skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Of course, but that's not how I've seen it play out now, twice. They're eerily similar in going all in, full cloud mode kubernetes docker yaml hashicorp trendy product soup. Complete with architecture teams who try to wrangle it into a best practice starter repo for all engineering teams to use. I have no say in it otherwise yeah you can deploy on a bare ec2 instance but that's too simple for a serious enterprise software developer.
My experience with assignments is that I will have a guaranteed waste of time on assignment if post asignment interview go bad.

Unless I really want a job, i usually avoid assignments.
I agree with the sentiment if you are creating things that can only be run in AWS. You're setting yourself up for vendor lock-in. However Kubernetes should be cloud agnostic, make sure you use it that way.
Thats was true some time ago, but isn't anymore - for every authentic review you will find hundreds of fake SEO article/comments. This means that by simply increasing n you're basically guaranteed to be less informed.

Welcome to the age of misinformation.
Good to see how decentralised the Internet truly is.
NPM requests from AWS us-east-1 fails with 503 for us.
DO DNS is down.
Yep - I have a Shopify app that uses Cloudflare, and was just about to panic when I saw this post.

Turns out no one will notice, as all of Shopify is down anyway ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Hmm.. mongo might be hip or whatever but sql as a whole is not going anywhere. Perhaps some businesses will switch but half the world has already been built on sql, and new things are being built on sql all the time.
Cloudflare going down is one of the things which keeps me awake, My main complaint about Cloudflare is that they are very good at everything they offer that we've become reliant on them for everything.
Were you on VPN by chance, same thing happened to me and I’ve been permabanned ever since.
Your box running your web server is far less complicated than using a CDN and worrying about countless additional points of failure. Network problems are only a minor risk.
> mistakes at that networking layer seem to happen less often than mistakes that take AWS us-east-1 or one of the big CDNs offline

Not in my experience. Things break all the time, the difference is nobody notices because either the colocating ISP is too small or we are.
Peep, anyone there?

Wow, for me it looked like the world had gone mad. This is a reminder to not only rely on 1.1.1.1 for DNS resolution in PiHole.

I host most of my services locally, but ironically could not connect to my own homelab. I use a dedicated domain with DynDNS and did not configure the network and DNS without reliance on external DNS. Surely it's infinitely more likely for me to make a mistake, right?
imo it's messed up that they haven't rebuilt their network infrastructure in the four months since they got acquired
Back up now as of about 5 min ago.
It's certainly any business' model to grow as big as possible, but it's a hard business model to implement so competition is hard to find. I just can't blame CF for that imo.
So, I'm an electrical engineer (these days). I work with parts. Parts have part numbers. I need information about parts. Some of my parts are weird and rareish.

It is shocking how many searches I do which are well described by "show me every single thing on the entire Internet which matches this string". (I'd love to match a simple regex, since part numbers have stupid trivial variations, but I'll take what's actually feasible.) Or, I often want to match only PDFs, but that hurdle seems well solved these days. There aren't that many results for a few of these things (and those are often the ones I need information about the most), so I sometimes really do want to see every result.

I don't see any other way to do that than a full-text, full-web index. I just don't. And my job gets a lot harder if that class of search isn't possible anymore. So I'm desperately hoping these indices remain at least somewhat viable.

And yes, I am noticing that Google is lovingly correcting my long part numbers that do actually match a fair bit of results to crap that is useless. Fuck that bullshit, Google.
Agreed same shit at my work. We have a maintenance problem but the other devs are wanting to solve a scaling problem that we don't have and are unlikely to have in the foreseeable future. Talk of microsevices and one database per service, which will only complicate things and put a load of unreliable network call into our already buggy system. Dev environments that take forever to set up and are incredibly fragile.
I blame the OOP culture for the idea that code is self-documenting (and also for the sibling idea that unit tests can replace documentation).

See, OOP worldview is a priori based on the idea that all programs can be written as collections of small, independently reusable, objects. In that world, there is no place to put any high-level explanation of how the parts interact as a whole, or what are any emergent properties of the system, because it is (on the ideological assumption of object independence) not needed.

It's very visible from e.g. Java package system design, there is no place to document what a particular package is for, or what classes are part of its public API and what are internal. And in Java in general, every entity must be assigned to some object, the things that lie outside (and can be shared) are frowned upon.
I'm old enough to remember WiFi mesh networks, OLPC and how they would change the world in the future. I've lived in that future for a while now, and seldom see an actual mesh network.
One of the advantages of LoRa is that is free. Any monetization scheme on top of this is actually prejudicial to the tech. Also - from my limited knowledge - LoRa is actually quite prone to abuse or traffic prioritization; this is often not an issue on a self-regulated community, but it will clearly be an issue if there is monetary incentive to disrupt the network behaviour.
This is what is commonly called "golden handcuffs".

Of course they offer a great product, that's how you create a monopoly.
Cloudflare are usually pretty good with posting post mortems. https://blog.cloudflare.com/tag/postmortem/
Of course not. If you don't need Cloudflare, don't use it :)

For anyone else needing their services, they are a perfectly reliable provider (most of the time). Would make sense to ensure a fail-over, though.
My company uses 3 CDNs, although not cloudflare. If one (say Aakami) goes down it gets removed from the pool and life continues.
Companies switching to cloud? It makes sense why they do it - that layer of problems was solved for you, and solved well enough. Your company should focus on what it does best, theres surely tons of other challenges in the interesting parts of your stack, the ones you cant just grab off the shelf. There is plenty of fun to be had there.
Yes.

There are two types of problematic teams in these companies. Those that never want to change anything, and those that chase new technologies for the sake of it - maybe they want to learn something relevant for the future. If you're unlucky, your leadership is too far in one of these directions too.

I can, for instance, tell you that Kubernetes is a worthwhile investment if you're large enough and you never have to touch 99% of it. People often get it wrong and throw a kubernetes endpoint at developers and then wonder why there's cognitive overload and everyone just does the most minimal thing that works without taking any advantage of the new environment.

There are plenty of places that do Spring now and manage to let developers do the things they're good at without constant interruption. You just need to find one. You also may need to learn Kafka, since that is where most of the data in large constructs ends up in now.
The way I read their complaint was that they should have something on their website to indicate they were down. Anyway, at the time they complained, the status page also already said that the issue was identified and a fix was being rolled out.
And paying you 0.001 in ETH or BTC will cost many orders of magnitude more than that in payment fees alone, and take massive amounts of time to vetify. Meanwhile the actual solution to this problem is micropayments, which can (and allegedly are) better implemented using traditional texhnologies
Classic movie music seems to be doing well - like the Star Wars music, and the Lord of the Rings music. The Game of Thrones theme music is very good, too.

What I complain about is the decline of the trumpet. Modern music has completely abandoned it in favor of terrible synthesized horns.

If you want to hear how incredibly good horn playing can be, Maurice Andre and Herb Alpert's horn playing are just sublime.

Chicago was a horn band, and I like their tunes, but the horn skill was rather pedestrian.
hats off to you sir - would not want to be in your shoes right now but thanks for the updates
Can someone link me to some information that explains what Cloudflare is besides being a CDN?

Like I understand how websites can be served using a CDN and how a lot of the internet depends on that... but I don't see how gaming services like Valorant or cloud providers like AWS or chat room like Discord depend on Cloudflare.

Thanks!
You may also want to consider that this is how the web looks all the time for those of us blocked by Cloudflare.
Seems to be back up again, albeit a bit slow.
Because of state and federal regulations, the path through back doors, fire exits and water coolers are always shorter from engineer's desks to the planetary atmosphere than it is through the front door and reception areas.
no, you are not alone, I was laid off when the pandemic started, and I got a job doing web dev, I won't go as far as to say I "hated" it, but I didn't like it, I since did a software engineering internship, where I did automation stuff library dev, and went back to finish college, and specifically applied for a job where I won't work in "web stuff"

also, jobs that aren't about doing cloud stuff config do exist, if you really dislike that, you can change jobs (unless you can't? what with financial stability, depending on your situation)

if you're skilled at programming, even if you've only ever used one language, you should be able to program in another, you might not be as skilled as your preferred language, at least initially, but that shouldn't be a problem in the long run
As it stands, existing school is child jail. You didn't vote for the people telling you what you can and can't do, and they aren't paying you to be there either. The authority of the "authority figures" isn't actually built on any rational principle. If it weren't for the fact that the easiest personal option is to just wait out the clock and never look back, surely large swaths of people held in this system would openly revolt. Why does society presume adolescents to be obedient, suckers, and obedient suckers? Take their time, pay them for it. That simple.
Using outsource development for a mobile app can heavily reduce costs and find non-standard solutions. When should you hire external specialists and are there any stumbling rocks on the way? Find out here:
This doesn’t really answer the question - I mean from a process perspective how does it work.

Like I write a song that has 10 different owners - is the idea then that I purchase rights via purchase of an NFT? Because that will need a lawyer-y real world contract attached to it anyway, so I’m not sure what it’s replacing. And how does that NFT determine the cost of rights, which will be different if I am using it as the theme song for my movie compared to a tiny sample in a song?

I understand the complexities from that post, I just don’t understand how NFTs and smart contracts are the solution to the complexity.
if a street changes into a one-way one day (signaled by a sign) relying on a map will lead to a big unhappy problem.

sure, if you consider everything selfdriving that works on a NASCAR track, then yes, a map is sufficient, but if we are talking about driving on public roads then recognizing and "obeying" signs visually seems like a hard dependency.
Uh, that’s not good. The negatives of centralisation really smack you in the face.

I’ll start moving my sites away from Cloudflare soon. Not because it’s bad — in fact it has been amazing, but rather to decentralise.
> Dynamic allocation reduces the memory footprint, the author compares it to the best alternative which requires pre-allocation of a large chunk of memory.

Architecturally speaking, it makes almost no sense to have dynamic memory allocation in Microvium. You could theoretically even do static analysis on whatever chunk of code you're about to run and figure out exactly what your upper bound for memory usage would be. (Remember, we don't have an interactive runtime.)

So now that I actually think about it more, not pre-allocating in this particular case is actually an antipattern.
As someone adjacent to software but not really a dev in that sense, it's stuff like this I rant about all day here and (unforunately) to my friends and family is how devs can't just embrace things that work but have to reinvent everything every couple of years and how that attitude makes life worse for everyone, both users and those downstream from software like me.

I don't know how to fix it because it seems like an industry wide problem, a very deep cultural problem that absent some outside force will not change. Just as a note, the curse was called "CADT" by jwz back in the late 90s to early 2000s so it's been a part of the industry for a while and likely won't dissipate any time soon.
Yes, this is actual irony, unlike “rain on your wedding day.”
Berry's response to that (and similar) letters is quite sharp, but fair, I thought:

> I am also surprised by the meanness with which two of these writers refer to my wife. In order to imply that I am a tyrant, they suggest by both direct statement and innuendo that she is subservient, characterless, and stupid -- a mere "device" easily forced to provide meaningless "free labor." I understand that it is impossible to make an adequate public defense of one's private life, and so I will only point out that there are a number of kinder possibilities that my critics have disdained to imagine: that my wife may do this work because she wants to and likes to; that she may find some use and some meaning in it; that she may not work for nothing. These gentlemen obviously think themselves feminists of the most correct and principled sort, and yet they do not hesitate to stereotype and insult, on the basis of one fact, a woman they do not know. They are audacious and irresponsible gossips.
The difficulty is not that there's too much code.
Looks like it's mostly good now?
If only we could come up with a globally distributed set of networks and systems that could be run by millions of entities that don't rely on each other to keep working. Oh no wait...
I don't have shoes on.
Apparently yes, people in here are quick to defend our new overlord.

"But they're great", they cry, "why should I use anything else?"
Our monitoring systems had influxdb endpoints behind cloudflare. Now we not only lost users but also access to data about the impact of outage.
As someone else who was an SRE at Google years ago, you should indeed be very glad that we made hiring decisions based on merit and not personal politics. The SRE team I joined shortly after the IPO was dominated by libertarians and arch meritocrats who would have considered your attitude a clear firing offence. It was those sort of people who built the company.

But who knows? Maybe we should have done background checks to keep your type out. Certainly, Google has become a shadow of its former self now, filled with employees who seem to be phoning it in and spending all day searching for meaning in hating their own users instead of creating great new products.
If you need fault tolerance/isolation, you want to have a second box in a different colo (preferably in a different city; a different coast/continent if it's important).

If you can live with dns round robin between the two, then you can easily host the DNS with multiple providers and avoid SPOF (could maybe host it on the two boxes you already have, too). You're still at risk of domain registry/registrar failures, and failures of their tld nameservers (very rare for well run tlds) and the root servers (not sure if they ever had a widespread failure). And of course, simultaneous failure of both locations isn't impossible, just less likely.

On Comcast DNS failures... Most of the recent ones I've heard of manifested as users on Comcast can't resolve X, but were really X had bad DNSSEC records and Comcast DNS refused to return records that weren't signed properly. It's easy to avoid that by not using DNSSEC.

In the general case of working despite bad ISP dns, you can't do much (anything?) for web browsers, but if you build apps, you can hard code fallback IPs for when DNS doesn't work... But you need to have IPs that stick around for the lifetime of your app downloads.
Having a starter repo is a good sign. What should be happening is that such architecture teams (or platform teams as they're usually known now) hide all the complexity of how and where things run, beyond a simple set of guarantees handed to developers.

As much as I love setting up single instances and deploying directly on it, it does not scale and the quality of the deployment is very dependent on the developer. The quality and even existence of documentation for the same too.
Security theater. Instagram intrudes on your inner speech.

"ADDICTED TO INSTAGRAM? says the ad.

Below is a poll with two options: YES and HOW’D YOU KNOW.

I tap my answer and the poll reveals its results.

Forty-nine percent clicked HOW’D YOU KNOW."

They know because they surveil your inner speech.

https://nplusonemag.com/issue-36/essays/my-instagram/
maybe we should start suggesting the use of IPFS/Arweave to host critical infra status pages or similar sites that are occasionally imminently needed
It's happening everywhere, not just computing. E.g. there was a thread about the decline of the quality of dental care a few days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31790226

Greed is taking over.
Discord is back, Kickstarter progressed from 500 to an exotic "Error 1016 Origin DNS error".

EDIT: all flushed, Kickstarter works.
First of all: You have deep knowledge. That is good and valuable. The Java ecosystem is not going anywhere and it will stay relevant for years to come.

But there are also other technologies that have their merits. I understand that you find it frustrating to look at them and you feel like it's a huge wall to climb to also learn these technologies after you have invested so incredibly much time in mastering the Java ecosystem.

My advice to you is: Don't stress out over it. Explore these other technologies without having to think about how you will use them in your professional life. Take away the pressure and focus on the enjoyment of learning something new. Eventually you will learn enough for it to be useful. And as stated previously: The Java ecosystem is not going anywhere.

You might also want to check out Clojure. It's a very different language but it uses the Java ecosystem, so you will still feel at home. https://clojure.org/
No advice, I feel the same. The industry has gone to shit and it's crossed the point of no return. The only real innovation has been with AI. Everything else is an endless reinvention of the wheel. Most of the skills I've learned are equivalent to underwater basket weaving. OOP was supposed to manage complexity but it actually creates more complexity. Imagine going back to the 70s and talking to a developer learning C and Scheme. How depressing to tell them no improvements will be made over the next 50 years and languages will actually get much worse.
On a tangential note, I prefer GN for their understated delivery and heavy use of data and charts. On some channels the emphasis is clearly more on the -tainment part of infotainment. The default tech video is is now produced with the same template: little jokes between presenters, background history, open ended questions, Netflix type camera shots on the couch, post processing, visual effects etc. With GN at least it's easy to FF to see a graph and listen to conclusions. Other channels require me to be emotionally invested in the content and delivey method and it gets very tiring after a while.
Brace yourself for a lot more of those kinds of articles in the next few days.
You can buy a top quality DDR pad for €200, and could back then too. A Quest 2 costs £299. Since £299 > €200, the Quest 2 is also "insanely expensive", and so most definitely has all of that problem.
I agree with the other post here, sounds like you need to find a new job. The cloud isn't your enemy; it's just a bunch of machines. The decisions that are being made at your present gig are orthogonal to the fact that it's in the cloud.

However I would add that sticking to one technology stack for your whole career is probably just not possible in today's environment. There's still plenty of places that are using Java, but they won't be the cutting-edge startups. Frankly, you may not want to work at a startup anyway, the pay is lousy, the equity is usually worthless, and job security is low.

I encourage you to methodically look at your skills, which Industries and segments they're valuable in, and what you need to learn going forward depending on which segment you end up focusing on.
More like. AcmeCo makes a widget nobody wants. WorldCo wants to buy a single needed core feature. WorldCo then must pay for the widget too.
> dissonant harmonies, inhuman rhythms and charmless sound patterns

If one wanted to check those, what are some of those horrific modern compositions?
Their WAF is very useful, it makes it very easy to defend against attacks without paying anything. In general, their big plus point is that they offer many services for free, making it easier to onboard.

But by now they offer lots of services, although I believe WAF and CDN are probably still the most important to many.
For me it's just a waiting game. I'm not going to start the next big crypto project, and I really don't want to get too caught up in FOMO, so if blockchain actually becomes huge and useful, I'll wait and see. I don't mind if it does, or if it doesn't. There are certainly aspects of it that sound very exciting, but also it seems that the unwieldiness of it counteracts that.

In many ways it's like quantum computing vs. classical computing, everyone is very hyped about it, but no one knows exactly what we are going to do with it, and it isn't clear that the cost and difficulty of using it justify the somewhat ephemeral benefits.
Google's New Imagen AI Outperforms DALL-E on Text-to-Image Generation Benchmarks
While this sucks, at least we'll have a great writeup to look forward to
Wow, it's uncanny how well this post mirrored my own thoughts, down to the phrase "consciousness is observer independent". I ended up rejecting the conclusion though, for the roughly same reason Maxwell's demon doesn't actually reduce entropy. Normally I wouldn't expose people to my armchair philosophy, but here goes:

1. Consciousness, if present, should depend on dynamics. E.g. frozen snapshots of a conscious being probably shouldn't be conscious themselves.

2. (Building on 1) Because a full definition of consciousness requires dynamics, a measurement of consciousness can't just give one "conscious" snapshot. It needs to dynamically continue to measure consciousness, which is much stricter than Joe's original requirement.

3. If measurements of an iron bar are dynamically changing in order to find consciousness in random spins in the iron bar, then picking the correct measurements actually requires immense computation. In fact, it would require simulating a conscious being, while also simulating the dynamics of the iron bar. I'd argue the consciousness you're measuring is then real, but not a property of the iron bar at all.