skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
don't have time to read the article so I'll take your word for it, but I will note that upon skimming it seems to really look at bitcoin a lot. Bitcoin might be one of the worst cryptocurrencies to remit.

I will concede international transfers is not a very large use case, and definitely doesn't justify the market capitalization of the blockchain base currencies FWIW
The biggest use case for Bitcoin is of it being an escape from arbitrary printing of money by central banks. The richer your home country, the further you are from intuitively grasping how catastrophic printing is in the long run.
"Greybeard" scratches my ear as sexist.
You can tactfully tell your manager that in a 1:1. I've had co-workers do that - the volunteering employee gets severance and the manager doesn't have to stress about a name for the list.

Success depends on your relationship with your manager and if they actually have control over who gets let go.
> the cloud hosting costs are minimal

Disagreed. The cloud equivalent of a small server is still a few hundred bucks a month + bandwidth. Sure, it's still a relatively small cost but you're still overpaying significantly over the Hetzner equivalent which will be sub-$100.

> pay someone to manage that for you

The same guy that manages your AWS can do this. Having bare-metal servers doesn't mean renting colo space and having people on-site - you can get them from Hetzner/OVH/etc and they will manage all the hardware for you.

> The fact that we just deploy containers to k8s all over the world works very well for us.

It's great that it works well for you and I am in no way suggesting you should change, but I wouldn't say it would apply to everyone - the cloud adds significant costs with regards to bandwidth alone and makes some services outright impossible with that pricing model.

> We also host geo-located DB

That's a complex use-case that's not representative of most early/small SaaS which are just a CRUD app backed by a DB. If your business case requires distributed databases and you've already done the work, great - but a lot of services don't need that (at least not yet) and can do just fine with a single big DB server + application server and good backups, and that will be dirt-cheap on bare-metal.
What other benefits are there to being a "public telecommunication utility"?
These trains in case anyone is wondering.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iore
Yaron Minksy is probably too busy.

But the tech blog is really good too.

https://blog.janestreet.com/
Ok, so to your points.

"It depends" is the correct answer to the question, but the least informative.

One Big Server or multiple small servers? It depends.

It always depends. There are many workloads where one big server is the perfect size. There are many workloads where many small servers are the perfect solution.

What my point is, is that the ideas put forward in the article are flawed for the vast majority of use cases.

I'm saying that multiple small servers are a better solution on a number of different axis.

For
1) "One Server (Plus a Backup) is Usually Plenty"
Now I need some kind of remote storage streaming system and some kind of manual recovery, am I going to fail over to the backup (and so it needs to be as big as my "One server" or will I need to manually recover from my backup?

2) Yes it depends on your availability goals, but you get this as a side effect of having more than one small instance

3) Maybe I was ambiguous here. I don't just mean rolling deploys of code. I also mean changing the server code, restarting, upgrading and changing out the server. What happens when you migrate to a new server (when you scale up by purchasing a different box). Now we have a manual process that doesn't get executed very often and is bound to cause downtime.

4) Now we have "Use one Big Server - and a bunch of small ones"

I'm going to add a final point on reliability. By far the biggest risk factor for reliability is me the engineer. I'm responsible for bringing down my own infra way more than any software bug or hardware issue. The probability of me messing up everything when there is one server that everything depends on is much much higher, speaking from experience.

So. Like I said, I could have said "It depends" but instead I tried to give a response that was someway illuminating and helpful, especially given the strong opinions expressed in the article.

I'll give a little color with the current setup for a site I run.

moustachecoffeeclub.com runs on ECS

I have 2 on-demand instances and 3 spot instances

One tiny instance running my caches (redis, memcache)
One "permanent" small instance running my web server

Two small spot instances running web server
One small spot instance running background jobs

small being about 3 GB and 1024 CPU units

And an RDS instance with backup about $67 / month

All in I'm well under $200 per month including database.

So you can do multiple small servers inexpensively.

Another aspect is that I appreciate being able to go on vacation for a couple of weeks, go camping or take a plane flight without worrying if my one server is going to fall over when I'm away and my site is going to be down for a week. In a big company maybe there is someone paid to monitor this, but with a small company I could come back to a smoking hulk of a company and that wouldn't be fun.
Sovereign Unicorns: Jiaolong, a $1B Private City in China
‘Normies’ didn’t lose all of their money selling credit default options and swaps on mortgage-backed bonds. They wouldn’t have access to the markets for those instruments or the capital to do so, and if they had access or capital, they weren’t a normie.
Zerodha. They are the biggest stock broker in India with a team of less than 40 people. Check out their tech blog for their tech philosophy: https://zerodha.tech/blog/hello-world/

Also, WhatsApp with their choice of Erlang. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-...
I don't like the architecture because it looks like a set of ugly hacks. You don't need virtual machines to isolate applications because CPU already has a sandbox provided by protected mode. The problem is that legacy OS like Linux/Mac/Windows are unable to use this sandbox effectively.

For example, here [1] they show a separate VM for the USB stack. But why do you need it if you can simply run USB stack in protected mode?

Also, I assume that running so many VMs requires a lot of drive space and hurts performance.

[1] https://www.qubes-os.org/intro/
I tried this before and I can’t remember why I ended up not using it. Maybe because, even though it supports markdown, notes are stored in a database and not directly on the filesystem?
Software engineering is complex. Some of the challenges are simply irreducible.

I believe this is one of them.
Location: Chicago, IL

Remote: Yes, or Hybrid/Office

Relocate: Yes (USA)

Technologies: Julia (Flux, Turing), Python (PyTorch, spaCy, numpy/scipy), Go

Resume/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-mahowald ; longer form available upon request

Email: matthew [dot] mahowald+hn [at] gmail

I'm a data scientist and mathematician with a track record of leadership in both management and technical aspects of machine learning models, products, and services. I have a PhD in mathematics and about 8 years of industry experience across both seed-stage startups and large businesses. I have domain knowledge (and have delivered data science products/solutions) in finance, accounting, insurance, and manufacturing.

I'm most interested in companies where machine learning is at the core of the business, and in roles that offer a blend of technical leadership and "hands-on-keyboard" engineering.

I also occasionally write about various topics in data science on my blog: mahowald.github.io
No thanks. I have a few hobby sites, a personal vanity page, and some basic CPU expensive services that I use.

Moving to Aws server-less has saved me so much headache with system updates, certificate management, archival and backup, networking, and so much more. Not to mention with my low-but-spikey load, my breakeven is a long way off.
I wonder why so many german companies have only german in their sites.
Real wages have gone significantly since 2020 when COVID hit per the below link. This inequality index website includes both labor and capital - meaning not just wages but income from stocks. Yes the stock market has gone down, the rich own more stocks, and so rich made less money. Wages, the payment for only labor has been declining in real terms due to inflation outpacing wage growth. See this link and the sharp decline.https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
Is it really? If you can't change it for goods and services before turning it back into regular, government controlled currency, is it out of the hands of governments? If China can get all the miners to move to Kazakhstan, were they ever out of government control?
What’s my score according to my timeline of events -
Late 2016- Layoff
Early 2017- moved across country for new job
Mid 2018- Got married
Mid 2018- Layoff from second company
Mid 2018-Mid 2019 - Moved away and back for two jobs
Oct 2019 - Started new job
Nov 2019 - Birth of child
Dec 2019 - Death of father
Mar 2020 - Cannot visit mother for 2 years due to Covid

I think my score is about 210-290 for the last 4-5 years . And I am supposed to keep a high performance because of health insurance and keeping my visa lol.
Funny how retirement and dismissal from work are so similar.
Some very expensive server CPUs do have something vaguely like this (eg. IBM Chipkill) but it’s more for protecting against failure of entire memory chips.
Depends on how technical your customer base is. Even as a developer I would tend not to ascribe too much signal to that message. All it tells me is that you don't use AWS.

"We stayed online when GCP, AWS, and Azure go down" is a different story. On the other hand, if those three go down simultaneously, I suspect the state of the world will be such that I'm not worried about the internet.
I don't think it was fraud so much as loopholes. I'm not sure how she did it, but a common strategy is for give custody of the child to a grandparent, who on paper is poor and has 0 income.
Definitely. Somehow the author went and brought valid arguments against ETH and web3 but failed completely at point #2.

Just to answer the author concerns about point #2. There are coins with entire Blockchain that can fit in my OnePlus 7. I am from Algeria (a country without a financial system), LTC and XMR are the coins that brought me out of poverty, not because of gambling but they allowed me to do software development consulting online without begging services like Wise to not ban my account for random suspicions.

The author somehow talks about Crypto currency but somehow keeps pointing to flaws in exchangers with KYC.. Again, a lot of progress has been made here, exchangers without KYC emerged (check out Bisq net)...

I just wish people would point out more honest reviews of the such technologies so we can improve together as a society.. Cryptocurrency might not add a lot to your life, but there are many people having access to instant, cheap and secure transactions is a game changer.. I don't care about the legality of it as those broken laws are probably not protecting the average citizen.
We notice repeated failures because we have metrics on our "up to dateness", and those metrics will stall. We also send logs to CloudWatch logs and alarm on certain threshold of errors. Once an alarm fires, we investigate manually and see why the job is failing. This happens occasionally but not too much. While we are investigating, we are spinning up repeat jobs with some frequency, but this hasn't proved to be a problem.
Unconscious bias is not a well supported psychological construct. The Implicit Association Test, upon which the theory of unconscious bias is based, has a poor track record for consistency and does not predict actual discriminatory behavior.

Some of the scientists who originated this work have since distanced themselves from it, because people have run with the concept far beyond what the science supports.
All textual discussion, no videos for comparison or inspection.

Edit: best one https://YouTube.com/watch?v=ra4-gmQT_50
Volunteer when you hear layoffs are coming. Just tell your boss you'd like to be on the list.

They will usually oblige you because you are solving a problem for them (meeting their cut headcount requirements) and they know that if you stay you might leave anyway and if you don't you'll be unhappy.

Heck, if they layoff is a surprise, ask your boss if you can swap with someone else. They often have the flexibility to do that.
Embedded can be a tiny little msp430 with RAM measured in bytes, or it can be the latest and greatest intel flagship - it's a description of how the chip is used more than the chip type.

As CPUs get more powerful in general, so too do the little development boards. I can spend $10 on a board with multiple cores and megabytes of ram to drive my blinky lights and do wifi - that's enough power to run a full unix.
Really wish I could join but I'm not there yet, need more work to get there. Good luck and have fun!
This requires price stability, which is at odds with the use of crypto as a speculative investment vehicle. People use fiat to transact because it is stable. It’s stable because a central bank is using tools available to bring about stability.
> It's really hard for any crypto solution to beat that.

Not really.

One can do that with either XRP, Stellar, or Algorand blockchains with has virtually little to no fees, much faster and far cheaper than a wire transfer, all worldwide.

Perhaps is that why Moneygram realised that Stellar was a great use-case for their service? [0]

[0] https://stellar.org/moneygram
> simultaneously throwing away incredible CPU and PCIe performance gains

We really need to double down on this point. I worry that some developers believe they can defeat the laws of physics with clever protocols.

The amount of time it takes to round trip the network in the same datacenter is roughly 100,000 to 1,000,000 nanoseconds.

The amount of time it takes to round trip L1 cache is around half a nanosecond.

A trip down PCIe isn't much worse, relatively speaking. Maybe hundreds of nanoseconds.

Lots of assumptions and hand waving here, but L1 cache can be around 1,000,000x faster than going across the network. SIX orders of magnitude of performance are instantly sacrificed to the gods of basic physics the moment you decide to spread that SQLite instance across US-EAST-1. Sure, it might not wind up a million times slower on a relative basis, but you'll never get access to those zeroes again.
I’m pretty much just using mine for testing sandbox purposes.

Unlike my other cloud accounts it doesn’t have a billing card so has utility in the billing footgun sense - but build anything on top of it hahaha nope

Oracle is really harming their rep with the seemingly random closures and killing all the goodwill created via the exceptionally generous allowances
First, schools have a limited number of admissions so they may very well have to choose in a situation like this.

This is not strictly about racial diversity. The article also mentions ethnic diversity so it is clearly more than just race.

They explicitly mentioned socioeconomic situations as well.

> In their amicus brief, Yale and the other schools said that during their admissions processes, they obtain and review extensive information regarding each applicant’s life experiences, accomplishments, talents, interests, and goals. That information includes an applicant’s socioeconomic background, parental education level, whether languages other than English are spoken in the home, educational experiences, military service, leadership skills, “and all the other intangible characteristics that are crucial to ascertaining how an applicant will contribute to the university community.”

They are clearly also looking at socioeconomic situations along with race.

Maybe you should take your own advice: "Please don't try to distort the issue."
My god it is so frustrating that I can't seem to get open ai access any time I have an idea for a project using dall e, gpt, for whatever reason, they won't approve my account.

I have to sit here and watch everyone else play with the fun "open" ai tools... company needs a name change if they're going to keep this up.
What makes you think BTC utopians are going to be disappointed?
That's a terrible framing. It gives no sense of scale of difficulty of these problems and assumes they are similar.
> Your definition lines up more neatly with anarcho-primitivism than conservatism (at least modern American conservatism, with which I'm most familiar).

Anarcho-primitivism is a discrete variant of the overarching conservative phenomenon: when an-prims go say "go back" they mean a specific and particularly reactionary set of social transformations. This doesn't mean that ordinary conservatives don't desire social regression; it just makes them not as openly reactionary as the most reactionary social conservatives.

You're right, of course: any short and pithy summary of an ideology is going to have gaps. American conservatism is "funny" in the sense that it admits of additional gaps: there is a significant (although continually diminishing) population of "purely fiscal" conservatives who have dominated American intellectual conservatism, for example. And this is true for progressive movements as well, particular in the context of labor.
that's why letsencrypt use a single database on a powerful server
https://letsencrypt.org/2021/01/21/next-gen-database-servers...
I've started augmenting one big server with iCloud (CloudKit) storage, specifically syncing local Realm DBs to the user's own iCloud storage. Which means I can avoid taking custody of PII/problematic data, can include non-custodial privacy in product value/marketing, and means I can charge enough of a premium for the one big server to keep it affordable. I know how to scale servers in and out, so I feel the value of avoiding all that complexity. This is a business approach that leans into that, with a way to keep the business growing with domain complexity/scope/adoption (iCloud storage, probably other good APIs like this to work with along similar lines).
In my case, was one week for every year — so 16 weeks for (just short of) 17 years.
But on a fundamental level you're not describing a technical hurdle, you're describing a social-policy hurdle. Like, wouldn't you agree that if there was policymaker will to make this process more efficient, it could be more efficient without a blockchain?

Suppose that blockchain did not exist but that securities law did not require you to consult securities attorneys to "create the investment opportunity". You would have an efficiency gain by cutting out the attorneys.

In particular I think about your "dream": you dream that in lieu of paying people with a mixture of direct deposit and paper checks, you could pay them with an electronic currency; but presumably at least some of the people being paid with paper checks want to be paid with paper checks (if not, you'd presumably pay them all with direct deposit) and while securities law probably doesn't let you disburse via Paypal or Venmo or any other electronic account transfer, if it did, doing so would be approximately the same as USDC, right?

It seems to me to make a sustainable case for blockchain, you need to basically say assuming the exact same regulatory posture and the exact same degree of technical laziness in terms of automating steps not currently automated, would blockchain make it better?
Yeah, I mean, this is my take, too.

I have worked for places that offered equity a few times. It did turn into something once (Google bought my employer). But the actual equity conversion was minor in quantity compared to the rest of my Google TC.

There's no way out of "serfdom" other than starting your own company. I don't think this is healthy. The incentives are not there for engineers in startups to really put themselves out there.
The relevant scene: https://youtu.be/xW1CrQu_H6E

Great film.
Dealerships are not an efficient way to run repair shops either. Would be better if manufacturers just used repair certification for independent shops.
The cofounder was involved in some drama with a CELO bridge not too long ago

https://imgur.com/a/gV6s1Gw
Ens domains, PoolTogether, Aave and more: https://ethereum.org/en/dapps/

Have these people writing these kind of articles ever downloaded a browser wallet and played around with Defi? The amount of ignorance here is staggering. How is it on HN? HN is supposed to be a place for people who are tech savvy and are able to think about the future and imagine it different from yesterday.
Awesome that it worked out for you! That said, 9 months of pay as severance for 20 years of work seems a bit disappointing.

In my country it's currently one month of pay per year worked for layoffs where the employee was not at fault.
You're correct that it's not really captured in the prose of the article, but the first image does inform you.
The problem with Bitcoin is that it is a pain to transact any business with it.
There's another likely scenario (at least in my mind) where Bitcoin is a global reserve "currency" like gold used to be. In this instance, the on/off ramps that exist already would still likely be the ones around. That is to say, completely centralized instiutions that interface with completely centralized fiat currencies. Bitcoin isn't going to replace countries, countries will likely have fiat stablecoins which is exactly where our increasingly cashless societies are headed towards.

tldr; either the crypto itself is traded like real money, or a l2 or even centralized unconnected layer is - either way on/off ramps that currently exist (p2p and centralized) continue to exist and thrive.
Their 2021 revenue was $25M.
Ivy league schools have finite space for new students, you can't really fix this with more money. In the first place these schools don't need more money, they're some of the richest institutions in the country and only growing richer: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-17/ivy-leagu...

So I think a policy fix is in order.
Currently we've hired more than 0 people through a global outsourcing company. The outsourcing company sends us invoices, we wire them dollars, they charge us 3% on top of extremely bad forex rates plus 10% for their services, then a local company who's hired "our staff" processes payroll, pays local taxes and insurance, etc. The whole process of getting the money to the recipient takes days to a month.

Currently we have more than 0 staff who have been displaced by a war and do not have good access to local banking, so we pay them in dollar stablecoins. This does not cost ~15% and does not have a latency of days to a month.
I wonder why reading Anglo-gibberish is a standard?

Does a bridges proper engineering rely on detailed emotional understanding of Shakespeare?

Human language is only 5,000 years old they say. Leaving human intuition for quantity millions of years to fine tune itself; enough food, enough heat, to prevent biological death.

Nothing about human biology is fueled or relies upon grammatically correct English and everything to do with correct use of mathematical measurement.
The problem, though, is that you give up the benefits of working within a regulated system. Things like being able to stop or reverse mistaken or fraudulent transfers, protections from fraud, protections from whoever is handling your money for you (with crypto, someone is still handling your money for you) going out of business, etc.

Everything has an upside and a downside. But in the regulated system, you at least have a chance at some sort of recourse if something goes sideways.
It's nearly impossible for folks outside our industry (or some comparable industry in terms of pay).

Car trouble? Savings gone. Any sort of medical issue? Savings gone.

I actually think those folks are more financially disciplined than us, given they somehow make it work despite their low pay.
Since Livebook is a web app, I would assume so.