skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Accurate. If the conversation revolves around cutting the absolute cloud budget, perverse incentives kick in and people will start naively "cutting" costs without thought. Producing value always has a cost. In a functional organization with a competent business plan, higher input costs should mean higher production and more revenue!

Decoupling costs and production is simply impossible and defies the laws of physics. If you're a truck driver and you get a new job demanding double the miles, you expect to pay double the gas price - this is common sense in most industries. It would be absurd to take a job and insist that you can do it on half the fuel, then proceed to not do it but instead spend time holding meetings to speculate on how you could double the efficiency of diesel engines.

If you're irrationally scared of absolute costs, you'll make decisions that reduce everything: throughput, latency, functionality, customer engagement, and reliability. Cut costs without any design intent = cut value. And often at the expense of additional engineering complexity to compensate for the enforced austerity. And from the business perspective, you've backed yourself into a corner where the system is so locked-down from being micromanaged by bean counters that it couldn't possibly handle the exponential growth you've promised to investors. Looking at absolute costs always seems to lead to this lose-lose situation. This is the path of a failed product.

The better approach, suggested by this article, is focus on the efficiency of your infrastructure. Whether you're processing data or serving web requests or whatever, frame the question in terms of operating cost per unit of value delivered. Then the engineering team has three jobs a) track output and cloud costs somewhere and regularly compare them, b) make each unit more efficient, either through code improvements or architectural changes and c) scale the infrastructure up and down according to demand, such that costs scale predictably with load. This leads to a situation where the entire team is prepared for and welcomes a sudden increase in costs as that translates directly to customer activity. You can get back to the business of creating and selling value... rather than enforcing an arbitrary budget restriction on your main feedstock for production.
I don't think that's true for the British Army in WW1:

"The casualty rates were highest among the subalterns... estimates for the mortality rates range from 65 to 81%. This was, at its lowest estimate, double the rate for enlisted men."

https://www.arrse.co.uk/community/threads/the-slaughter-of-t...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S18777...
I never proposed an alternative. I was simply pointing out the problems with pure democracy. The critique comes from Plato.

But since you asked, I'm a monarchist.
Few things have a single cause, but I think it's not outlandish to hypothesize that potential pending famines could be driven by a fertilizer shortage, driven by Russia's invasion and global economic issues, driven by the pandemic.

Maybe this is obvious to those smarter than I, but I'm beginning to have a sinking sense that direct deaths by SARS-COV2 will be a shockingly small minority of total deaths caused by the pandemic over the next generation. We're going to see this event loud and clear in every economic and demographic chart for the next half-century, aren't we?
This strategy is hard to do if you add an another kid to the mix within the first 3 to 4 years. The baby will suck up so much resources that between baby, cleaning, cooking, working, and resting, being able to give that much attention to the older toddler may not be possible and so you decide to entertain them with a tv show or something while you do something else.
Sure, but my point is Amazon is acting like an accomplice not a victim.
He has the technical chops to squeeze more out of his $250k LambdaLabs pro-rig than the average among the walkoffs and layoffs in the techsector or a tables worth of happy-hippos at a scheduled meeting sharing Excel spreadsheets in the old fossil fuel firms that have experienced stellar double digit billion dollar profits. Would that he mixes in his reading list some choice papers from the social sciences and social contructivists. The a16z group gave the impression they are into the social sciences in a podcast. General intelligence technology can help people bridge the gap before them to get where it is they want to be for the better. The educated might want to make known something from the unknown-unknown. The stinky hobo sleeping under the bridge with a smartphone could be guided to special social programs by Ai.
I was told ai was taking away our jobs, was that a lie?
I agree that's the case for people who own homes.

However, many (most?) lower class people do not own homes. Even the lower side of middle class can't afford homes in much of the country.
Amazon has a service to send a semi-trailer to the loading dock of your data warehouse, so you can forklift in pallets of physical media.

Then hauls it all away for ingestion into its cloud.

Or, if it will fit in your station wagon, you can haul your data down the highway to one of Amazon's clouds.

Or put it in a box and ship it Fedex.
Shoot the F#cking Deer
Clearly do this by tweet storming him via LLM
Too harsh!

ChatGPT is lossily compressed knowledge of humanity collected on the Internet.

And it can talk! That's extremely new for us poor hoomans and so we get extremely excited.

I found out, it gets about one in ten things wrong. When this happens it spews confident bullshit and when I confront it, it cheerily admits that it was wrong, but can continue to produce further bullshit. I understand the comparison to a con man.
> The idea that a continent full of people with different cultures and economies would benefit from following laws set by politicians elected by voters they can't even communicate with in their native language seems insane to me

Yep but it's even more insane than that. The laws don't even come from elected people at all!
Sadly there’s disproportionate value. Your attention is only worth a few cents, the criminals' (SEOers, scammer ps etc) cost is miniscule per user, but the cost to each user of the misinformation and wasted time is larger.

Like breaking a shop window to steal something small and easily transported/resold.
Fair points. On the other hand, a full-term newborn isn't fully "default alive" either - if the parents don't expend resources on it, it dies. (And then we arrest the parents for neglect.)

So... yeah. "Things are rarely clearcut", as someone said recently :-)
Me too.

I really enjoy MRKT Call from Risk Reversal Media. They also repost their MRKT Call podcasts into their „on the tape“ podcast podcast. But when you enter one of those two, it doesn’t show the other one.
The way I've come to look at ChatGPT is via a D&D analogy.

It's like a helpful Bard with 1 rank in all the knowledge skills and a good bluff roll.

It'll give you good answers to a lot of basic queries, but if it doesn't know, it'll just make up something and provide that.

Once you know that, I think it can be a lot of use and in many way, I think it'll get a lot better with time.

I've already found it useful in basic programming tasks, specifically where I know how to do something in one language but not another, it can give me the equivalent code easily.
All these articles really sound like “I used an apple to hammer in a screw and it sucked. This has to be the worst plant-based object ever made”. It’s a common junior engineer approach. “I broke our database by running DROP TABLE cows in the console”. Yeah, dude, that’s possible. Just don’t do that.

The point of tools isn’t to use them like Homer Simpson. But you know what, it doesn’t matter. Stay behind. Everyone else is going on ahead.
I played with the idea as one way to deal with a problem client. At the time I had never heard of the method.
> Sounds like OP has spoken with cloudflare previously about their usage/cloudflare services, likely looking to upgrade by the sounds of it but sales maybe gave the impression OP was ok on current level of service.

They've done this to me, too—I read the TOS and tech docs and plan details and ignored them, because according to their own stuff, they were wrong, and "first-tier sales guy said it" isn't a helpful recourse if you get told to leave (so, migration costs) or pay $$$$ because you're violating their documented permitted usage.

Hilariously, they also seemed really confused when I brought up a gaming use-case that they had an entire sales landing page for.

(Nb I actually like, use, and would recommend CloudFlare for some workloads and use-cases)
Can this be used in the Dart/Flutter world?
By coincidence, just this morning I had a panic because I tried to close FF by closing the only window (which is something I need to do periodically because memory usage will build up over time), and I thought I had lost the tabs because when I opened it back up, they were gone with no way to restore. Apparently the behavior had changed so that closing the last window no longer closes FF, but just that window a la Skype.

(Fortunately I was able to figure out what was going on and restored the previous window.)

Also, the automatic "check before exiting FF" got turned off somehow.

So, yeah, lots of fun surprises to deal with.
So your fix is to do nothing and complain? Sounds like a great plan.

Maybe stop living in places that are run this way?

Who let the supposed powerful police unions get that way? The police are an arm of the government. You will change nothing by targeting the result of government overreach instead of the cause.
I used to be 220lbs and winded going up steps. Now I'm 180lbs and weightlifting and running, going on 7 years.

Not all diets fail. Willpower is the way.
I can 100% confirm this - every hotel is incredibly understaffed in all the "working-class" departments; places that used to have an entire overnight banquets crew to set for the next morning are down to one guy and a dog, and the dog never shows up.
I can't believe how fewer people see that side! It's good for the working folks to get competitive wages, but what are you doing with the troves of people who had to embark in the 401k/IRA/etc. "trains"? Are they expected to get back to work in their 60s/70s/80s, to make up for inflation and purchasing power
The actual lesson here appears to be don't use Microsoft Windows.
"Centrifuge" as in https://github.com/centrifugal/centrifugo ?
The murderer rate for young alumni of Eton would be higher, but so would the rate for young people generally. In fact, the correction would be even bigger as Eton is a boys-only school and the homicide rate for the wider population was for both men and women.
Interesting that everyone commenting on why Amazon is no longer their choice is pointing out that it’s scamazon now but no one mentions worker treatment so far. Amazon truly is a race to the bottom.

Even if it were the cheapest, the dehumanization of workers is a deal breaker.

There’s been a lot of consternation around the recent tech layoffs and how ai like chat gpt is a bullshit generator. Now imagine if layoffs are not an abnormal occurrence but are a daily possibility and have zero benefits packages. And that they based on badly trained models that constantly monitor one’s performance, and are set to demand 110% at all times.
I have seen similar across various age cohorts. Older folks 65+ who opted for Social Security + Medicare versus going back to an office, as well as couples who found better value from single income and making adjustments versus two incomes and intermittent child care arrangements (child care is not only expensive, but difficult to find, due to wait lists, staff shortages, etc).
> Paw Patrol and Daniel Tiger are safe and inoffensive and inclusive and diverse and socially correct

Someone has missed the Paw Patrol discourse.
How would you explain that? Most people I know (NYC Metro Area low 6 figure earners) who aren't, are getting a monthly stipend from their parents

People get high paying jobs then rent a 1br for $4,000 (at that price its not even that nice a 1 br)

Yes they could make $120k and live with room-mates, but how many Americans do something like that?
Unfortunately the norm in our industry, can't have "Cloud" margins without sacrificing something.
Ask HN: How to make a web app which connects to databases of other people?
Hi there,

I want to build a web app with some sort of dashboarding functionality. Users of the app will connect their databases to the app and will write SQL to make charts, dashboards, etc. Pretty standart stuff.

So I want to build a some really simple prototype of this to test the idea I have. Anyway, it requires having some backend which connects to 3rd party databases. The question is, how do I store connection credentials to other people databases? Like in my own database? (encrypted of course). But still, during every API call to my backend I would have to retrieve these credentials, establish connection to a user's database and then run some SQL against it. Sounds like a very bad workflow.

Another issue in this approach is that I would have to pass raw SQL to my API, which is also not the best idea.

So, what is the best way to develop such a functionality? Maybe I should use some existing open-source tool for this?

Thanks a lot!
Fact-Checkers Are Scrambling to Fight Disinformation with AI
I agree it is far more strict, but I am glad it exists. I do throw the MIT license on most of my projects, so its rare that I license things with GPL. But at the end of the day, having the BSD and MIT license and the GPL licenses gives us all the options we want. Want to produce something and don't care how it gets used? MIT or BSD license. Want to create something, offer it for free, and know that nobody will modify your code and start selling it? GPL.
I hate tobacco with a passion. It's irritating to be around. However banning tobacco seems authoritarian and pointless. It will be like prohibition all over again.
[strikeout]Powell said yesterday that the current issue is in services, and he named housing in particular. Interest rates must increase until they meaningfully lower housing prices. Otherwise, rent and housing will just keep sucking up the wage growth.[/strikeout]

You can see here how, despite nominal wage growth, real disposable income hasn't improved since pre covid: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DSPIC96
ChatGPT is like that tipping point where things starts to get wild. It really seem like a tipping point. Put another way, it opens up a new graph and it set at zero
They reflect on it here: https://twitter.com/foone/status/1440375176604966924

Or in a saner format (when it loads): https://nitter.net/foone/status/1440375176604966924
No matter how cool something is, there will always be people saying it isn't that impressive. Perpetual motion could be invented and there would still be people going "yeah sure, but it's not a free energy machine so it's a scam"
Just open about:profiles. You can create new ones, remove old ones, set which one is the default and can open them in a new browser. I use this all the time to open a browser as a new SSO functional user without having to log out.

I don't know why they don't add this somewhere in the menus and I don't know why you can't bookmark about:profiles, but this works well for me as it is.
Oh, you mean for long-term high inflation, right? I mistook that to apply to today.

Someone who signed a mortgage 5 years ago should be pretty happy if their salary kept up with inflation, wouldn't they?
Well it's essentially a (good) search engine then, isn't it? Somebody somewhere wrote that description, and chatgpt understood your query and fetched it.
> I avoid GPL projects because I am a software developer and the idea of the project dictating how I can release my own source is a big FU to me.

GPL doesn't restrict how you can release your own source code - even if you release your project as GPL, you can still release it under MIT, or a commercial license - it's your code, and you're the copyright holder. The restrictions only apply to code derived from other GPL projects, but that isn't really "your code".

Your reason for avoiding GPL seems to be that you cannot take GPL code and release it under a non-free license. That's exactly the behavior that GPL is designed to prevent - the bottom line is users' freedom, not developers' convenience.
There was a big rural/urban divide in upper classes in WWI. Rural upper class would be officers on the front lines and get slaughtered at unthinkable rates, urban upper classes would do things like logistics and strategy and largely made it out okay.
It's still much better than the alternative, which is not having any kind of way to reproduce race conditions :-) QEMU's a pretty complex multithreaded program and my experience with chaos mode has been that it's quite good at tripping up the races (and you only need to catch the race once).
It seems somehow that Asimov got it right. The obvious next steps are all about making it smarter but also implement the right ethic rules...
Thank you for the suggestions. I have got uBlock origin and will look into Multi-Account Container pretty soon too!
To a degree, the comment ranking algorithm helps, though long/fast threads do often leave brand new replies buried upon posting.

Still, I believe what makes HN unusually nice is just the stellar moderation. It is definitely imperfect, but it creates a nice atmosphere that I think ultimately does encourage people to try to be civil, even though places like these definitely have a tendency to bring out the worst in people. Having a deft touch with moderation is very hard nowadays, especially with increasingly difficult demands put against moderators and absolutely every single possible subject matter turning into a miniature culture war (how in the hell do you turn the discussion of gas ranges vs electric ranges into a culture war?!) and the unmoderated hellscapes of the Internet wrongly painting all lightweight moderation with a black mark.

I definitely fear for the future of communities like HN, because the pressure from increasingly vile malicious actors as well as the counter-active pressure from others to moderate harder, stronger, faster will eventually break the sustainability of this sort of community. When I first joined HN, a lot of communities on the Internet felt like this. Now, I know of very few.
Unfortunately reddit is spammed with promoters
The VTL was invented because, at the time (2012ish), none of the largest enterprise backup solutions had a good S3 interface and none supported Glacier. After talking with the backup software vendors (Spectrum, Tivoli, Symantec, Commvault, etc) it became clear that adding another backup target wasn't something we (AWS) could get them to prioritize, for perfectly reasonable reasons. We could (and did) apply pressure via our shared customers, even then they estimated it would take years.

The fastest way to enable large enterprise access to S3 and Glacier for backups was to meet them where they were. We did this by virtualizing a tape library.

Background: I'm one of the original inventors - https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloa.... I am no longer with AWS.
It's going to take white collar jobs. The cost of batteries, motors, and steel makes replacing humans with robots not cost effective.
Everyone going all like “I canceled prime and didn’t buy anything. This makes sense”. Guys, their retail and Prime stuff is going gangbusters, your cancelation notwithstanding. The loss is because of other stuff. I won’t spoil it for you. Sometimes articles contain details.
Kicks me out every 60 seconds or so. Very weird.
Beyond the I-Novel: Ayako Sono's “Miracles” (2017)
No. The problem is that Facebook has automatically enabled 2 factor protection(due to large friends count) without corresponding 2 factor methods in place!!. To reset password, 2 factor authentication is needed, but there is no method and it cannot be setup since it requires password!!

And there is no way to contact Facebook.
Unlimited time off is another gem they use.
Not the way America is, no. China gives loans with minimal terms to build infrastructure, and has a record of forgiving the debts when they become unpayable. The US (via the IMF) lends money for infrastructure under terms that require concessions in government policy like "repealing wage laws" and "spending less on healthcare", and rarely discharges debt, instead lending out more money at worse interest with even more austerity concessions. If a government pops up thay doesn't like the terms, we coup them. China does nothing anything like that.
Not even for satisfying your curiousity?
And that's why I'm mixed...

I don't really disagree with you either. It's one of the few levers that the fed actually has, and it's a BIG lever with lots of consequences and fallout. Moving it is tricky (and hindsight is always an unfair place to judge from).

But it does feel a bit systemically unfair that we're structuring our financial regulations in a manner that seems nearly hellbent on increasing inequality across the population.

That's not really the fed's fault though... I would absolutely lay blame on congress.
Iran-U.S. RQ-170 incident
The USA was hardly a disaster. Mutual defense is possible without unifying everything under a single government (see NATO), the US didn't even have central banking at all until the 20th century so not sure how you concluded the lack of that was a disaster within a few years of the USA being born, and "consistent policy" is something it still doesn't have in many key areas - without the USA being a disaster.

> The EU was created because the European nations wanted to be a powerful continent-sized political entity

It was created as a trading bloc, literally the European Economic Area. That project later got hijacked by federalists who wanted to do what you say, but they never had agreement on that from the actual citizens. That's one reason the UK left.

> Arguably, the US doesn't have enough centralization and this is causing many of its internal problems now.

Arguably the US's internal problems come from too much centralization, hence why Americans famously loathe Congress but like their own Congressman/woman.
Without value judgement on the above quotes, I think Carmack is very much aware of his own lane and would say to take any comments outside it with a grain of salt. For instance earlier in the article, he states:

>I’m trying not to use the kind of hyperbole of really grand pronouncements, because I am a nuts-and-bolts person. Even with the rocketry stuff, I wasn’t talking about colonizing Mars, I was talking about which bolts I’m using to hold things together. So, I don’t want to do a TED talk going on and on about all the things that might be possible with plausibly cost-effective artificial general intelligence.

He likes to figure out new puzzles and how things work. He's an engineer at heart and that's very much his comfort zone. AGI is an exciting new puzzle for him. I'm glad he's taken an interest.

(Edit capitalization & punctuation)
>He beat the nanny, Sandra Rivett, to death with a lead pipe.

One wonders if the Etonians of earlier decades were hit as hard by lead poisoning as by a misplaced sense of impunity.
My coworkers and I used to joke that at banks, even cleaning staff get VP titles.
Oh crud, you are right. Any idea how to fix this? Perhaps a more curated (and more manageable) list? That would seem to be in conflict with our bazaar model.
I totally have a mortgage rate that was lower than inflation at the time because it was sth like 0.7% above market rate for 20 years fixed… Banks don’t care about the real value of money the way normal people do. Borrow 100k, pay 1% interest, buy a piece of stone and sell it for 200k after a couple of decades because of inflation and pay back a banks 100k: they are happy because the math adds up.
Unfortunately this is the norm when ML algorithms are at the wheel. Nobody can conclusively tell why an AI restricted an account; they can only guess.

I don't know if this is the case for CF but it seems to be for other businesses.