skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It really depends on the workload. GPU clusters are usually cheaper to run in house since Nvidia let you use regular GPUs for research which end up cheaper than cloud GPUs. And often Universities will charge less overhead for capital expenses on a grant which can artificially reduce the cost of running it yourself.

The big downside of institutional HPC is it can be difficult to get stuff running on the ancient distributions they're stuck on. Nowadays perhaps Docker makes things easier but even running a Docker container was a challenge when I worked at a university some 5-10 years ago. As a software engineer who had not used HPC previously I found it much more difficult than just firing up jobs on AWS which had documentation (though for many researchers it was the opposite.)

I also kind of object to the term HPC... with the exception of a small number of shared memory clusters used for physics simulations they're usually just a bunch of standard servers often with incredibly slow network storage. Nothing high performance about them.
OCaml is like an HN darling, always go to the front page.
Hopefully, OCaml 5.0 would drive more adoptions to the language.
Either it’s easy and nobody should complain or it’s hard and people are making a crazy investment with no idea about return. I don’t know if it’s so different than sports. Yeah, it’s better to be LeBron than a guy who was just short of being good enough for the pros. But playing at that level is not easy no matter how much you are being paid.
Back in 2003 while I was still studying I spent some time working at a bank helping write some boring web form using a java servlet. I was really junior, and the code was an absolute mess - every time they made a new web form they copy+pasted a 3000 line java class (with no unit tests) from the previous form and modified it. For source control we were using visual source safe - which is one of the worst programs I've ever used. Every few days the repository corrupted itself and needed to be rebuilt.

Well, I made a horrible mistake. Right after deploying (compiling then manually copying a .class file onto our server), I accidentally lost the source code to all my work. There was no backup of the changes I'd made, and source control didn't have it. All testing was manual - which was a horrible process we went through before every deployment. So if I half remembered my changes, I'd have to manually test everything again and hope I didn't mess anything up.

All I had left was the compiled java .class with my changes in it. I was terrified to even tell my boss given all the work.

Well, I tried decompiling the .class file with my changes in it - but the result was 10k lines of nightmare fuel. How could I find my changes in that? But I also had the java file from a few weeks earlier, before I made my changes. So I compiled the previous version, then decompiled it. Then I diffed the two decompiled source code files. That showed me (in decompiled java form) all the places where I'd made changes, and with some work I managed to figure out what all my changes were.

A few hours later I had re-implemented all my changes in the java source file. I could guarantee I'd done it correctly because the output from the decompiler matched perfectly. So we didn't even need to re-do all our manual testing.

I don't think I ever told my boss.
> I think that Thiel makes some thought provoking points

He doesn't. It's the same boring ground that's been trod for 2,500 years. There isn't an original thought in anything Thiel has said.

> all I've seen in this thread is a lot of name-calling.

There is none.
It's common to equate capitalism (which is the economic reality) with free market (or economic liberalism, which is the underlying ideology, and never completely true in practice). Typical definition of capitalism is that it is a system where (a) significant amount of capital is privately owned and (b) significant amount of labor is traded in a free market (in other words, labor is a commodity).
One that's fun from a historical point of view was my hack for fixing palette flash. Back in the early 90s PC graphics cards typically had a "palette" of 256 colors at one time, selected from a possible 256K colors.

In theory this gave you a lot of options, but in practice, switching palettes tended to cause "palette flash" where the previous image changed color in a distracting flash.

I was doing a multimedia project that had video in it, and each CODEC had its own built in palette -- one for Cinepak, one for Indeo, etc. Then there were other palettes for the images. If you wanted to display video in a window on a page that had other graphics, you could determine the palette of the CODEC (with some effort) and then use that to dither your graphics. Theoretically they should play nice together, and it worked on some cards, but you'd still get palette flash on other mainstream graphics cards.

I tried every trick I could think of but could not eliminate the flash on every single card until I came up with this hack:

Make a video consisting of a single frame with a 1x1 black pixel, compressed in the desired CODEC, display a black screen for a moment, play that video (which was as fast as could be because it was so tiny) over the screen, then load your image and real video.

The black screen couldn't flash, and when the next screen and video (the real one we wanted to play) came up, the palette was already set correctly. And it worked on every video card.
I see where you're going with that, but gravitational force is GMm/r^2, so the mass of the air column halving would halve the pressure, and the shell theorem implies that is exactly half and not even a rounding error on M because none of the air above (the only bit contributing to the pressure) can contribute to the gravity field.

First part is also why Venus, with a lower mass, is able to have about x89 Earth's atmospheric pressure.
Try doing it in Whitespace then :)

https://github.com/andrewarchi/ws-challenges
Thank you! It is hard to believe I was not aware of that tool. I am glad someone saw an issue and attempted to solve it. It actually gave me a clearer picture of a path forward that until now was kinda shrouded in a fog of war. I hate information asymmetry.
If they are indeed Ponzi schemes, it would be better for them to collapse sooner rather than later, since the accompanying damage is only going to increase with time.
No they don't. You know media stories can also lead the perpetrator's friends and family to report them realizing how serious the crime is.
> If you so hell bent on the data safety then btfrs should kernel panic as soon as one drive degrades. THAT would make sure someone would come and investigate what happened and no data loss.

> Right?

Panicking an already-running kernel would only serve to prevent userspace from handling the failure through mechanisms that are inherently beyond the scope and capabilities of the kernel alone (ie. stuff like alerting a sysadmin, activating a hot spare, or initiating a rebalance to restore redundancy among the remaining drives).

Perhaps the kernel should default to freezing a non-root filesystem when it becomes degraded, absent an explicit configuration permitting otherwise. But for the root filesystem, that would be counterproductive and prevent the failure from being handled gracefully.

Obviously, the tradeoffs are different for a system that is still trying to boot as opposed to one that is fully up and running.
>There's another big problem right there: this isn't really true anymore for most multiplayer games.

I was recently introduced to the game Rust. In chat within a server a player asked "How do I keep my base from being destroyed when i'm offline?", the answer that the crowd provided him was "Set your mobile to alert you when your base detects people near it.".

It then dawned on me that there are probably quite a few players who will wake up out of a sound sleep, dash to their computers and rush to defend a virtual base from players in distant lands -- sacrificing their personal lives and sleep health not due to the enjoyment of the game, but simply because someone somewhere antagonized them in an environment they were disconnected from entirely.

I can understand pulling late/all hour sessions due to a personal obsession ; game/coding/hobbies/etc. I've done that way too many times throughout my life; but the marathon represents to me a stream of enjoyment and fascination.

It's tough for me to consider pulling late sessions and deriving myself from sleep as a constant response to antagonism in an always-on persistent world.

I guess what i'm trying to say is that I totally agree with you; games aren't only played for fun now -- they're played sometimes in an entirely reactionary form to either gain from the current limited time event, a fear of missing out, or a fear of loss of competitive advantage -- and all of these concepts are being orchestrated by the game developers and the industry at large.

I have absolutely no idea what to do about it, but I recognize the problem and absolutely agree. The move from pastimes being an entertainment value to a constant worry surely plants more asses in seats, but it feels entirely unhealthy and psychologically damaging.
This is like making a program work on your laptop, but realizing that scaling up to production with 1000 laptops would be too costly, so you use actual servers. But you are in no rush to code directly on a server machine.
It may well be true of some tribes in some regions, but it's a very broad generalization to make from a single documentary.
> Only I know the threat models I care about for any particular account I have.

You are not neccesarily the person being negatively effective.

Email service providers are all about reputation so their stuff isn't marked as spam. When your account gets hacked and starts sending viagra ads, you are not the one who suffers the fall out.

There are lots of email providers out there with different policies. One of the reasons gmail is popular is because of these policies.
At one place I worked one of the perks was you could buy their products at ~cost, and the way they'd do this is by sending each employee a load of coupons that they could redeem. When I got my coupons through I noticed they looked remarkably sequential:

HDGT26YA
HDGT26YB
HDGT26YC
HDGT26YD
...

Half an hour later I had a list of 10,000 working coupons with a value of a few million (if you could somehow redeem them all). I emailed some marketing manager who'd initially sent them out and got a snotty reply along the lines of "This isn't a problem p.s. please delete those coupons immediately", then started CCing in people progressively higher up the chain until they decided it was actually a problem. A couple of weeks alter a fresh batch of coupons came out that were better randomised.

Not that big in the grand scheme of things but pretty satisfying for an afternoons work.
Also people don't seem to understand that an optimal growth path had high interest rates in the beginning and low interest rates in the end.

If you have a constant interest rate aka exponential growth that actually means you are growing too slowly in the beginning and too quickly in the end.

Even if you subscribe to the classical time preference theory it doesn't make sense for the market to signal that you need to save more today and then signal once the future arrives that you need to save more. If the interest rate were stuck at a positive 3% this would imply that people will perpetually ignore the present and therefore some of the savings will never be spent ever. I.e. aggregate demand will be below aggregate supply.

So no, zero percent interest is not some abberation, it is simply the result of low inflation rates and high rates of capital formation and the lowering of capital intensity due to software companies.
Can’t look at the page and can’t archive it either
> It's reasonable to want to preserve all the data you currently have—some of which probably hasn't been backed up yet—and not accept new data to be written with the durability guarantees the array was originally configured for silently violated.

IE (by your logic) the system should stop the writes as soon as the array became degraded.

But this is not what happens with btrfs: it would happily continue to write the data on the array until reboot.

And then suddenly it's "oh my god array is degraded!!!111 you should not write to it1111".

To add on that: I never seen for a HW RAID card to stop booting by a mere degraded state of the array. Changes in configuration of arrays, loss of more than enough for redundancy drives - yes, that would halt the boot and require the operator intervention. Array in a degraded state? Just spit the warnings to the console and boot. Nobody has the time to walk to each server with a degraded array on every reboot.
The core thing that I think differentiates software engineering and programming is accountability for the quality and ethics of what you design. If an engineer designs and signs off on something, they are legally accountable for if it. There is mandatory ethics training at university and people refuse to sign off on work they don’t understand or aren’t confident in. Engineering assurance and management of change processes are the opposite of “move fast and break things”.

As far as I can see there is no ethical accountability for the programmers at big tech companies. People are happy to pocket the crazy salaries and claim their managers or execs should be blamed for the damaging outcomes of their work.
I'd only seen the word used for musical instruments, where it refers to the scale length and/or the tonal range.
Seems like here the same general idea when applied to an engine refers to its operational RPM (frequency) range.
No worries! I think for undergraduate studies I’m sure you can. Although motivation levels of “motivated enough” have to be pretty high!

My experience was that pretty quickly professors (and TAs) provided insight and guidance I couldn’t (or at least didn’t) get from just reading the textbook. But also that this increases the further you go in your education- in a 200 student auditorium class for linear algebra or calculus the professor isn’t going to be giving you any individual attention but in my school even by the 3rd-4th semester classes were already often small (15-20 students) and we had actual conversations with the professors about the material (and beyond).
In high school (using windows 7) cmd.exe was blocked, but only by launching it directly.

Creating a .bat file and double clicking on it got it loading just fine.

I didn't find any cool tricks to do with it besides just running it.
> They all have iPhones and refuse to even look at Android phones because they don't want to have the wrong color circle in their SMS chats (SMS... how quaint).

This is a great example of the negativity he attempts to avoid.
> Well, you certainly have your mind made up.

It's not that I've made my mind up, it's that Thiel has made up his.

> Perhaps they should be scorned as well?

Dumb ideas will always be scorned. That is the correct result.
I did that just to be cautious.
Monitoring Kubernetes Jobs Doesn’t Have to Be a Tough Job to Handle
This is awesome, i had to do the same, ended up writing a
.h file that redefined malloc/free with macros, and then reported the missing and double frees.

https://github.com/qustavo/smc/blob/master/smc.h#L191
There is a difference between knowing who owns a car, and knowing exactly where is and has been. Imagine a public database where you can type in a license number and get a log of every sighting of the car in the last few weeks.

Somebody has this data, but far as I know its not public.
Right now, users won't trust it and investor's shouldn't trust it.

Why bother to try and normalize it?

What are the benefits to lawful society? Are there any that exceed the cost and risk?

The simple approach to regulation is to make it illegal for regulated banks to deal in crypto related finance. And prosecute blatant fraud such as "stable coins" being minted and sold without the backing that is claimed.

This would eliminate most of the risk to the overall economy by isolating it and leaving crypto to sink or swim on it's own merits without government interference? Isn't this the stated objective of crypto --- to avoid government money?
Sorry, forgot for a moment which timeline I’m in.
1. The revolution of diginity was a series of protests. No-one took over the airwaves and killed the existing government.

"On 21 February an agreement was signed between Yanukovych and leaders of the parliamentary opposition, witnessed by representatives from European Union and Russia. which promised return to the 2004 constitution, early elections and withdrawal of security forces from the center of the capital."[0].

2. Crimea was assigned to Ukraine in 1991. It's part of Ukraine's internationally recognised borders. It's illegal according to international law.

It was taken by force[1] without the will of the people. Any referendums under occupation are illegal and invalid (also according to international law)[2]. You can't vote with a gun to your head.

[0]: https://www.bbc.com/russian/rolling_news/2014/02/140221_rn_y...
[1]: https://time.com/19097/putin-crimea-russia-ukraine-aksyonov/
[2]:https://www.gov.uk/government/news/the-crimean-referendum
A few years ago I was planning to meet some friends in Brazil for the holidays. I waited until the last possible day to apply for a visa. When I tried to apply for the visa, there was an off by one error in the front end form validation that was checking that some dates were valid, and since one of the dates on the form was in December, the validation thought that it wasn't a valid date. I had to edit the JavaScript on-page to allow myself to submit the form. Got it submitted and got my visa a couple days later. I'm wondering if I'm the only person who managed to apply online for a Brazilian visa that day.
With sincerest apologies for how much of a pedantic prick I'm about to be…

You probably mean more _precise_.
It'd likely have to combine all that with exit visas.
> I retired rich 30 years early.

Sounds better than working as a product manager for 25 years.
While hospital records are protected, traditionally genomics data is not considered PII so is not covered by HIPAA. It does seem a bit of a farce though considering it could be uploaded to GEDmatch and have a good chance of finding relations of person the sample was taken from...
That seems to just be a nerded out version of this, perhaps original and not cited, article from many years ago (with the same theme and discourse) but much more digestible and lacking the pretentiousness: https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revol...

PS: the scale of the problems and the civilization around the model is in part 2 of the link
"Software Engineer" is pretty much a literal description of the job. What these threads always miss is the definition of the word engineering[1]:

> The application of mathematics and the physical sciences to the needs of humanity and the development of technology

The Wikipedia article for Engineer[2] further drives it home:

> The work of engineers forms the link between scientific discoveries and their subsequent applications to human and business needs and quality of life.

And that's what I do: I take the field I studied (Computer Science) and I apply the knowledge and discoveries of that field¹ towards the needs of humanity, i.e., I engineer. (Typically, and it is somewhat expected, I engineer software. Not always, ofc.)

People get hung up on that "PE" is a specific term of art in some jurisdictions and some fields, with a correspondingly more narrow definition.

[1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/engineering

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineer

¹or, well, some of us do. The profession these days seems to have a real problem with knowledge.
But your essay isn't funny. Fortunately, as they say, practice makes perfect!
You mean they decided to keep inflation low which obviously also means lower interest rates in the long run.
Why did Microsoft just buy fiber optic cable company Lumenisity?
Totally. Deep inside the capitalist machinery, what really propels it forwards is the irrational human need to do something really crazy. If only rational MBAs ruled the world, nothing new would ever happen.
Were you so harsh on self-entrepreneurs that came here crying out loud because Google did shut down their developer account for some unrelated payement error on a linked account?

I hope so because otherwise you are just discriminating people based on their wealth. But praise lord dollar that if you ever fall from your status you won't find pedantic guys like you when seeking for help.
Would it work to denote that 80 % as a separate product X that only has internal customers?

On the one hand, it's the obvious solution. On the other hand, that would move the developers of X further away from the customers of A and B.
Oh man this brings back memories, and is the exact same approach I used a couple of decades ago — there was some undefined behaviour in some code, and it ended up being nearly impossible to reproduce when using valgrind.

Using the approach you described is extremely effective and low-overhead, and allowed me to actually reproduce the issue (I think in the end it was due some async / race condition issue, because I was using “if map[key]” in a place where I shouldn’t, which actually inserts the key if it’s missing (and thus mutates the map).

Fun times.
> I have long wondered if two factor authentication actually causes more economic harm than it solves

At Google at least, there are people who are responsible for measuring this sort of thing. 2FA adoption reduces overall account loss.
A few years ago I started taking up running regularly but I didn't have a buddy that I could run with so I decided to adopt a dog. Unfortunately the shelters were relatively far away from my home making it inconvenient to go in and check continuously on the weekends. I later realized that nearly all of them connected to a central city database which contained all of the dogs in the nearby shelters and furthermore that that database was behind a publicly available rest endpoint.

I whipped up a program that periodically every 10 minutes would query the database filtering for dogs matching the qualifications I was looking for using a combination of regex to search for any dogs that were:

- Between 50 and 100 lbs

- Did not have a history of behavioral problems

- Matched a list of active breeds

When it found a potential match it would send an SMS via Twilio to my phone with a picture of the dog, a link to the shelter, and a picture.

Several years later my huskee / Pyrenees hybrid is the best running partner I could ever have asked for. That's my proudest hack and I think she would agree with me.
Coming up with a variant — like "usefennel" for "fennel", is covered in the comment you're replying to. You're still at the whim of the registry/registrar, if they start pulling this crap.
Joke's on you, I still have my old bimetalic strip Honeywell.
Ukrainians speak Ukrainian, Russians speak Russian. It's true that due to being bilingual, Ukrainians can consume Russian content, but saying they have the same culture is kinda like saying Austrians and Germans have the same culture because they speak the same language.

Interestingly enough, historically, Russia's culture was "Ukrainianized" around the 17th and 18th century, being heavily influenced by Kyiv's culture (influences can be seen if you look at the history of painting, music, architecture). But that's another topic.