skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a scenario I’ve pondered. Not as an excuse for the USA, but as a sure what if?

Say Russia decides their new hypersonic system, that new nuclear torpedo, and their newest tanks are ready, and they decide the odds of WW3 are in their favour, and they annex the entire Ukraine, or the unrest in Kazakstan turns into an occupation and pseudo-annexation with the government taking orders from Russia in order to keep Russian troops maintains order, betting the USA/NATO won’t pull the trigger. Ok, so this probably provokes a reaction, and simultaneously emboldens China, making the move immediately doesn’t make sense but it’s likely to encourage them to begin a buildup. If “full out” fighting begins in the former Soviet states does this represent the opportunity to launch a flash invasion? What tools do China have to rapidly deploy their forces? Do they need to soften up the entire island or can they pull off “D-Day, Blitzkrieg remix, Feat. China” with the first major action being troops on the beach within the same hour they hit coastal defences?

It’s an interesting scenario from a game theory and war planning standpoint, and one I suspect the USA is gaming out a lot lately.
Netflix are accused every day of the exact opposite, i.e. "pushing social justice narratives". They're a media company caught up in some nonsense internet culture war, don't read too much into it.
I'm in Eastern European Nato country.

If you make your energy 100% dependant on Russian dictatator then you deserve those high energy prices.

For you it is high energy prices, but for Ukraine it is life or death.
Eat Meat
UK, Australia, to build 'network of liberty'
Absolutely, and I would make it a bit broader: Anything that automatically charges a client a variable amount should have a maximum-spend limit that the client can set, and it should default to a reasonable number based on the client's expected usage.

In fact, you could even just change that to any auto-billing service or product and the default for constant-charge services would simply be the amount of the constant charge.
It seems like everyone is blaming azure when this was an issue with CloudFlare…

I get that everyone has an obsession with dirt cheap providers instead of cloud solutions like aws/azure. But that doesn’t mean it’s better. Everything has pros and cons.
https://www.hetzner.com/?country=us

They also have dc's in the US
On Worldbuilding and the Question of Resistance (2021)
Not the GP, but:

- a desktop on Arch

- an arm-based NAS on Debian

- a router running OpenWRT

- a backup target on Debian

- a media player (x86) with Kodi/Wine/Dosbox/Mame/other emulators

All are in regular use, but only the NAS and router run 24/7.
Russia took Crimea in 2014, Russia controls much of Donetsk, Luhansk in the east and 14,000 Ukrainians have died so far. I get a kick out of people who say Russia won't invade. They did!

Putin is like Xi they consider Russians and Chinese to be theirs no matter where they live. War, genocide, the constant harassment will never end until these two are gone.
A stardust instance on scaleway comes to less than 2 EUR per month and it has 1G of RAM and runs a toy project or even a small personal infra just fine :)

EDIT: Personally I pay 9-10 EUR per month to Scaleway for a 2G RAM and 2 CPU VPS, private docker repo and S3-compatible storage which holds data and some backups, which run both my personal services and some toy projects when needed. I am not affiliated with them in any way
1. Starting a war with Russia is not the goal here. Deterring Russia is the goal.

2. A war with Russia wouldn't be a proxy war and it wouldn't be anything like Afghanistan or Iraq. It could quickly become nuclear. It's not the same as America's wars in Afghanistan or Iraq.

3. You're implying that Russia is not a threat to Europe even if America stopped using its military to deter Russia from conquering Europe. I don't think that's correct. If Russia believed it could conquer parts of Europe tomorrow, they would probably try. They don't care about public opinion in western countries.
> How do you deal with Microsoft's crap on a daily basis?

I'm still using Windows 7 for specific Visual Studio 2019 developments where I must code. Most of times I'm under Debian.

For Windows specific build-only machine I use the free Hyper-V Server installation with OpenSSH installed via powershell and Add-WindowsCapability. I'ts one of the best Windows IMHO because there is nothing installed.
rent-seeking must really be about lusting after power, after all, how much money do you actually need to live a really good life in the West?
This type of talent is extremely valuable. They sometimes show it in the most direct fashion (HFTs, game engines, etc.) but when they are not most of the time companies don't even bother. IMHO We pay the price of that as a consumer every day: PCs take 10s just to start booting a system that takes 2s to load, webpages are just eating your battery life etc.
> I can only see there being an advantage for some game developers to be using it these days

Maybe for developers writing games in C++ or their own engines (or small time engines), but for many, how is it better?

As far as I know, out of the most popular engines, only Godot actually offers out-of-the-box Linux support. Unreal, Unity, CryEngine and the others don't offer Linux support for their editors, although some give you access to the source code so you can build it yourself on Linux, but that's often not so trivial.
I was quoting you. But I'm sure you could figure out the meaning anyway: what's the source for that information that you claim he keeps a secret.

Partially it even works the other way - FBI and others are feeding data into hibp https://www.troyhunt.com/open-source-pwned-passwords-with-fb...
It can seem cheesy, but something like P90X3 will whip you into great shape at a commitment of only 30m per day.

You do need a pullup bar though. The program itself can be ordered digitally but is also pretty easy to find online.
That's true - if you want to make a fair comparison between the two you need to consider the costs of the setup on AWS vs the cost of setting it up on whatever your platform of choice is. For a small team with no/development only loads, then a $5 digital ocean droplet would likely work for them, maybe even 10 of them. It's not worth managing a VPS for deploying 5 containers when you can have DO do it for $25 behind a load balancer. For a small team with moderate load, the question is "is it worth spending X on setup to save Y but potentially spend Z on maintenance of the systems on Hetzner/whoever, vs spending A on setup, B on compute and C on maintenance". If the difference is < 6 months salary, you go with whatever your current team is comfortable with and reevaluate in a year.

For a large company, it's not about $ cost, it's about risk management and avoiding cost centers.
40000 windows VMs is already painful, even without windows update experience
> There are zero US interests to protect in and around Ukraine, so all of this looks like unwarranted poking of a lion/shark/whatever.

Not everything is about self interest - free people have a moral obligation defend freedom. Inaction on Ukraine will be especially egregious after taking away Ukraine's nuclear weapons in exchange for security guarantees.
The Bitcoin Recession
>As far as I am concerned, I just don't understand why people use cloud services.

Well that's the first issue. Many people have automated large parts of their infrastructure in this way so that distributing one huge file becomes part of that whole mess. The goal is of course to keep costs down to a minimum. You can actually do a lot with little money using cloud services.

But the careful balance is that you can easily miss little details. But how does that differ from any systems administration? The details are just in new areas that didn't exist 5-10 years ago.

And the details you miss are more likely to increase cost. And when you process a lot of traffic, you're popular, that can go real fast.

20 years ago in hosting we might get a porn stash on a hacked NT4 server that would draw bandwidth. And back then a whole company might have 100Mbit fiber so you'd notice.
I mean Orbán is basically Putin's dog in the EU and NATO (they meet next week in Moscow! [0]). Russia don't have to attack, it's enough if you have someone like Orbán who will veto and sabotage everything in the EU and NATO

0, https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/hungarys-orba...
I was playing Pandemic (the original) 5 years ago and it was a very popular game even then. When Legacy came out (long before COVID) it rocketed to the top of the ratings in short order.

Nothing whatsoever to do with real life. Legacy is popular because it’s a very good cooperative game that evolves over time, encouraging people to keep coming back to it every game night.
In the past I always found Visual Studio to be a solid dev environment. This was for C++, where the debugger was unmatched by anything else.

Things may have changed since then (8+ years ago)?
I'm sure that marine and airspace incursions by russian craft are just happy accidents...

I'm sure Putin's veiled (or explicit) threats against NATO countries (and Google has plenty of these) are just him being humorous

Also the cyberattacks (some by Russian gov. APTs, some by entites tolerated by the gov) are just inoccent as well.

Not to forget the Internet Research Agency.
that's an easy one, military dictatorship is much worse. The last time when companies committed war crimes by themselves, independently of governments, was long ago.
If you host anywhere a LAMP stack: I built a very basic markdown-based blog in PHP: https://github.com/Cristy94/markdown-blog

The idea is that Apache/PHP handle the loading/displaying of markdown files from a directory, so to add a new post you just create a new markdown file. It's very basic, but it's easy to customize with a bit of HTML/CSS/PHP.
Are we talking about the same thing? I know Hetzner offers Cloud servers (VMs) in the US since recently, but I don't think they offer Dedicated Servers in the US (yet?).
>Just because someone has not set up a hypervisor before doesn't mean they're inexperienced.

Wait, what? If you never did something, then you're unexperienced, ain't you?
Just did the calc and 600GB/day is about 55Mbit/s. That's really not a lot and if there's not too much computation server-side you could serve this from a raspberry pi at home (provided you have good uplink). But that's assuming you keep the CloudFlare cache of course, or as author mentioned himself, advertising only torrents for the multi-gig files.

I really don't understand the cloud craze. Everything is more complex to debug, more expensive, and more shitty in all the possible ways you can imagine. I mean i was not exactly a fan of the VPS craze 10-15 years ago, but at least it wouldn't automatically ruin your bank account whenever you got a little traffic.

Kudos to the author for having so much money (thousands in one month?!) to waste. I wish i did too :)
The die is not cast at all. Troops can move within Russia back and forth without problems, there are no obligations to give an attack order just because the troops are standing near the border. There is no too much risks to his internal image, because according to propaganda he is fighting for peace and does not want to attack at all.

I think that Putin has lost a chance to grab the eastern Ukraine in 2014. When Yanukovich fled Kiev, he could have made him ask for a military help, and in the post-maidan chaos could take everything east of Dnepr, creating a puppet state loyal to a legitimately elected president, and then slowly incorporate those territories into russia over the next few years or decades.

Also, do not equate Chechnya, Georgia and Crimea. Chechnya was an internal region with no international recognition ever, so this is an internal matter, and it's not so much 'grabbing territory' as 'restoring order'. Taking territory from Ukraine, Georgia, Belarus, etc is a different matter and is seen by state propaganda as bringing the rightful territory back into the fold.
Most of the clouds have functionalities to manage this. In AWS for example you can create an alarm with AWS Budget to monitor costs by tools/service/etc. Using a complex cloud without using this is not good practice.
About dealing with Microsoft crap. You customize Windows to your liking and move on. It's certainly not "on a daily basis" as suggested by OP. You don't have to keep anything as suggested by Microsoft. Oh, and you don't upgrade to newer Windows on existing PC until extended support runs out :)

If you don't like start menu changes, you install something like Classic Shell (I don't know whether it runs on Win 11 though).

If you don't like Explorer, you use something like TotalCommander. I've been using this fantastic software since mid 90-ties, crazy!

Btw. I'm tied to .Net and Visual Studio and can't change platforms. But even if I had a choice I probably wouldn't switch. I used Mac and Linux a bit and still prefer Windows. Probably old dog/new tricks kind of situation. Yes, Windows throws curve balls here and there, but you can usually work around them.
Nobody's complaining, I'm simply saying your criticism is weak. Stars aren't perfect but they're better than anything else for a rough estimate.
I would suffer if I had to use Windows applications. Because having to pay (or even pirate) quality paid software that I have to sit and learn is less convenient than downloading pretty good free (as in beer) software that I've used for the past 5 years and I'm very comfortable with. GNOME applications are surprisingly polished and good, and I'm not getting that on Windows.
Right now, Russia's official communication also seems contradictory (at least what you hear in the West of it)

On the one hand, they claim any talk about an invasion is absurd hyperbole, on the other hand they demand security guarantees or else.

Or else what? Like, if an invasion won't happen under any circumstances, then what exactly are they threatening to do if the demands are not met?
Windows is mandatory at work, but all of my personal stuff I do on Linux. Since I do more at work than I do in my spare time I have to answer Windows, but if the question was which do I _prefer_ then the answer would be different.
Sure but the question was "why would anyone prefer chrome over Edge" not why would you use Chrome over Firefox.
That's why you set the canvas size to scale with the screen. Can be done with CSS or JS. Overflow works, I do that with all my webgl fullscreen projects.
Presidents usually get more popular when they go to war.
It’s a good example actually - people would like it and we could all use a little more physical challenge in our environment!
I was interested to be able to play around with it myself, but I could only find some predefined samples (https://openaipublic.blob.core.windows.net/webgpt-answer-vie...) they say are not cherry-picked. Anyone know if there is a interactive demo somewhere?
You may want to check out Blinkist. https://www.blinkist.com/ They give you the condensed information. Usually it is enough to get an overview. For a deep dive you can follow up by buying the book.
This user hostile mess is peak Windows? At least back then Microsoft had backwards compatibility as a core value.
Thank you! I thought about this but I think it would blow up the size of the page or make it slow because each guess had to be validated against an API?
SQL is more like asm. It's the language of the databases.

In my opinion, you'll have to create a language that compiles to SQL that is better than handwritten SQL and is easier to write, just like writing in C is easier and gcc can create better asm than you.

The problem is that ASM_SQL is easy to learn and write and has a lot of features, so that this new C_SQL must be even easier to learn and write and/or a lot more powerful.

It's a high bar to overcome and reordering and renaming SQL things is not going to make it.
You clearly need to be introduced to Apple's ecosystem :)
> Using pointers is terrible because now you have to add a check for null inside your function, as its API contract says "I can accept null values", while references make it clear that it does not make sense to call if you don't have a correct object to pass it.

You need no such NULL check. Specify as part of the function's contract that a pointer be non-NULL: if a caller breaks the contract, behavior is undefined. An unexpected NULL is just like any other violation of the function's contract: a programming error.

Spell out the contract in the function's documentation. A contract is more than the signature. There is absolutely no need for a runtime check (certain special cases aside) to enforce function contracts.

In some cases, assert()ing that a parameter that is expected to be non-NULL is in fact non-NULL can be useful --- but you don't need such checks for correctness of the program, and use of assertions in general ought to be a matter of taste and discretion.

Knee-jerk, automatic checking by random internal functions of a module of pointer parameters for NULL in every single place suggests that the author doesn't fully comprehend the concept of interface contracts generally.
> You don't move this many troops and ships etc as a feint (nor would you need to)

I agree, but you know what? The best feints are the believable ones, and even moving 100k troops is cheaper than actually engaging in war.
Solving daily Wordle and spamming Twitter, all automated
To be fair it also happens on my MacBook. I charged my computer and placed it on my bag, asleep and unplugged, before a trip. I was not pleased to find it hot in the morning and at 60% battery.
To everyone here who says about "why does US care at all?":

I want you to remember 1939: everyone pretended nothing happens. Then one day, in 1940, half of the Europe fell, and US had to go for a war, and lose many soldiers.

So, maybe it's rational to care about it now.
Well, yes. People aren't perfectly and universally stupid. Human beings, both at the individual and systemic level, are complex and driven by multiple sometimes contradictory interests and factors. It's entirely possible to be stupid about one thing, and not stupid about another - "stupid" being a subjective and contextually sensitive term in and of itself.

But it's also the year of our Lord 2022, and instantaneous decentralized global communication and 24 hour news is a thing. Fighting one war to distract from another wouldn't have worked in the days of fully state controlled media during World War 2, how could it possibly work now, or in the near future?

I don't know what point, exactly, you're trying to make here.
Nobody forces anyone to install an OS, but he probably meant that he was pressured into, not by someone but by the very conditions of software.

My example: I had to return to Windows a while back because I rely heavily on Zoom Meetings, and Zoom in Linux is just near unusable.
Frustrating thing is it's hard to escape. It's petty, but one of the most infuriating episodes of my life was Apple forcing that U2 album into everyone iOS owner's existence and making it difficult (impossible at the time?) to delete. I'd forgotten all about it until, a couple of phones later, it reappeared as the first song played every time I connected my phone to the car. Petty, like I said, but enraging. Having some basic control over an environment you've paid for should be a given.
They are but they kinda feel like late 90s/early 2000s time capsules. A lot of Neon Genesis Evangelion, FFX, Card Captor Sakura, Magic Knights Rayearth etc.
Same here. I live in Turkey and Cloudflare just block many websites' access from here. I can't access some sites just because I'm from an IP range from Turkey. I can jump onto my VPN, but still, not convenient.
I recently tried to use WSL2 for work on my Windows machine, and I had no end of issues getting things to work on it that I know work on both OSX and Linux because we usually use those 2.

I finally gave up on it and went back to using my underpowered OSX machine instead of continuing to try to get WSL2 to do the job.

Was it possible? Probably. But I'm not going to spend the time to figure it out. There's probably a correct way to install everything we needed, but I didn't find it, and I found numerous wrong ways.
> Plus these days more and more software is browser based so you don't run into nearly as many "Linux not supported" issues as you did when I first gave up on Windows (back when XP was new).

Instead, you run into "Firefox not supported" issues.
Population growth, 10000 BCE to now
Who is the second they?
I don't know what the alternative is. Run a home server and pay an ISP $$$ for unusually high upload bandwidth/throughput? 99/100 times running it in the cloud is going to be cheaper, easier, and more resilient.

Of course, the delayed sticker shock is a problem.. I think Google cloud actually lets you create a budget that turns services off if they go over, so there's a solution here if you run a hobby project that you suspect might take off and cost you more than it's worth.
So the US wouldn't mind if Mexico and Canada joined some China-Russia-Iran military alliance? It's up to them to decide? I don't understand how people can be this naive.
Presumably MSFT don't have a competing product. It's like asking why he's hosting it on Intel processors.
Nope. Just being in some country (in my case Turkey) is perfectly enought to be geoblocked.
If you already won the war you're not a wartime president
> Any effeciency numbers?

Efficiency is pretty irrelevant because the total amount of power available is tiny.

The only use cases for this are things like remote pipe monitoring sensors. Nobody is going to use this to generate meaningful amounts of power.
It's a Safari extension.
As an Italian I would guess an American of Italian descent owns that.
You can work around everything if you want to. The problem is, I shouldn’t have to work around stuff like this, the OS should compliment my PC work and be out of my way, not work actively against me and try to outsmart me.
Next wave of AI training seems to be through human imitation. To create long form unambiguous responses openAI is training a machine to follow human patterns and conducting and summarising a Google Search. Maybe before Google improves its search results, OpenAI can make it easy to scan results and plug the gap in Google's ranking algorithms
It does look like I'm behind on pricing changes. Sounds like it's time to move away from vultr.
Because America has never missed a war. It's too profitable.
> avoids having to check for nullptr

You don't have to check for nullptr. It's the caller's job to adhere to the function contract. A function's caller can screw up in a thousand different ways: why check at runtime for one of those ways?

> by smart ptr

Unnecessary heap allocation (which is what you get with a scheme that forces passing of out parameters via smart pointer) is a bad thing.
This stems from Google not being a service company. Support for products is mostly like this. You can submit a bug report but that does not mean they will help you.

We have a saying here that goes something like "don't buy pizza at a burger joint"... Don't buy services from a advertising / products company.
Though not directly related, this does remind me of an idea I once had.

I live in the Caribbean. My house effectively has a few heat pumps running most of the time (split air conditioning units) as well as a dryer and a water heater. Why can't the heat moved by those units be used to heat water or to dry clothes? By using the heat directly, there wouldn't be a need to use a Peltier unit or deal with the associated losses.
Big congregation, arena-like seating? Check. Incredible 300-metre-plus gothic tower? No.

I saw a drawing somewhere online that just captured my imagination - a cathedral-like building on a scale absolutely dwarfing regular buildings. I'm 90% sure it was actually Warhammer 40,000 concept art.
This situation has been brewing since at least 2014 so chalk that timing up to coincidence.