skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How can I learn to build distributed systems?
I work at a very small company and our products are not used by a lot of users. Our stack is very simple: Rails/Heroku/Redis/Postgres

I spend time reading about larger scale systems and watching talks about how big companies have scaled their products and the challenges they face and its given me a general understanding about some scaling techniques.

Is there some way i can try to implement some of these things and test to make sure that the way i implemented it works without having to spend a bunch of money?

For example if i want to try making a distributed cache, test sharding a database, create a messaging queue and test it, how can i do this?
I will defend that a little. We are all, to an extent, victims of circumstances. All those Excel+Python+API hacks are result of individuals having to deliver results, but with limited tools at their disposal.
Some of us just have kids and finding a flat with enough rooms for everyone plus an office room is almost impossible. So it's good to have the option to also go to the office in addition to WFH.
No, why do people think this? In the US banks have a right to refuse to do business with you for (almost) any reason and refuse they do. They are more likely to ban you than eBay. There's no right to have a bank account, there's no right to keep your back account - full stop.
Tesseract is the most ideal OCRA SDK for reading simple bw documents. If you aim to read “text In the wild” or scene text then Firebase offers a much better alternative. I had a lot of hope for Tesseract 4.0 which is supposed to be based on NNs but it’s so far performed just marginally better than 3.0
> you can determime whether a number is odd or even with a modulo

Or you could check the lowest bit. Better to abstract away from that implementation decision. ;)
Unreal. People are getting robbed in traffic at gun point and there are "bigger" "more violent" issues for the police to deal with?
No. Such a weird take. As if there's a finite amount of nurturing. (The kind of zero sum dogma this OC refutes.)

The point is to lift the floor, not lower the ceiling.

Stuff like homelessness, malnutrition, illiteracy, and so forth stunt natural healthy development, denying those children the opportunity to realize their potential.

Neglecting the least fortunate is bad for everyone. Socially and economically.

Helping kids help themselves is good for everyone. Almost biblical, morality wise.
I tend to remap caps to ctrl, for instance. Sometimes this fails, meaning that suddenly, the keyboard is stuck in caps lock mode and can’t be returned to «lower caps mode». I don’t know if autohotkey can intercept caps lock?
While you can go into a huge amount of debt in the US getting a college degree, you can also graduate with little to no debt just using the many programs and scholarship available and being strategic on where you go to college. Yes there are always going to be people paying $80k per year to go somewhere, but you'll also have a lot of people getting there degree while spending very little or (if they are good academically) nothing.
This is just wrong. I'm just dropping the two biggest ones:

https://github.com/dotnet/

https://github.com/microsoft/

What part of vscode you don't consider OSS, for example?
I never read it as "removing oversight", more like "removing excessive admin". And it explicitly says to value "individuals and interactions". Part of that means you need a facilitator in retrospectives who can detect conflicts between individuals which may not be being addressed in that forum - and ensure that they are addressed elsewhere.
I would argue that a developer that can't structure and query data for efficiency and integrity, is probably wreaking havoc in the rest of the systems too. You don't need a DBA, you need a better developer. Managing state is an important skill outside of DBs too.
Slow people in the left lane can easily make a calm and peaceful drive into a chaotic nightmare as people cut each other off trying to get around. Another bad one is when a big truck is passing a slow car but then the people behind the big truck won't let it move back into the right lane.
Jesus f..ing christ. It's one thing to not crack down on victimless crimes aka people dealing small-time drugs on the street, but that here is a travesty of justice.

I mean... what the fuck is that "yeah we have so many leads to follow up". Dude. Take a hundred officers, cordon off the area and fleece everyone. It isn't that hard. And what the fuck was that "we want police to focus on bigger things"?! Like, camera crews get robbed on highway heists? At gunpoint? Doesn't get much bigger than that!
Why do you like using Clojure for scripts?
Xinjiang is the first great model in the era of digital mass surveillance
"In the Camps": https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/696114/in-the-camps...
Apple keeps it's tap-to-pay feature to itself to protect revenue
Small reminder that the PS1 was so weak it couldn't even play 128kbit (IE; quite poor quality) MP3s in real time
Sandstorm has a pretty unique sandboxing model, which makes it drastically more secure than Docker in practice, but the tradeoffs in terms of packaging differences can be significant.

One of the biggest things is that Sandstorm prefers to sandbox individual documents versus applications, which mitigates a huge variety of security flaws in apps. In most cases vulnerabilities in apps on Sandstorm are not exploitable when run on Sandstorm.

It also manages most authentication and authorization roles for apps in an integrated way, which requires more integration work than just spinning up a Docker container.

Feel free to hit me up if you want to know more, though it would be a lot of work to make Sandstorm work for your business model at this point. It's cool seeing others in the "make open source web apps user-friendly to run" space though.
A $2m endowment is approximately $80K/yr of safe return, which is approximately the sticker price of college.

Harvard is free for people not in the donor class, so I'm not sure what your are asking.

Also, universities do research and teaching, and the research costs money separate from teaching/tuition concerns.
That too, but I get the feeling those kinds of operations aren't in Javascript's standard library...
I had this problem myself when using tmux (how to switch sessions quickly and easily).

I ended up writing a shell script [1] to use fzf to display a list not only of sessions, but the windows within each session.

Which I invoke from tmux like this:

bind C-a run-shell -b "$HOME/.local/bin/ftwind"

This has become so ingrained in my tmux workflow that I would be utterly helpless without it.

[1]: https://github.com/anelson/dotfiles/blob/master/home/.local/...

EDIT: for formatting
And when you're the government you don't want to lose employees.

Propaganda will make sure this won't even reach the average citizen.
More like a web orchestrator these days, so maybe “web maestro”. ;)
The 737 Max tragedy wss mainly caused by regulatory constrains on design.
it doesnt even have to be a mitutoyo to get you down to 0.01mm precision, i got mine for about 40euros. Using equipment i had access to at work i checked that rating and indeed: the tool i got is good for measuring at that scale, and you really dont need any electronics.

Usually you can pay the vendor to calibrate the tool for a couple bucks more.

of course digital ones are much, much easier to read, but you only really feel that convenience when having to measure hundreds of items quickly to sort them into a tray or something...

And in the end, usually a Nonius type caliper is good enough anyways, and skilled users can read those to up to 0.02mm... and thats already pretty good and most of the time: good enough

and in case you do need to know the length of something down to a micron, there are other tools for that with less sources for measuring errors

so yeah: mechanical calipers rock
and: you dont have to always get the brand things to get what you need
I wholly agree with this analogy. But it doesn't help that the populist press, schools, and various other institutions always try to paint every instance of failure, job loss, and economic pain as a referendum on a broken system rather than a necessary part of the economic circle of life.
How PNG Works: Compromising Speed for Quality [video]
“Cool URI’s Don’t Change” … https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI
> During the 1880-1950 we were causing massive disasters all around, literally nuking cities. But that period is also where we came up with virtually all of technology that makes the modern world: cars, planes, radio, computers, nuclear power, jet propulsion.

What is your concrete suggestion for taking more risks? Surely not nuking more cities? Having more world wars? Shall we declare war on Russia and send troops to Ukraine? Would that create more "progress"?

> Otherwise, it has been a time of stagnation.

How so? To take one example: we had a killer virus come out of nowhere, but we were able to develop effective vaccines for the virus almost immediately. The "slow" part was just the safety testing, not the vaccine development. Would this have been possible during the 1880-1950 era? Science and technology continues rapidly; I'm quite puzzled by the stagnation comment.

In 2022, we all have computers in our pockets that are vastly more powerful than anything from 1950, and we can use these pocket computers to instantly communicate with anyone on the planet.
I like this article as I'm pretty nostalgic about those things too.

>Our websites were pretty damned ugly. Instead of worrying about window dressing, we focused on words, hierarchy, and structure.

Naw, the sites were ugly because we were bad at window dressing and the tools were wonky ... and it was glorious that we were bad at it. I loved the ugly web. It reeked of "trying things".
Because all countries have an element of socialism and it's fairly significant.
I think everyone who had a vote in 1922 and thought “Climate change? That won’t affect me!” (and almost everyone who also said “or my children or grandchildren”) would have been correct.

What are we doing wrong today with that level of disregard for things that may affect our great-great-grandchildren, and why?
For “text In the wild” or scene text, the last time I checked, EasyOCR and PaddleOCR were both good.
This is the new HN shrug - just go about your business and maybe the oligarchs will genocide all the non-rationlists
I was talking about famous inability to display the actual price (product/item price + whatever tax applies that time of a day) on a tag.
>Maybe that's against the rules or something.

Maybe you should read the rules for the service you are using?
any idea how the performance compares to native code from the original tesseract?
I mean couldn't you just run Wine or something?
Came here to say this. To understand the forest's inner workings and mechanisms you likely wouldn't be setting up an afternoon picnic
I'm only about 80% sure that this comment is sarcastic...
> I mean I get that (not that a bank isn't a financial instrument...) but to what ends?

Tenure means a guaranteed job for life, and the university needs the money to guarantee it. The position exists even if there aren’t sufficient student or research grants to fund it.

Harvard is a bad example to use here because they are so massive. Other schools aren’t situated as well. And yea the endowments have taken a life of their own but tenure is a part of why they exist.
why, because we ran out of habitable planets in the galaxy?
Code may come and go! We write them, modify them and sometimes later delete them. But documentation is different — they shouldn’t change no matter what.

This is wrong in most cases. Documentation should change as the app changes. In some documentation systems its possible to version the docs nicely, and keep them inline with the application version, but for lots of documentation that we write that's not the case. It's important to go back and edit documentation to add, remove and update sections as the world around the application changes. Documentation that fails to reflect the reality the user is working in is incredibly frustrating.

EDIT: To be fair to the author, they actually say as much in the post, but the format of a "call and response" they've chosen doesn't make their intent very clear at all (slightly ironic considering the topic). If you're going to write in a way that refutes the 'parody' points don't put an image in between the point and the refutation.
It’s nice sometimes to have a deep dive into technology that does work, and works so well you barely even notice it.

When it’s failing is when it comes to the forefront. Crappy touchscreens seem to be a major component in lots of them, had an experience with an elevator “system” with a touchscreen that was mildly annoying.
> While the great illusion persisted, we’d have more and more trouble maintaining current customary industries housed in client states such as Germany and Japan.

He lost me here. I've (recently, and this is strictly my point of view) become of the opinion that the only true lasting civilizations are the East (mainly China) and the West (The Ruhr area being its center). Civilizations have sprung on the shadow of these two giants but they were mercantile: The Roman Empire, The Islamic Khalifs, Portuguese traders, the USA are all civilizations relying on linking East and West. These two areas of the world had two things in common: 1. Lots of people, and 2. they were industrial.

They produced stuff and they needed to trade. The journey to trading between these two was so profitable that it enabled the financing of whole civilizations which claimed the titles. There are little signs that this order will change. These two areas go through their ups and downs but seems to bounce regularly (World War 2, China civil war, Japan, etc..) to reclaim their status.

Offshoring, so far, has only kicked off an internal market in China. Most countries who are doing offshore industrial jobs still rely on the motherland for technology, organization and development. The US seemed promising on the East coast (the most Western part of the US?) but it didn't last that long.

Of course this doesn't address a post-industrial world: There are no guarantees that these two areas will remain the dominant ones. But my guess is that it'll be the case like it has historically been.
> like we wouldnt have intercommunication without such a bureaucratic money sink

I talk facts you talks hypothetical non existent scenarios, but go ahead and explain why ~200 countries are in a 80 years old organisation if alternatives are so good. It's like saying a company can function without any managers or meetings, sure you'll still have communication but nothing as serious/organised/efficient

> What has the UN done beside spending money ineffectively?

Open an history book, there have been hundreds of missions, if you put a bit of good faith in it it really isn't that hard

> world hunger can and will be solved, but not by the UN.

By who then ? Musk ? Bezos ? Some hypothetical person/organization that only exists in your mind and that might make it happen at some point in an equally hypothetical future ?

> Jealousy is such a pathethic feeling - Tolstoy

How's that an argument ? The dude works 95% of his awake time, can't even take care of his own kids, it's the rich guy I'm the least jealous of, and on top of that I absolutely disagree with his ideas.

> He writes, in a thread where the UN asks Elon for more money

? It was a PR stunt from Musk, like 90% of what he does, if you can't see through his bullshit I feel sad for you, jealousy is bad but worshipping people like him is equally dumb.

By the way The UN <> Musk discussion didn't go the way you're trying to portray it. The UN never asked Musk anything and never talked about ending world hunger for 6B, on top of that Musk bailed out of the discussion, so really there is nothing going his way on this topic, at least get your basic facts straight

https://mashable.com/article/elon-musk-solve-world-hunger

https://twitter.com/WFPChief/status/1454883966071230472
Drupal definitely is the 800lb gorilla in the PHP space. You can do everything with it, but you'll often need to spend some (read: lots of) time getting it going.

For lighter sites, I recommend GravCMS [1], which does a fair amount of what you're looking for. Their documentation [2] is decent, as well.

How many users does your client have? It's been a while since I last played in the WP land, but is it possible to setup new roles that are more restricted?

1: https://getgrav.org/
2: https://learn.getgrav.org/
> Over my own now 25 year career in IT, the average developer seems to have less interest/knowledge in data modelling and administration.

Even when it's clear as day that the data model is incorrect they often just ignore it. They blame MySQL for not scaling while having ten joins per query and using ORs like they're going out of fashion. Say it can't be done in another way, even tho clearly it could.

Or say how the benchmarks for Elasticsearch are specicially crafted, you can say that when you get 30k per second and they get 50k, but when you get 50 per second and they get 50k per second it's not their benchmark that is specially crafted it's your data model is crap.

I honestly think the thing that costs most companies the most in their hosting is developers not using databases correctly and spiking the hosting costs. I literally saw one company have to spend 20,000 a month for 500 requests per second on elasticsearch.
I wonder what a correspondence between Anthony Bourdain and David Foster Wallace would have been like. My impression is that they were pulling water from the same well.
> Unfortunately this tradition of including a beginner-friendly programming language with the OS stopped somewhere in the nineties.

It was earlier than that: it was in 1984 that the Macintosh shipped without any built-in programming capability. Indeed, if I remember correctly for a time there weren't any programming tools available for it at first; one had to develop on a Lisa instead.

At the time, I was so enthralled by how easy the Mac was to use that it never occurred to me that it was painful to extend. Oddly enough, that same characteristic is just as true today, perhaps moreso.
Reducing Interview Bias
> by spinning a dial

When we moved into our current house, it had a microwave like that. When we replaced it, my primary requirements were 1. multiple fan speeds, and 2. a nice, simple touch pad for entering the time; preferably one where you didn't need to press a button before starting to enter the cooking time.

The dial thing is... infuriating. It never once found a situation where it made using the device better, and in most situations it made it worse.
You can have pushbutton on/off controlled by an MCU, and having near zero leakage.

Just lookup circuits.
You might be able to remove the “buzzer” or speaker in the device.
Hear, hear! After being woken up at 6am a few too many times because of a bluetooth speaker like this, I swore off all bluetooth speakers.
Show HN: A new way to deploy multi-cloud infrastructure
I think the point is more along the lines of there not being a personalization story for most product companies that really makes sense.

That is, the dream that a bike company can use personalization to get better market penetration with their emails is dubious. Even a category store can only tailor their message so much. Is why most bookstores all have the same books.

This goes as far as medicine. People want to think that a personalized prescription would be far more unique for individuals than the truth of it just being slightly tweaked.
This is also a problem for lots of banking in the EU now (with some exceptions -- using hardware TOTP or similiar device).

I can't login into the bank without the phone. Also you can't verify online payments in most locations without the app.

Previously the digital certificates were used.
I remember you could often watch images being slowly rendered line-by-line in the browser due to slow connections or slow servers back in 1994/1995.

In the meantime computers and the internet became so fast that websites could be very fast by default, but the front-end tech stack and adtech still makes it slow most of the time.
I think better inputs (books)mean better outputs (thoughts). Most people understood what I meant.
AMAZING!! Hope you land your dream job because you deserve it.
> I hope the international community can start looking how we can preserve those forests and all the species that they have.

Silly gringo question: can foreigners buy the land and lock it up as preserve or something similar?
True, but the fact that it is simultaneously a demo of their product, and also claims to be a secret to engineering productivity, means that the reader has a sense that their claims are biased, and they might just be talking their book. I also had that sense halfway through of "oh, this is just a pitch" and started dismissing it on that basis.

It is interesting to think why the piece gave me that sense of distrust. Since they are a productivity company, it's not surprising that they might have insights into productivity, and also that they might orient their product development to enable those insights.

Maybe if they had been more upfront at the beginning of the article as to what it was, I wouldn't have had the sense that I was bamboozled into reading a long pitch when I thought I was reading an impartial blog post.
> you'd either need some sort of "perpetual students" who hang around a long time

We have this. They’re called grad students and if they hang around long enough we call them professors.
Me and a few friends have been working on multy.dev, an open-source[1] cloud agnostic API that makes it easy to deploy the same infrastructure to any cloud provider using native managed services.

The motivation was the realisation that, even when using Terraform, migrating infrastructure code requires an end-to-end re-write. Even though most core resources are the same in any major cloud, developers need to learn a new provider to deploy the same infrastructure when moving providers.

We are still in early days of development and currently support core services from AWS and Azure:

- Networking (virtual_network, subnet, route_table, security_group, network_interface, public_ip)
- Compute (virtual_machine, managed kubernetes)
- Database (managed MySQL databases)
- Vault (managed secrets)
- Storage (managed storage)
- Abstraction cloud differences (Azure VM public vs AWS EC2 private by default)
- Deployment through Terraform

We’re looking for feedback from developers about our approach and messaging. Let us know your thoughts!

[1] https://github.com/multycloud/multy
The Making Of Grand Theft Auto (1996) [video]
That random system might only have the dash shell and busybox. What are you going to do then?