skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> yet we're talking about the feasibility of a distributed system being able to sustain random bursts of write amplification factor of 100 million across a decentralized database, with ideally exactly-once write semantics even if a failure occurs mid-way

I think my assumptions are just a lot more relaxed than yours. This isn't a trading platform I don't see why you need exactly-once write semantics.

> Not fanning out to up to 100 million inboxes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_Twitter_...

There are only 6 users with 100m+ followers and they avg a lot less than a daily tweet. @BBCWorld is #50 and it drops to 38m accounts. #1000 has 2 million followers.

> And you think that's acceptable for a business valued in the tens of billions of dollars?

Elon by his own admission grossly overpaid for it. Twitter has hardly ever eeked out a profit, it is not worth tens of billions of dollars. Nothing much would happen if it went down for a bit except maybe bored journalists would report on it thus, as ever, driving even more users to the website. But that is neither here nor there.

More to the point: if Elon and Obama and Bibster tweeted in the same minute (what are the odds) you would, gasp, have to stagger the fan out of the updates. That's alright too, for Twitter. It isn't really actually real time.

Those follower counts are also grossly inflated and as you understand yourself only a small fraction of them are online using the app at the same time as the person is tweeting. By the time they do check they might never even see the tweet.

To the people offline you don't need to fan out in a timely manner.

In short I believe the write amplification is much closer to 1 million than 100 million even with the pathological cases. And beefy enough hardware can handle those peaks.

Here's another way to think about it: Elon has 118m followers and just posted twitter has 260m daily average users. He is a bit like Tom from MySpace, half the users on the website are subscribed to his updates (not exactly really but for simplicity).

I think it is perfectly alright if it takes a full minute until all those users see his latest meme. It is very unlikely that even a quarter of all his followers are using the app during that exact minute, so we're talking 30m writes in 60 seconds. Big whoop.

> You seem absolutely convinced that a massive social network can be run on a shoestring budget with tiny staff

I would bet a budget of say <$1 billion/year and 100 engineers for the core functionality as is.

> no amount of evidence from someone like me (who actually worked on this stuff in depth, and posts with my real name, and expertise in profile) will convince you otherwise

Neither one of us presented any evidence, just opinions as outsiders, as part of an informal conversation. An appeal to authority isn't an impressive argument, I am also from this industry and with similar experience.

There is no need to take things personally. I think we just have a very different estimation of just how much activity twitter sees at peak and how strict the requirements are.
Yeah.. if I have to dig into your python code on github to figure out what library you're using for the main feature of your project (OCR in this case), I'm not impressed
So then there is language-level Optional and library-level Optional?
Anyway. Isn't Black Friday racist? Shouldn't it be called 'Friday of Color'? [sic] these days?
For the average protocol you're going to init the entire message then set into it, you don't need to fully zero fields.

This is mostly relevant to write into existing memory or memory-mapped records.
I’m not sure, but I suppose you would be correct.
> whatever they do to make a lot of money is ethical as long as they buy some mosquito nets afterward

EA doesn't support this. It's absolutely not okay to do immoral things to make money and even things like Earning to Give via legit quant roles is and was pretty hotly debated.
Thanks! There was a lot in that and I didn't follow it closely. Honestly that always confused me about the dc failing prep. Like I get that it would be a good idea to have a documented plan but at the same time, we did lose a whole DC and figured out how to recover(not that it was that easy) Im not sure having a cold boot prep plan would have helped that much. The things that failed that I dealt with personally during that event, I don't know if I would have foreseen. The site went on afterwards so it didn't seem to be existential.
I did good here, but it took me two tries ;)
I really don't think marcan and co have some secret backchannel with Apple. If nothing else, a lot of their coding sessions are streamed live on Youtube, so you can see them reverse engineering stuff in real time.
Recently there was an interesting discussion on here about a blog post discussing pigs in medieval times.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33318215
I think so. The way I see it, effective altruism is a dangerous trend because it can very quickly go into the 'ends justify the means' territory.'

In the case of SBF, if he essentially stole from a bunch of retail investors, and then went about doing altruism (this is not yet verified, of course) did he ultimately create a net positive? That only works if the investors in FTX did not lose out, which they did.

Anything that goes into the 'ends justifies the means' territory ends up badly. Sometimes immediately, sometimes over time, but always.
Do you allow negotiation over how the pot is split for shared victories? Like can a weak player help the leader win in exchange for a small cut of the winnings?
That’s for creating an enumerable of discrete integers, not for defining an interval.
I seriously do not see and never saw how "Web 3.0" is a follow up from web 1 and 2. The whole thing was a hijack by ponzi schemers or just another way to get someone to get their life savings into some crypto nonsense.
Do you feel like that because you were once a professional, that it helps with the startup? As in, does it help you avoid useless nonsense that doesnt add to the bottom line?

Also the time management piece is ultra important here I think. Its like Leetcode for time management. Theres leetcode easy which is just brute force working hours, then theres more efficient ways of working that become more obvious in a professional setting. Its the one thing I have over myself when I was 24. I know how to manage time more effectively.

Do you feel the same way?
Agreed 100%. When people ask me what the best time is to work on a startup, it's always when you have no dependents, living with parents, and perhaps no significant other. It's quite amazing just how much you can skim down your expenses at that point in life.

Minimizing expenses, maximizing runway. The rest is luck. Just blind luck.
Thanks I will check Sciter! I almost forgot, Cobalt has a very well designed porting layer. Therefore, it is relatively easy to run it on custom Linux embedded devices. It also uses Skia as a backend for rasterization. As many people here have already written Cobalt is designed as a youtube player, but it can be successfully used for other purposes.
PG says you can try consulting

http://www.paulgraham.com/startupfunding.html

Scroll to the consulting section
> I don't understand why the Meta stock hasn't plummeted even more than it already did.

Even though growth is slowing/negative at META, they still made $4.5B on $28B in revenue in the previous quarter.
I did think up some ideas one evening long ago and wrote down a rough note, but I don't think it would have much use for serious predictions (except as a fun toy to play around with to generate ideas)

A mostly un-edited, totally unpolished, and probably erroneous - don't judge too hard :) - version here:

- All goals are to some extent intermediate - a means to achieving a further goal - directed but not acyclic

- Some goals are largely measured by how useful they are achieving others, exemplified by stocks and tokens

- Node values are the measurement of the goal (in what?) and the edge values are the percentage split (like a Sankey diagram) but inclusive of factors less than 0 or greater than 1 (i.e any value) to be added to the value in the node, like y = y + (xf)

- (The x-f relationship could also be exponential - (xf^n) is a better equation)

- Maybe, by measuring the values of x and y empirically over time, we can try to calculate f. f has units to balance out the units of x and y, so no problem with incompatible units

- What are the nodes? Every damn thing that can be measured - prices of everything sold on the market, population statistics like literacy rates, time spent on Khan Academy, anything that can be quantitatively measured (quality of the measurement doesn't matter as each f value is completely independent of other f values)

- And we have a tech tree! You can choose the measurements that you want to optimize for and use it to prioritize your resources towards progress. Can also be used to intelligently guess at the inputs and outputs of progress in a specific goal

- Better for quantifying the current economy and scientifically deploying investment for the near future. The long term is obviously unpredictable (think https://twitter.com/robert_zubrin/status/1278681124944793611), however can be used to analyze changes during previous paradigm shifts with historical data

- This is 99% dependent upon price signals (which I believe will be almost all of the useful data)
The gift of no obligation to get you a gift in return.
For what it's worth, I love working with stdin/stdout/redirection.
So that is a crash reporter, which fires when a crash was detected and asks for submittal. Not telemetry, which constantly records users actions.
Diataxis looks interesting thanks for the link
> They couldn't produce more energy in a year, since that is limited by the rainfall and dam height.

Design also dictates the minimum water height that can be used to produce power, so a redesign could actually give a wider range of water heights at which power generation is possible.

And turbine efficiency has improved over the years, so you can generate more energy with the same water.
"We’ve got seven million prime-age men, 25 to 54 years old, who are out of the job market altogether, neither working nor looking for work."

This is insane. I had no idea it was that many.
What is an example of that working? Just code that speaks for itself? How would you ever know why something was done?
Thank you for stating this. I been pulling my hair out trying to comprehend how more focus is not put on that fact. Whether your language is null-safe or not, you have to deal with this. Like for example, if I have a type that is serialized from JSON to Kotlin type and one of the fields is not-nullable but the JSON does not have that field, you still going to get an error, right? With Java, at least you'll be able to do something about it and not just fail the request at the these null-safe touchpoints.
Interview with Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt. He holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at AEI

From the book:
Today, in 2022, American men suffer Depression-era employment rates, even though they inhabit the wealthiest and most productive society ever known. After the pandemic, we have gone from men without work, to work without men
Timing is quite important in the longterm. This article is saying that you can still make a profit despite bad timing (assuming the stock market does well), not that timing is not important.

It also only analyzes a single time period (1970s - 2015), which happens to be quite a good one for stocks, and then makes an implication about markets in general which is quite speculative.
yeah, i have a script almost identical to this that i've been using with i3 for a long time
More than you'd think... including the venerable MySQL.
Agreed. There is a pop-up asking if you want to help at install(FF & TB). Big data has earned a reputation for just cause. If the Mozillas want to differentiate themselves to get that trust, aka opt-in, I encourage them. So far, "No, thanks".
What’s the difference between a tutorial and how-to guide?
"Nah," said Jon Corzine.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Corzine
No one else makes a laptop that has the power / thermal / battery / weight spec combination that Apple does, and none of them are ARM laptops, either.

To exceed the Apple M1 / M2 specs with anyone else’s hardware, you need to give up on other specs that matter greatly to those of us who care about things like that.
Even in all the complexity of spaceflight, Twitter is the single greatest risk to SpaceX's mission. I would laugh but i'm crying.
Thankfully modern development practices should ideally run tests before commiting, the build should never be broken.

With good infra, everything from unit tests to integration to acceptable tests get ran before code hits main.

The only excuse for builds breaking nowdays. is insufficient automated safeguards.
Felix Salmon on Slate Money podcast this past weekend suggest that its still net positive given alternative is those people don't even try to make world better. More nuanced than that but my take on the position.
AFAIK the enforced SB without allowing "3rd-party" keys is specific to (32bit ARM!) RT devices, which are obsolete. The current line of "Windows on Arm" devices (various Laptops and their "Volterra" dev kit) allow turning off secure boot.
"[...] It is sadly thus that the very human impulse to help others [...] have been infused with logic so cold that even Mr. Spock would cringe upon hearing it. One iteration of this tendency is in the idea of “effective altruism.” We believe a more accurate phrase for this concept is “defective altruism” and will therefore use that term for the remainder of this article."

Quoted from
https://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_elitist_philanthropy_of_...
Can you name some notion of “good” that doesn’t run the risk of going into “ends justify the means” territory?
I’ve never heard of this. Does it exist in the US?
Maybe don’t bundle the font by default? Can‘t you just use the standard system fonts like tailwind does, and gives quite good results?

font-family: ui-sans-serif, system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, "Helvetica Neue", Arial, "Noto Sans", sans-serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol", "Noto Color Emoji";
Musk says he had no role in bringing Kanye West back on Twitter

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/kanye-west-back-twitter-aft...
Effective Altruism is a lipstick on a pig.
Do you think conservative judges aren’t receptive to fraud cases? Republican appointees regularly give the longest sentences to white collar criminals. Your comment is clearly written about someone who actually knows nothing about law except what the political media prints. And no one has deregulated or legalized outright fraud, which is what happened here.
Well....do you think that the reality shown to us on TV is even a remotely accurate representation of reality itself? And has this caused you any substantial psychological unease?

Silicon based AI isn't the only form of AI that can get up to mischief.
I know EA's who earn six figure salaries but take the average salary of the country (UK) and donate the rest. So you will find anecdotal evidence supporting both getting rich and not getting rich.

But let's say people do get rich and donate to charities to have a clean conscience... is this a bad thing? EA is not a reason to do outright immoral actions to donate to charity but out-competing a colleague for a promotion? Leaving a job after 6 months to take double the salary elsewhere? I think these are all decisions I've personally taken for EA-based reasons and donate a fixed 10% per month so yes ultimately I've ended up richer but I fund more charities and that seems like a good thing.

Building ponzi schemes to redirect money from investors to charities is never okay.
it is called 'web3'
> Then do an awesome startup when your kids are out of the house, you have a solid nest egg, and you can take risks again in your 50s.

Then figure you have 10-20 active years left, and do you really want to spend 5-10 of them on a startup?
The rich man who came to Jesus asking him what he should do knew that too much money was a bad thing. He followed all the commandments but felt that it wasn't enough.
It's all just marketing.
I assume that in-house they sic'd several instances on each other.

And I suspect that the result so horrified them that they dared not publish it in conjunction with the results under discussion here.
I was a data scientist at an insurance company. Was a fairly standard redundancy based payment but with a little bit extra to avoid it being a redundancy and to get a mutual non-disparagement agreement. Basically the bonus for the year, 3 months garden leave, 8 weeks redundancy pay, taxes, pension contribution, and share scheme buyout etc.

When I'd avoided redundancies at previous employer (large bank) some really great terms had been offered.
As an ethnic Russian, I completely support it. Barbaric Putin's regime should not be treated as a legitimate state.
If you are writing for reviews, you are not writing for your peers. The question is: who will be using the documents?
It's a pretty amazing library although figuring out how to use it is almost like learning a new language. :)
VS Code... does pretty much everything I could ask, and not much more than I need.

Killer features are directory list, integrated terminal, git and remote development extensions.
Sometimes yes, but you must also not null-terminate the strings in those cases.

And on embedded devices you are often memory constrained so you might reuse an existing structure.
From the horse’s mouth:

“Ya. Hehe. I [SBF] had to be. It’s what reputations are made of, to some extent. I feel bad for those guys who get fucked by it, by this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us.”

https://www.gawker.com/money/sam-bankman-fried-is-so-stupid-...
There are variant maps for fewer players, like this one for 3: https://www.playdiplomacy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=57439
I don’t know, the conflict of interest especially in saas is tricky. Let’s assume that I build some niche etl tool, my employer deals with data etl for a certain market, how can i safely determine that my side project doesn’t interfere with their business? Not even lawyers can determine this. And what about the working hours overlap? Who knows except my commits to my repo and myself?
I don’t know, side projects seem like a bad advice as they probably increase current job insecurity imo..
I am very pleased to see more FOSS voice assistant solutions out there.

Related and also cool: While exploring PeerTube last week, I stumbled across someone using a new voice assistant, Numen, on their PinePhone running SXMO. The code repository link is in the video description: https://peertube.plasmatrap.com/w/dYo8QcVVFFpzS7PwddFPMV
wow, I'm just walking through the demo linked by Veuxdo and that's exactly what I was thinking: each step in the walkthrough drills context down deeper or widens context in a very clear way.

I've tried to do similar things in graphviz but pulling out individual subgraphs or subsets of nodes + edges isn't easy and I always end up with multiple files for each view that I want to show and they get out of sync.
I disagree with your advice, because it amounts to "sit around and do nothing, give up on your goals."

I know someone who has a family who stated a side business in their spare time in their 30's.

It started extremely modestly using just some spare time, and I think a lot of people have at least some spare time. The average person spends, what, 4 hours a day watching TV? If OP has an hour a day they can make at least some progress.

This person also uses freelancers to help achieve chunks of work where they aren't experts. A modest amount of savings can pay for some of these deliverables.

I know someone else who sells baked goods at farmers markets. They put some time into baking and posting to social media but it's a side gig. Another person I know got together with a group to help share the effort and they're working on a hummus business (again, selling at farmers markets). These are all people with families and day jobs.

Instead of that fatalist do-nothing advice of "wait until you're an empty nester," I'd say "start small." Don't expect to be a massively scaling SaaS thing. Don't expect to replace your income, certainly not within ~5 years. Don't try to build some wildly complicated product. Budget your time, don't neglect your personal life. Focus on solving a simple pain point for a specific type of customer.

The other thing I'd warn OP about: don't start a business for the wrong reason. The wrong reason is dreaming of a lottery ticket out of wage slavery. The right reason is that you've identified an area that you think has potential to help someone else achieve a positive outcome, especially an area where you have some kind of expertise.
Just leave me alone for a couple of days.
> and then went about doing altruism

He did donate and fund many people through his FTX Foundation and donations via Giving What We Can. I know this because 1) people were funded with real money, even if some people who have not received money yet are of course screwed and 2) I did some voluntary data analysis work for some EA orgs and saw figures, SBF donated.
I think the problem is not the paycut, so much as you suddenly work 80 hour weeks and never see your kids.
Weekly Frontend Ecosystem - https://www.getrevue.co/profile/refine_dev
imo it seemed like there was this phase of "if we pretend null doesn't exist maybe it will go away" that resulted in a bunch of design issues. Beyond Optional, the other big one to me is Map.compute/Map.merge, which subtly breaks the previous interface contract for Map. As annoying as null is, I'd rather have null than have broken apis.
Oh. I forgot that power/thermal/weight is the only spec that matters.

The point is that not everyone cares as much about perf/watt and there are plenty of comparable computers which surpass Apple laptops in different areas.
A Million Migrating Birds Expecting Kansas Wetlands Will Find Dust
I want to highlight that this opens with

> based on […] some quick reading I’ve done on the topic

and is dominated by a quote from Hitchhiker’s Guide.

There are much better considered critiques of effective altruism than this article.
Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road – Lex Fridman Podcast
Telemetry just means any data about operations that are sent back to the mothership. Crash logs are just as much telemetry as a click event log. Equating any telemetry=spying is a knee jerk reaction to tech companies abusing telemetry.
From discussion it sounds like ~700k are students, and some other large number are on disability but he doesn't provide that number.
> Nobody is adding changes that blows out the DB? or add some inefficient code that burns CPU much faster?

not to be flippant but you find that out like 3 environments below production.
Is it dwindling? I think the number of hours of meetings I attended approximately quadrupled due to WFH. Limited conference rooms making > 1 hr meetings impossible was wonderful.

Or are you saying it was dwindling, but it surged up due to wfh? Then I guess I agree, though I’m not sure if it’s due to productivity theater, or physical constraints being removed
Just a heads up, Scala 3 actually has a compile flag that will make types exclude ‘null’ as a valid subtype, so every nullable variable will have to have type signatures like String | Null.