skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bah, dang rich one-percenters looking down on us CRUDdy peons! ;-)
Ask HN: Cloud vs. Dedicated Hosting
I work at a small startup (~5 devs) and right now we are hosting everything on Azure because we have some credits. Our use case does not really need instant scaling all that much since we're a B2B business and know ahead of time how much compute we will need.

I've been trying to convince my CTO that we would gain more benefits from a dedicated hosting solution (Hetzner) but haven't managed to convince him yet.

Right now we have around 5 small dedicated VMs for each dev (2 cores, 4gb ram) and 2 production VMs (4 cores, 16gb ram).

His arguments are that things are easier to manage in the cloud and he doesn't want to have the extra burden of manually configuring infrastructure since none of us have any real background in systems administration and in the future when we will scale to more production machines it would be easier to just start another VM than wait for a new dedicated server. We also use Azure managed MySql which helps us to see performance easier than if we rolled our own.

Do you agree with me and if so what arguments should I use? Would you recommend something other than Hetzner?
They are correct.

It doesn't matter, and nothing will change in large corporations. That's not a bad thing, or a good thing.

It's just the way things are.

I spent most of my career in large corporations; many of those years, as a manager, where it was my job to maintain all that overhead the author complains about. I'm quite aware of the need for it, and a good part of my job, was trying to streamline the overhead, and shield my coders from it, so they could get more coding done.

Nowadays, I work on my own (mostly), and the difference in productivity is amazing.

I remember when I first read The Agile Manifesto, I was, like, "These guys really get it!" It was a dawn of a new era. The scales fell from my eyes. There was hope! There was a light at the end of the tunnel!

The headlamp of the 5:15 Express, out of Sheboygan.

Seeing how "Agile" is being implemented in corporate (and also small corporate wannabe) shops kinda took the wind out of my sails.

But large corporations seem to get done what they need getting done. Very often, it's fairly "klunky" stuff.

But that gives small shops an "in." If they can speak to the customers of these corporations, they could make some sales.

Then...it comes time to scale.

Let the meetings begin...
Are they stronger than LCDs?
A few years ago, I threw out Molokai and made a deliberately-minimal and high-contrast colour scheme that I named “bland”. For the first two weeks, it was strictly black (#000) on white (#fff), with keywords bold, comments italic, escape sequences in strings bold italic, and things like Rust attributes underlined. I was fairly confident I’d want a little colour, but I wanted to give strict black-and-white a fair trial period before introducing anything further. After this self-imposed moratorium I made strings red, comments green and number literals blue, and have since made a few tweaks (e.g. italics instead of underline for Rust attributes, italics for macro invocations, and orange for things like macro variables), and made a dark variant somewhere along the way, but this is what I use to this day and find to work very well. It’s also what I use on my website, though generally with a slightly grey background rather than white.

Now all this was for monospaced terminal and Vim use. I’d very much like to try it with the ability to use a proportional typeface, and especially in the context of a monospace environment, to experiment with mixing different faces (Triplicate + Equity).

Back to the monochrome thing: I’d like to be able to use grey in most or all of the places where I currently use colour, simply to distinguish them more clearly; it’d be a lighter grey than the luminosity channel of the corresponding colours. Give me that, and monochrome is quite sufficient. But really, even black-and-white was tolerable, though it’d lend significant difficulty for some features line diff highlighting. Certainly full colour is nowhere near as necessary as most imagine (commonly often never having experienced anything else).
The agreements would have been signed when Ubuntu had >50% Linux market share. Increasing share is not particularly helpful in that scenario compared to increasing revenue per seat.

Also, these agreements are Ubuntu's primary revenue source, AFAICT. And they have hundreds of millions in revenue per annum. Primarily from the cloud vendors.

All distros have these clauses. The software is free, but the name is a protected registered trade mark. Not all distros enforce it, but the HP lawyers will ensure HP is covered.

Finally corporate buyers will want a trusted distribution, not the flavor du jour.
No, 0 K isn't arbitrary. That's exactly the point; it's the lowest temperature for which the definition of temperature makes sense.

Your analogy about days relating to weeks or years is wrong. This is a matter of scaling. In this sense, Kelvin is of course arbitrary, but said scaling does not matter for the computations in question.

If the poster had written "49 C is 6% further than 46 C from the point at which water freezes", then we'd be in agreement that their choice of interval is no worse or better than others. But absent such a clear labelling, the only notion that makes sense is the absolute one.
We've figured out 20 years ago that writing code, showing the resulting program to customers and getting feedback was the most effective way to find out if you're actually solving customer problems. Some group of people wrote about it in something called the "Agile Manifesto" or some such.
How to Start a Podcast on Spotify
I think all of that is easily possible if you can extract text from audio. To tell the truth, I would prefer a simple CLI util which can input an audio and output a text without any Internets (which is impossible unless we are recognizing same few words like "ok google", "alexa", you know what I mean). What actions I would do with the text-recognizing util on offline computer - not a question for you at all, most of your ideas are trivial.
Being “locked in with Musk” has been one of the best investment strategies of the last decade.
>"maintainable and reliable" are overrated

That is popular opinion among the unemployed, as hoisting that BS on your project lead has real world consequences after your code audit.
=)
Any notes that you feel help you with your working day!
So many of these marketing-slick web sites show up on HN....

Some guy in his basement that cobbled together a working e-Ink word processor would be much more interesting to me.
Doctor Fortran in “It Takes All KINDs” (2017)
... and soon a small x-ray spectrometer? (even though this is illegal in most countries since x-rays are really dangerous).
For some reason you seem to have ignored the second half of the sentence I wrote.

> Sure that's only a 6.5% increase in temperature w.r.t. to 46C ... but that's an incorrect way of looking at it.

I've added an edit to clarify what I was aiming at.
Taskwarrior on desktop / Termux+Taskwarrior on android keeps my life sane. At this point it is an almost perfect piece of software that needs just maintenance but no extra features.
Dataset has the data from 1975 to 2019.
> Libraries over frameworks.

I currently maintain a minimalistic website, and using a static site generator has been golden.

I consider that a framework. The moment I need to do anything the framework author didn't think of, I'll end up spending hours. But because I make so few changes, the bulk of the website content is Markdown, and the very limited styling is done with the HTML/CSS templating system. Basically, because this website is a low priority, anything that proves complicated is a bad investment. A framework is great here.
A crisp benj is worth about 21% extra (the typical tax rate of a business). :)
I think if you read the author's other posts, they appear to just enjoy ranting. I wouldn't be surprised if they manifested after a beer or two considering how myopic and exaggerated they become.

Alongside this we also have: open source is inferior because of... reasons, something about older developers ageing like fine wine unless they work as web developers with all of those young whippersnappers learning new JS frameworks every month, something else about maths and algorithms but is really about Big O Notation being bullshit.

Not to dismiss the author's point: I'd like to believe they're being genuine and not just being controversial for clicks. But they have quite the chip on their shoulder it seems.

Also, it is quite amusing. I do enjoy the occasional rant.
> For some reason you seem to have ignored the second half of the sentence I wrote.

I can't see that the second half rectifies it though. The rest, the part about the energy needed being what mattered, I wholeheartedly agree with. It's still incorrect to say that the temperature is 6% higher.
Wish I could have gotten a picture. I've seen a few lunar eclipses before, usually looks like a round shadow slowly covering a flat disk. Something was different last night; Moon looked more 3-dimensional, at first like a round egg, then as the penumbra shadow fell, it started to look distinctly like an eye-ball. The rest was typical, but that part stunned me.
I use a much simpler technique which seems to work for me a similar amount of time. When you clap your hands together, move them up vertically as well as toward each other. Whatever other games they play, the fly will always move upward first.
This used to be much more common in es5. It’s good to know how they work etc and why they were a necessary evil way back when.
That's a lot of work you've put in! Nice and clear documentation. Thanks for your contribution.
Not surprised. I see many startups with Head of SEO (Search engine optimization) with huge salaries now a days.
It's been the same for unscatter.com for years but I've always attributed to that to me not having a real marketing strategy or even sticking with the ones I've tried to start.
Double-negatives in the "not+no" formulation tend to be a special case. The easiest rule (as you realized) would be "If there's a 'no' before the noun (direct object?), in an already negated phrase, then ignore the 'no'".

It's technically incorrect but common English.
VS Code is derived from the open source codebase (but note the official binaries and some other extensions are closed! Notably the remote extensions and some of the debugger stuff needed for the C# and python extensions), but I don't believe individual components of it are published in a consumable format anywhere
That's really interesting... and sad. For what it's worth, I've noticed comment bots dramatically increase over the last year too. They have always been there, but looking at Reddit, YouTube, etc, now there seem to be 10x more than there were a few years earlier. Even on HN it has gotten worse.
I'd appreciate a comparison with Scala 3 given/using or the previous implicits
> One guy responded by saying his only job is to write code and he doesn’t care about anything else.

Which is such a weird perspective to me. The point of writing software for business is to solve a business problem. Maybe it's a function of working in small companies and/or roles that straddle code writing and business, but I have a hard time writing good code unless I know the business problem space.

It's also why I think I don't get too worked up in the language arguments. I've written code from VB5 to Java to Go to JS all which deliver immense business value. When I think about the best code I've ever written, I don't think about how pretty it was or even the language, but is it still in use 5-10-20 years later.
Readability and pragmatism always win.
The one genocide you mentioned stopped by itself four years earlier.
I wish there was a dedicated distraction-free OS.
I would just install it on my old MacBook Air.

A word processor and a basic file system (with possibly a link to Dropbox or something). That's it.

That would be amazing.

[edit] as mentioned here: http://www.suppertime.co.uk/blogmywiki/2019/07/distraction-f...
> Meetings generally aren't for developers. They're to keep everyone else involved with the project sync'd up.

But if every project has non-developers deeply involved in them then the software is very shallow. So to me anyone who thinks that every developer needs to be involved in such meetings just shows they have never worked on anything deeper than a crud app with some basic business logic. If you work on anything like a compiler, a garbage collector, a database engine, a load balancer, any kind of software framework etc then you will have plenty of teams never needing to talk to non-developers.
I haven't contributed to open source in a few months and I still can't find a date to take to Starbucks. What am I doing wrong?
I do this all the time
I was legit dreaming about a laptop with e-ink display to help with eye-strain and then saw this post. Hope this product gets to market and sells enough units so that it becomes more common!
This is certainly an aesthetic I can get behind. Kudos to Framework for supporting things like this.
Same phenomenon, slightly different analysis.

The gervais-style analysis mystifies some of the issues it describes. The heart of the group dynamics is "leader vs follower", "rutheless vs clueless" and "transactional vs passionate".

A startup is largely "passionate rutheless leaders", it grows to include "transactional ruthless followers" (its-just-ajob), then to "passionate clueless followers" (middle-management). At this phase its highly stable... you hire in "passionate rutheless followers" (ie., more actual workers)... who also need more middle-management... and at somepoint this becomes unbalanced due to poor executive incentives.

That gives you your large population of "passionate clueless followers" (ie., middle-management), and the death of the productive phase of corp. action, into a more rent-seeking (or death) phase.

In gervais, "losers become sociopaths" in a mystifying way; and likewise the "clueless" population is inexplicably unpromotable. My breakdown, for example, clarifies why: the "clueless" population never become rutheless-leadrs as they arent leaders at all. They're followers.

I think muddling "transactional" dispositions with "rutheless" ones also mystifies the issue, under gervais, the "noble sociopath" is hard to explain. Really, its that they're both passionate (internally motivated) and rutheless.

---

NB., rough definitions: "leader vs follower" (I command vs. I am commanded), "rutheless vs clueless" (success requires it vs. virtue requires it) and "transactional vs passionate" (external-reward vs. intrinstic-reward).
The article says: "First, I took an acid trip. Then I asked scientists about the power of altered states."

Please, don't do drugs. If you play with fire, you might get burned.

There is an alternative. Play with electricity! With a plasma globe. And a radiometer.

What happens when you wave a plasma globe next to high-voltage power cables under a bridge, alone at night? Nothing unusual. What happened when I walked away afterwards? I felt different. Touching a tree made a grounding point.

Yes, ground loops are real. DC and AC are real. Trees are smart, they grow. They're still alive. So are you and I. Let's play in this world and discover something new!
Used bind a whole bunch in the knockout days and you will still find bind in a lot of todays react docs if I’m not mistaken.
Ah, no, I didn't mean to share my perspective as "this is the correct way, yo shall do as me". It's just my perspective and formed by my own experience and work structure.

As it comes up here from time to time, I work as a sysadmin, and have my side academic gig, which I'm the solo developer on a serious piece of code. I design, code, test and verify the whole thing, which is immensely satisfying.

My daily job is very connected to my academic gig, and they feed each other. As a result, I can apply what I've learnt from one to the other. We're a small team, doing a lot of big things, hence my work environment is drastically different than yours.

The gist of my comment was actually, "As I get more experienced, I design and write less code because it's more correct from get go. Then I document it at the level needed and I have something concrete and which can be passed over to anyone who wants to maintain or fork it, and this is equally, if not more satisfying".
I hate to even ask, but for a security-focused product, is that a good thing?

I think there is a valid argument “there is no good video experience on web otherwise” but that’s still a long list of less-than-fully-mature dependencies.
I wonder how that could be accomplished. Maybe they'll build a brain interface to replace the "I'm not a robot" captchas/add a TPM chip to the brain.

And then the spammers will start selling tools to fake the responses. Or pay Filipinos a few cents a month to have the chip implanted to their brains...
Someone will do it, but this is the second eInk article in a month or so from different people. If they only would spend their valuable time on making a screen for the Frame.work and post the schematics in GitHub. They can sell it and make profits because someone needs to make that assembly as an easy addon for Frame.work; they might even sell it as option?

In the previous discussion, I also learned about RLCD which I vaguely knew about when Qi Pixel was a thing but it seems to have improved. So one of those for the frame.work too, and all is good!
Between 0 - 3 people out of 10 will have something in their profile that conclusively shows they either have or want children.

Most profiles are blank, have a joke or quote, or put something like "No ONS" or "Dog mama", without indicating anything else about the profile holder.
Given that HP is also using obscure/outdated Linux images in their own Intelligent Provisioning / Smart Storage Administrator tools that are installed on the built-in flash of (at least) gen8 servers <https://op-co.de/blog/posts/microserver_gen8_fix_boot_order/>, I'm not at all surprised to see similar approaches in other situations.
> That's a 3C increase!

Not if you don't compare apples and oranges, these high temperature data come ONLY from 2 NEW automated stations with no previous data to compare, other stations used for years didn't report such crazy temperaturs, so you should take these new data with grain of salt. You should be comparing stations in same location with comparable data from previous years.
This, this and this again.
No one needs to be told to value their personal enjoyment/wants in the short term over sacrificing for others in the long term.
Maybe you don't need 7000, but software is even worse than icebergs (Only 30% visible). How many people at Twitter are there to fulfill functions we aren't even aware of? Compliance, privacy, legal, internal tooling, etc and god knows what else.

My experience at a tech company with around the same number of employees is that it actually feels understaffed in some of the areas I've seen. It's surprising how much responsibility some teams have.
I've been writing code for 16 years, which is now over half of my life.

I've been a full time software engineer (now lead) for the last 9 years. I've been in similar situations to this article where most of my time was spent in useless meetings that I disliked, I tried to improve things, to focus meetings, to improve our efficiency.

And all that aside I still love coding. Granted not all types of code, not the one I have to write sometimes at work.

Just now I'm starting another little fun side project that I've been coding on my free time these last few weeks.

All this is to say that coding is just a little tool, what you build with the tool is what can be fun. I think it can be healthy to write code that does fun things from time to time, even if the code you write at work is for the most boring aim.
This has to be my favorite webapp ever.
I don't use it super often, but every time I do, I can't notice how amazing it is.
I used Photoshop in the past so I'm familiar with the available tools and the menus and the hotkeys and this webapp emulates that so closely, it's astounding.
IBM PC keyboard from 1981 (and all later external PC & Mac keyboards) have an independent microcontroller.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_MCS-48#Uses
> India needs to move to homegrown manufacturing of cheap solar

I doubt India could manufacture solar cheaper than China which already has all of the necessary ecosystems for massive scale solar panel manufacturing.

> solar energy could help with the extra demand in energy because of high heat

It may seem counter-intuitive, but solar panel efficiency is affected negatively by temperature increases. Most solar panels have a temperature coefficient of around -0.3% / °C to -0.5% / °C. So at 50C , you're expecting more than 10% loss.

Most people don't realize a lot of electronics just isn't designed to operate in such extremes. Plastics start to lose rigidity, glues start to detach, liquid crystals start to behave slightly differently.
As the other comment mentions, this is a thing already, but thanks for bringing it up. I'd completely forgotten about it and it seems like a good hands-on way to get a better understanding of circuits.
Interesting. I cded without syntax highlighting for three decades. I think I could go back in an instant as I still haven't got comfortable with modern code editors. Visual Studio Code (as an example) has so much going on that I often can't tell if a word is high-lit because it's in my search field, I have selected it, or some other reason.
“ So the game is no longer about building stuff efficiently. It's about raking in as much money as you can for as long as you can and every inefficiency that justifies further work is actually best friend of everybody involved.”

You’re describing the goals of the individual becoming divergent from the goals of the company.

In the article the writer described his team’s goals at the VFX software company as being well aligned with the goals of the company and the customers. They even stayed late because they were enjoying solving the problem so much.

The same misalignment in goals is what made Communist Russia so awful. The stated goals were about providing prosperity to all workers and citizens of the USSR, but the goals of the committees became about personal advancement and the preservation of the party. It could be argued that the extreme job security of the dictatorship allowed this situation. If there had been a way to democratically fire officials, they would have been more aligned with the goals of the people. (A politician is only as good as your ability to fire them.)

Many large companies end up like the USSR. The way to solve this is to allow teams to fire their managers.
The AI Music Generation Challenge 2022
...who will instead invest their $20k life savings in beanie babies. The system is stupid, and we don’t all agree that it is the right way.
In applying to NATO, Finland and Sweden give the lie to Putin’s claims
You don't actually explain what benefits you would gain.

If it was my money, yes, dedicated FTW. Egress charges... nien danken.

If it's you boss' money, what's the point arguing it. Just let him have his cloud bills.
How do you think an author of the Agile Manifesto would respond to the original article?
https://archive.ph/LGerm
The country yes, the TLD not as much

For example .uk - If one day we decide to ditch the monarchy and become a republic I imagine this might change back to .gb

Everything would probably be grandfathered in of course being a reasonably populated TLD, and .gb would probably be wayyy less popular because it kinda sucks as a character combo, but it's a possibility.