skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's an old rule of thumb that each order of magnitude increase (10x) brings a whole new set of challenges.

Anecdotally I experienced this when scaling my software product from 1 --> 10 --> 100's --> 1000's etc. of users.

Thats not to say 2x can't be a substantial challenge, as you pointed out. It gets harder (and IMO more fun) when you're at the bleeding edge of your industry.
1,193,000 L is just over 9 railway tanker cars.

I have a hard time picturing large numbers, so I use railway tanker cars the way some people use bananas for scale.
Some people do tests, some people do development, and some people do test driven development.

If you are picking up some code to work on, the nicest to work with is the one that was done with TDD.
for some folks, this sort of doxxing carries severe real-world consequences.

think of someone who's trans for example: it isn't always possible to update names on government documents because of dumb state laws, so discovering and exposing (say) a coworker's "legal name" could out them as trans and cost them their job.
Only if your datasets, in aggregate, extend beyond what can be compressed into 16Gb...an what's the performance of the device you're swapping to? There's a GREAT BIG DIFFERENCE between an RLL 80 Gb drive and What you're swapping to on the motherboard today...

(In fact, you could consider the on-die RAM to be a really big Cache and the Flash storage to be REALLY REALLY big Non volatile addressable RAM.)
Not just that, there's also the fact that the result of the committee work will then be put up for vote. That's basically an enormous code review, if not enough representatives press "accept" nothing happens.

Imagine having to review code changes without a diff, e.g. with only the before and after states, on separate computers. Bad idea.
Small nit. Smoking, alcohol, and high BMI are the big risk factors, but not causes. The interesting question is why these risk factors are associated with cancer.
I have some experience serving static content and working with CDNs. Here is what I find interesting / unique here:

- They are not using OS page cache or any memory caching for that, every request is served directly from disks. This seems possible only when requests are spread between may NVMe disks since single high-end NVMe like Micron 9300 PRO has max 3.5GB/s read speed (or 28Gbps) - far less than 800Gbps. Looks like it works ok for long-tail content but what about new hot content everybody wants to watch at the day of release? Do they spread the same content over multiple disks for this purpose?

- Async I/O resolves issues with nginx process stalling because of disk read operation but only after you've already opened the file. Depending on FS / number of files / other FS activities, directory structure opening the file can block for significant time and there is no async open() AFAIK. How they resolve that? Are we assuming i-node cache contains all i-nodes and open() time is insignificant? Or are they configuring nginx() with large open file cache?

- TLS for streamed media was necessary because browsers started to complain about non-TLS content. But that makes things sooo complicated as we see in the presentation (kTLS is 50% of CPU usage before moving to encryption offloaded by NIC). One has to remember that the content is most probably already encrypted (DRM), we just add another layer of encryption / authentication. TLS for media segments make so little sens IMO.

- When you relay on encryption or TCP offloading by NIC you are stuck with that is possible with your NIC. I guess no HTTP/3 over UDP or fancy congestion control optimization in TCP until the vendor somehow implements it in the hardware.
The M1 is a very different chip from traditional x86. It only has 128 bit vectors, which can be a major bottleneck in software that is perfectly vectorized, but it also has way more out of order execution and decode bandwidth.
Discussion the other day:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32500912
When buying new and presented with the option, the rack mounted option will be more expensive (because professional) and louder (no space for large fans, they compensate with higher fan speeds). Rack mounts are more interesting for network hardware (because of lack of options) and second hand. Second hand rack-mounted stuff can be very cheap for the performance you get, but also energy hungry and loud.
it is a good book actually!
> My understanding is that one of the terms of the armistice was that the German army retreat east of the Rhine.

...And they destroyed industrial sites during their retreat.

> Could you name or provide a reference to one of the post armistice actions of the german army in northern france?

[1](https://france3-regions.francetvinfo.fr/hauts-de-france/pas-...)
[2](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compagnie_des_mines_de_Dourges)
[3](https://www.cairn.info/revue-guerres-mondiales-et-conflits-c...)
When the vaccines were first being developed, the oft parroted narrative at the time was that by targeting the spike protein, the virus will have to mutate and lose it's ability to infect new cells.

It was a totally unproven theory, and a weak one IMO, but curiously enough, we had several major manufacturers all attempt the same thing. J&J, AZ, Moderna, Pfizer all released products that instructed your body to produce the spike protein.

Sinovac and Sputnik V used different approaches.

It's interesting that in all this time, nobody has stepped up and declared which vaccine is best. Clearly, if any of them worked or still worked, we'd know which one was most efficacious by now.
That seems like a better deal than apple care.
That's a super interesting approach to culling the spam, since web spammers often are trying to make old content look new. Does it work well?
New evidence that water separates into two different liquids at low temperatures
Remember that global productivity usually does not scale with headcount!

Each employee adds some overhead, which requires more employees... which requires more employees.
Remember that outside of the HN bubble, a lot of people aren't capable of working remotely, e.g., surgeons.
Reminds me of

https://xkcd.com/810/
Modern routers are unable to do line-rate regardless of packet size. See for example the Q100 ASIC from Cisco. Rated for 10.8 Tbps, it is only able to achieve 6 Bpps [1]. So it needs 200-byte packets to hit line-rate. However, as for Netflix, this is not problem since they only push big packets.

[1]: https://xrdocs.io/8000/tutorials/8201-architecture-performan...
This isn't surprising at all, but also it's a bit alarmist. Who ever uses the in-app browser other than to follow a quick link that usually opens up a native app from there (like YouTube, for example)? Seems like nothing to stress about really, esp. if you're already okay being on these apps to begin with.
Except this is not what is happening. They are paying to buy all the "Top quality" A grade materials, the competitors has plenty of choice to buy B grade materials.

The seller of Top Quality Material are in no position to sell their A grade material to all buyers.
This is a testbed to see what breaks at higher speed. Our normal production platforms are indeed single socket and run at 1/2 this speed. I've identified all kinds of unexpected bottlenecks on this testbed, so it has been worth it.

We invested in NUMA back when Intel was the only game in town, and they refused to give enough IO and memory bandwidth per-socket to scale to 200Gb/s. Then AMD EPYC came along. And even though Naples was single-socket, you had to treat it as NUMA to get performance out of it. With Rome and Milan, you can run them in 1NPS mode and still get good performance, so NUMA is used mainly for forward looking performance testbeds.
M1/M2 use around 20-22w MAX in CPU-only tests. AMD and Intel chips usually max out at around 50-60w real-world power.

That's hardly apples to apples..
They may be assholes but gosh aren't they productive.

It reminds me of dwarves from Norse mythology. Short guys in their little workrooms underground banging away at projects. Grumpy. Making miraculous stuff. The shoe fits.
Author here. AMA
Streaming pre-recorded video and streaming realtime video are almost entirely different use cases.

Pre-recorded video streaming is, under the hood, really just a high-volume variant of serving up static web pages. You have a few gigabytes of file to send from the server its stored on to the device that wants to play back the video. As this presentation demonstrates that isn't trivial at scale, but the core functionality of sending files over the internet is what it was designed to do from day one. Because you can generally download video across the internet faster than it can be played back its possible to build up a decent sized buffer which allows you to paper over temporary variance in network performance without the customer noticing.

Realtime video streaming has two variants. One to many Twitch style video streaming is relatively simple, since you can encode video into files and upload them to a server for people watching to download those files. This is how HLS streaming works, and most of the techniques Netflix use to optimise video delivery can also be applied here at the cost of adding latency between the event being streamed and people consuming it. That latency will often sit at about 30 seconds, and people generally find that acceptable.

Skype style realtime video streaming is much harder. You're taking video from one person's camera, and then sending it over the internet to one or more people's device. You can't do any sort of pre-processing on that, or stage the video on servers closer to the consuming users, because you have no way of generating that video until the point your users decide to start talking to each other. Because you can't pre-stage that video you need to be able to establish a network route between the people on a call, potentially in an environment where none of the participants have any open connection from the internet directly to the device they're streaming from. Slight fluctuations in network performance can potentially degrade video delivery to the point of it being unusable. The most common route to deal with that is systems that attempt to establish a direct connection (ideally over a local network) between participants, and if that doesn't work going via relay servers operated by the software provider. These servers provide a single point on the internet all parties can connect to, and then allow passing packets as if they were all on the same network.
Waiting on my Win Max 2 now. It's shaping up to be an incredible device.
> deal with political crap day long to get promoted to a staff role

That's largely what many staff+ engineers have to do, even in otherwise healthy organizations. "Staff" isn't a glorified, autonomous, and stress-free version of senior at most companies. There's nothing wrong with staying at the senior level indefinitely provided (1) the pay and other factors are keeping up with your contributions and (2) the staff+ and management folks are being effective umbrellas for the politics and messy uninteresting details behind interesting problems like this.
Ask HN: Are there any decent GitHub Copilot Alternatives?
I find myself, especially when I'm jumping between languages that I'm less familiar with, more reliant on copilot for boilerplate, or at least example code that I can modify. It really does come in handy and save time, but I'm not certain it's worth $10 per month, or I'm just a cheapskate, and would rather find a better deal if there is one.

I've tried Tabnine, but it's never been that great and it's a memory/cpu hog.

Just got a notice that copilot's 'preview' is ending in 3 days, so it's time to find a replacement or decide if it's worth it to keep it and pay the fee.
>It would be interesting to define why is this particular subject so special.

Christianity, Catholicism in particular - perversion of human sexuality is one of its pillars. You can see this in their fight against reproductive rights and sexual minorities.
Most rackmount servers have some sort of remote management interface, which makes it a lot easier to work with them on a headless basis.

Pitfalls: Server-class hardware can take a very long time to POST, as they're intended to run 24x7, and (especially 1U and 2U boxes) tend to have extremely loud fans.

If you want a quiet server, your best bet is to build it up from a server motherboard and a 4U case, and use quiet fans like Noctua.
The Dune-sized worm in the room is how the religion of these friars assesses these findings?

Why is it important? Because they coded the moral and cultural foundation of the Western world. How could they be right regarding, say, whom you should marry (or the fact that you should marry at all with just a single person of your opposite sex), but be clueless regarding intestinal worms? Furthermore, how could they keep the pretense?
Disney Streaming had 850 employees as of 2017 [0] (can't find any newer figures); LinkedIn is suggesting 1k-5k.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_Streaming
20 years later and it still seems like magic. It’s incredibly impressive how it can identify a song in second even in noisy environments.
Minus all the safety precautions that make DD generally safe to use.
> After all, who would want to logout of HN?!

We definitely don't need more "dark pattern" implementations to artificially keep users logged in when they don't want to be. It's annoying to have to scroll around a website hunting for the logout button.

Several years ago I had a Discover card account, and one of the things that I always particularly liked about their website design is that when I wanted to log out, the button was always highlighted right where I first looked at the top of the page. The result is that I didn't leave their site every time with a negative thought about how long it took to find the damn button. I wish more sites took that approach.
So they DO have source control. It's just 100% manual instead of (partially) automated.

I wonder what happens when the "source master" receives everybody's tarballs at the end of the work week? Manually inspect them all and manually merge the source files? Or, pick one at random and tell the engineers to merge on their own next week?
This is incredible. I really like how you're able to trace the evolution of the systems as well.

It makes me wonder what the next hardware revolution will be. It seems like most resource intense applications are bottlenecking at transferring memory. UE5's nanite tech hinges on the ability to transfer memory directly from disk to GPU, Netflix built specific hardware to avoid copying memory between userspace and hardware, and I wonder how much other performance we're missing out on because we can't transfer memory fast enough.

How much faster could AI training be if we could get memory directly from disk to the GPU and avoid the CPU orchestrating it all? What about video streaming? I have a feeling these processes already use some clever tricks to avoid unnecessary trips through the CPU, but it will be interesting to see which direction hardware goes with this in mind.
Does the encryption in DRM protect the metadata?
Show HN: I made a 100 second meditative website that explores Stoic philosophy
Samples, sure, but they were written in weird Microsoft style and made very little sense to a young me

Also, another H/T for Rails docs, they are very good... but far from comprehensive
The really good bad actors already exploit them. The eager bad actors with less skills look for guides.
The last interview loop I went through, I met with 10 different people along the way. I asked every single one of them "What are the qualities that make for a successful engineer at XYZ"?

I got 10 different answers but with several common themes and threads running through them. Each individual is biased by their own experiences and perspective, but the commonalities are what speak to the culture.

No one person's answer was sufficient to give me a clear picture of the truth.
> Do you actually sell features? As in: Is your revenue directly tied to the number of shipped features per year? If so, who pays for the perpetual maintenance?

I have worked for years in different places where the answer is yes, we sell features. This happens any time you are in a competitive deal where customers want software that does certain things and solicit bids from software providers. Your software does some things out of the box and you need to customize or extend it to do other features the customer wants that the system does not yet currently do. You demo what you have, describe how you would do the rest, and do a bid for total cost to the customer. Your competitors do the same. Maintenance can work different ways.

But yes, people pay money for features. And when properly managed, it is possible to make features add up to a product that provides value and earns money.
Still a smaller pile of lies than the Ada Lovelace story.
I somehow feel personally validated that they decided to use JavaScript as it was in 2002.

I feel there is a lesson here...perhaps this is what you do when money isn't your incentive.
Great list. Closing layer 3* access (inbound firewall rule of deny-all) helps mitigate against the common webhook attack vectors as well (should still do all the L7 mitigation and best practices alluded to above for a multi-layered approach).

* examples:

https://netfoundry.io/zero-trust-webhook-security/ (blog)

https://youtu.be/TWohosldLP4 (video specifically for a Lambda function)
How do you know every bad actor already knows how to exploit it?
Carbon offsets are full of bad accounting and fraud, so they're sort of perfect for a blockchain.
>Small EVs and their riders are a city menace. They hardly ever use roads--though they are allowed to, just like bicyclists are--and instead roam the sidewalks, expecting pedestrians to get out of the way and getting angry if they don't.

You should probably try to dig a layer deeper and try to understand the root cause of this behaviour. We can read from your paragraph that the users of these vehicles are not actually particularly happy about being on the sidewalk - understandably so, there are plenty of pedestrian in their way there.

So why would they not choose the road, then?

The answer is simple - the roads are filled with cars, riding at unsafe speeds, threatening their lives if they dare use this infrastructure.

There is a pretty simple solution to this issue: build infrastructure that is appropriate for this category of vehicles, that all travel faster than pedestrian speeds (~5 km/h) but slower than car speeds. Bicycle infrastructure happens to be an excellent fit for all these vehicles.

Observe also that cities with adequate bicycle infrastructure do not suffer from this issue - micromobility users choose the bicycle infrastructure in that case, because it's the best option available.

>The cities that get it right, in my opinion, divide all vehicles into either unpowered or powered. Powered vehicles use roads and are subject to regulations; those that do not fit any regulated class (eg. being too new) are illegal by default.

Given what we learned from the analysis above, this is quite obviously a really bad take.
My understanding is that using the XCode compiler and libraries means that your could could very much wind up using co-processors that other compilers and codebases aren't aware of and aren't able to take advantage of.
FWIW, my flippant gut reaction was the same as parent’s, but really none of us needs to jump to logical extremes or put up straw men, the better thing to do than make assumptions about the other person is to have a conversation and ask about it, right?

To me the reasons that question should be asked carefully are that:

You’re interviewing to join a company that works a certain way and (unless it’s a startup) does so successfully enough to pay a salary. There are many valid ways to do source control, and a lot of people like to moralize their favorite one and make bad assumptions about how a company runs based on whether they use git or Perforce or Subversion.

The important question is just whether the company uses source control, and that’s what the Joel Test this question was borrowed from asks. Asking which one is fine, but requesting justification for it is the part that could come off as naive and/or condescending. That part of the question to me feels somehow a tad aggressive, and it feels focused on details that matter far less than whether the product ships or not.

Given a random interview at any size company, chances are high that the person you ask did not make the source control decision, and does not know why it was chosen. They might want to rationalize or justify something, but in any case, it’s probably not going to change, and it doesn’t really matter why it was chosen.
This sounds like interesting number paradox but with unrelated stuff on top.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number_paradox

I can see how this could be a local meme but can not see any value in forcing it. It's too ill defined with all the pointless letter counting.
There may genetic propensity, but it may also be fueled by maternal stress during pregnancy (anecdotally possibly energy depravation of some kind or too high a cortisol level in the blood). From Moms of multiples in FB groups, the level of anxiety in each pregnancy in the same mom seems to result in similar baseline anxiety in the baby. In one case a very early delivery (27 weeks) in a mom with a very stressful professional environment during pregnancy lead to the most severe case. Very little seems to be done to investigate influence of stress, different types of food intake, sleep on the fetus during different pregnancies of the same parents.
The thing is, Spotify had libspotify.

It opened a whole bevvy of open and useful Spotify clients that worked amazingly and some that still do to this day. Mopidy, as well as a handful of amazing MPD-speaking daemons got me through college. The only conceit was that it required a premium account and yielding a third party client your authentication data. They had some issues with Facebook authentication as it was OIDC, but setting a user name and password on your account was a simple solution.

The Spotify team has killed libspotify in preference for a Javascript browser or Mobile Device library (ios/ObjC or Android /kotlin) that uses the browser to authenticate over openID. It can only be a connect target, not query the full api, and depends heavily on the browser or native api to play the media.
> They’re not actually the ones rapidly deforesting or otherwise devastating mostly pristine ecosystems.

You're aware that about 90% of the megafauna in the Americas went extinct within a few centuries after the arrival of the early Native Americans?

Yeah, well, it wasn't Archer Daniels Midland or Cargill that did that.
This narrative consultant created a narrative narrating that a big company used a narrative to bring them more money to bring him more money.
SVN is also still in use.
i feel old.
Maybe snap/chisel the melamine off and replace with felt pads or something.
And you can birth one baby in 3 months by 3 women, right?

To add something useful as well besides snark, first of all, there are hard physical limits, which are sometimes well within context (you really shouldn’t try to outcompete light speed for example, relevant in some high-freq trading, infrastructure projects). Then you can try to increase headcount to any number, you won’t produce for example a better compiler. There are simply jobs that are more “serial” - the only way to win at those is to try to employ the very best of the field in a small team.