated in schools nor hospitals.
> there is evidence that men and women were equally interested in programming before the 80’s, but that a combination of cultural and societal factors came into play in that decade that branded computers as a "boy thing" and resulted in women being pressured out of the pipeline from a young age.

The nature of "programming" as an activity also changed quite a bit.
Drawing these fine lines is exactly what regulation is for. You can have air travel without having random people flying over and photographing your kids' backyard water fight party.
> Is there hope for people looking to break into software engineering if they don't like web development?

The technology has many aspect.

> From the outside at least it looks like all the jobs are full-stack roles.

Try to change your lenses. Not really at all.

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.17/process/submitting-pat...

https://developers.home-assistant.io/docs/development_submit...

https://www.indiehackers.com/

Godspeed and all
> “Update: Apple spokesperson Shane Bauer told The Verge that though the CSAM detection feature is no longer mentioned on its website, plans for CSAM detection have not changed since September, which means CSAM detection is still coming in the future.”

It's still coming.
I would not go multiple Availability Zone within the same Infra/Cloud provider...
> Why would apple have released a whole white paper on the feature if the plan was… to do it in secret?

Didn't that only happen after a leak?
yes, you are, and this isnt abnormal or require some form of temporary altruism.

google is incentivized by ad space, not hardware sales. a large portion of the users of google apps and search engine are using apple hardware.
I mean the empirical evidence alone seems point at the Unix Philosophy not actually being popular in practice. GNU tools are much more widely used on boxes humans interact with than BSD/busybox. You don't see everyone trying to figure out how to install all of the suckless tools immediately after installing linux, etc. And then of course we get into systemd and that whole ball of wax.

I do think there's a growing split between server like things and desktop like systems that people actually regularly use. For example, Alpine is super popular in containers, not so much on desktops. Same thing with Busybox, but that's more explicitly meant for embedded envs.
while :; do make; make clean; done
In the US only public companies need to provide this info (and I believe only for shareholders over a certain percentage).

Private companies' operations are, well, private.
You're correct about my language choice, I could (and should) have used more neutral language to describe my position. While I do believe that there are some fundamental differences in the interests and abilities of the genders (neither for better nor worse, they just are) I also agree that's its a slippery slope that has been abused in the past. Societal pressures and conditioning certainly play a role, however I think if you look at the lower-end of the job market the difference is clearer. Women tend to dominate retail work as well as waitress/hostess positions while men tend to dominate more labor intensive positions like construction, welding, modern day factory work etc. Is this due to some rampant discrimination in those fields or is it due to inherit biological/psychological differences in men and women? I'd be inclined to say the later. There are no pushes happening in the bottom end of the job market due lessen the gender disparity because those aren't as desirable positions so no one really cares that more men work in construction and more women are servers at restaurants. However when the position becomes more prestigious with higher pay it's suddenly a huge issue that a disparity exists - and obviously it's due to discrimination and has nothing to due with what each gender is naturally inclined to pursue or enjoy.

You're right in that it's important not to automatically ascribe any demographic disparity to fundamental differences between the genders, but it's equally important to not automatically ascribe that difference to discrimination without considering those fundamental differences.
The Rust in Linux thing is a lark. Anything you might do in the Linux kernel that you might do in Rust would be much more cleanly and easily achieved in C++, if not for Linus's rabid diatribes: every single thing he criticizes in C++ is in Rust, too. The inventor of the RCU synchronization primitive the kernel relies on spends most of his time with C++.

So, I expect Linux kernel Rust will fizzle, regardless of what happens elsewhere. Maybe Redox will get traction, or Fuschia kernel will be recoded in Rust.
We've had clusters of measles in Wales a few years ago, that were due to vaccine scepticism driving down vaccination rates below herd-immunity levels. That was a real event, that took more than a year to correct. And then you have all the circus they've built around COVID19.

Antivaxxers are real, downplaying the risk they pose is dangerous.
Maybe it's because I'm not the biggest Unix purist, but I don't really mind the proliferation of command line options. The two things that do irk me are:

* Using short options in scripts. Scripts should almost always use long options. As a corollary, tools should always provide long options unless the tool isn't intended for scripting.

* Lack of discoverability. We still don't have a standard way to ask an arbitrary tool which flags it supports, or for a rough semantic mapping of those flags (e.g. the classic -v/-V verbose and version confusion). Developing a standard here would go a long way towards automating things like tab completion without each tool needing to maintain N scripts for N shells or having its own slightly-different `--completions=SHELL` generator.
Ask HN: Where's multi-az?
Deployment to multiple availability zones is often touted as a must for serious web apps/sites.

How come today's AWS issue is so impactful? Do people actually use multi-az in practice?

If so, what does it tell us about az (non)isolation that something can affect several at once?