skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I read this article with interest, having run a SaaS for the last 8 years or so (solo-founder). I find it intriguing that the OP needed so much compute power. Computers are really powerful these days.

As a counterpoint of sorts, here's my "hosting journey":

* run everything on a single physical server rented at Hetzner (DE)

* [... several years pass, business grows ...]

* switch to ansible, learn it, spend a week or so to write automation for a 3-server setup, also learn terraform and write terraform configs for setting up a Digital Ocean system from scratch

* run production on a 3-server setup at Hetzner DE, run a staging system at Hetzner FI, also serving as a possible quick manual failover, for a total of 6 physical servers, test re-initializing systems from scratch regularly, test setting up a Digital Ocean system from scratch regularly

* [... several years pass ...]

* that's it — I really can't see a need for more in the near future.

But then, my software is not in Ruby on Rails, and I have no experience with that platform. I use Clojure and ClojureScript and I was careful to design everything to be rather client-heavy at the start. I also never wanted to depend on PaaS systems, mostly to avoid lock-in, but also because I don't buy the "just use our magic database offering and forget about database problems forever" selling pitch. You can sweep possible problems and complexity under the rug and hide them, but you can't run away from them. I also do not use Postgres (collective gasp in the audience), because having a single centralized point of failure is not something I want in my setup.

I also never needed significant sysadmin/devops support. Granted, I do have some experience, but these things do not require dedicated teams, unless you are YouTube. A little ansible+terraform goes a long way, so does buying an hour of two of consulting from an experienced sysadmin.

Those physical servers that I use are significantly faster than the over-subscribed cloud VM instances that you usually get from AWS and the like. And they have 64GB of RAM, not some measly amounts. If I need more servers, it takes on the order of hours to get additional ones, but I'm not sure what I'd use them for.

My total hosting bill is on the order of 350€/month and is boringly predictable.
Oh wow, it'll be so nice to turn my phone off until the expected arrival time. Sweet.
The Commonwealth of Independent States, thats what it looks like.

https://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/map/CIS-map.htm
This is fun, but it's missing the obligatory xkcd:

https://xkcd.com/538/
Here is a paper doing evolutionary approaches on top of LLM generating code. It seems LLMs are remarkably good at learning from feedback.

> Evolution through Large Models

https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.08896
Quake Live not taking off as a popular eSports title greatly disappointed me.
The long tail was absolutely about creators of all kinds making more money.

That was the sales pitch of this book, which - so far as I know - made the phrase popular.

https://www.amazon.com/Long-Tail-Future-Business-Selling/dp/...

What actually happened is various platforms moved to monopolise distribution. Only some of those are true open markets with low access and marketing costs.

There are always a few exceptions. Like the TikTokers - always cute/hot - who make millions producing lowest-common-denominator content. And some writers on Amazon who make millions producing... lowest-common-denominator content.

The premise of the book was that creators of all kinds of content - including those making exotic, experimental, and generally not-lowest-common-denominator work would find it easier to make a living.

There's some great original music on Spotify and Bandcamp, but it's almost impossible for anyone to find it.

There are quite a few niche YT channels in the 25k -> 100k range who are getting by, but most of them only make any money from sponsorships and product placements.

The real cost of entry isn't access to a distribution platform, it's access to expensive marketing, advertising, and sometimes sponsorship.

That's what publishers of all kinds used to pay for - and still do, but only for TV/movies and the top music headliners.

Everyone else doesn't get access to that kind of reach and influence.

If you're marketing a cold project you can throw some money at Amazon and Facebook ads and try to get some TikTok virality. But producing that extra content and keeping track of impressions and ROI is practically a full-time job in itself and requires a much broader skill set than just being a good creator and requires spare cash to burn on paid marketing that may be a complete failure.

The 2008 book promised that good content/products would pretty much sell themselves. All you had to do was find your niche with a bit of Googling and start selling into it.

That very much isn't what happened.
> So houses don't appreciate; they depreciate. So people don't use them as "investments"; they're just a place to live.

That's the core aspect for it to work in Japan though, it's a massive cultural difference in how houses are viewed as (and how policies were made) compared to other countries. The cultural difference is what blocks policies to increase supply in other countries, to break the culture of seeing a house as an investment and making current prices drop is exactly the friction point that demands some politicians to commit career suicide if they want to change it. I can only see it happening when the social fabric is close to a breaking point due to unaffordability, before that I don't see how Western countries that have pushed for generations housing as an investment to change course.
The biggest problem with healthcare is that doctors are sued if they don't provide state of the art care. So there's an incentive to produce more and more expensive drugs and technologies, and no (or at least insufficient) ability to trade off cost vs. effectiveness.
This is why I believe there is absolutely no need for laws against public use of strong encryption. A great number of side-channel attacks exist to defeat encryption, that state actors can employ against high value targets. The state is massively more powerful than non-state actors, and that advantage does not need to be added to with laws restricting the public's access to strong encryption.
In Europe it has been requirement since '94 and this requirement has been improved in '07 https://www.reifflawfirm.com/canadian-and-european-truck-und...
> Our bullshit receptors are good spotting dishonesty

If I had to count with my fingers how many times people wondered whether someone was sincere or just polite, I’d have to be a thousand-finger person.
Crowley might have been a drug-addicted sophist and not a good source for seeking ultimate truths. But was he a good sophist? I am interested in occultism and symbology, but only as entertainment. I am certain of my materialistic beliefs. It might be that he is so popular here because he is clever and decadent, something shocking and thrilling if you don't take it as truth.

Also, was he actually a fun sophist? You seem to have read a lot so I would ask for your opinion. Is he worth reading for entertainment?
It's not too different from that situation where someone says "how can I do X" but when you drill down on why they think they want it, there are better things they should be focusing on. Deadlines are about synchronizing different groups. The problem is opaque/arbitrary deadlines. "Why we need it by then" and "What exactly is needed by then" are very important conversations. Pushing for speed at all costs is bound to destroy morale and quality.
How to spend $580 in 40 hours. More can be done for much less in 2012.
I think it was for other nuclear plants that had been operating. Foreign welders were needed because there was only so much welding one worker could do before they reached their radiation exposure limit.
It also depends on what the goal is. If you need to extract some data from a specific site (as opposed to obtaining faithful representations of pages from arbitrary sites like a search engine might need to), then SPAs might be the easiest targets of all. Just do some inspection beforehand to find out where the SPA is loading the data from, very often the easiest thing is to query the API directly.

Sometimes the API will need some form of session tokens found in HTTP meta tags, form inputs, or cookies. Sometimes they have some CORS checks in place that are very easy to bypass from a server-side environment by spoofing the Origin header.
any plain reading of Hong Kong’s Basic Law, the name
of their constitution, shows it was always had a backdoor for Beijing control

so I can understand why people then defer to the Sino-British declaration, which has no legal force after the subsequent Basic Law was codified. They defer to it out of desperation because there is no framework for their beliefs

but I cant play pretend that the corporations are bowing down arbitrarily, or that Beijing is violating the 50 year agreement enshrined in law, the Basic Law is not a form of sovereignty aside from just acting like one until the last few years, legally it just puts one administrative step in front of Beijing shoehorning any preference it wants into that SAR in accordance with the legal method already proscribed

if anything, the blame should always be put squarely on the UK for leaving the residents without any hope but false promises
Crypto bros and con artists killed crypto.
Nitpick: Our own intelligence suggests that an artificial general intelligence is possible. First time seeing ASI but, any quality you can attribute to a human has the potential to be replicated by dint of the mechanical nature of our bodies.

I'm not saying we'll get there - I don't think 'we' as a culture even really understands what is meant by intelligence - but we know its possible because we exist.
I never used it either before I started seriously using neovim for Rust development with a near-perfect LSP. You quite often 'gr' (go to reference), to check what some function does or how something is defined, then gr again and again.. and at some point you need to go back (yes, there's gi and c-t etc but C-o is less specific and works in many other cases; you can also set marks and harpoons and the like but most of the time you don't).
Yes, that list reminds me of the exaggerated posts about "look how hard it is to install Firefox on Linux!!". Claiming that setting up a Debian Postgres server necessarily entails knowing ZFS and Kubernetes is quite a reach

Not sure about Debian, but I believe Ubuntu Server will let you setup an mdadm mirror, LUKS (with LVM), and install and enable a Postgres server with a few buttons in the install wizard. It can even fetch SSH authorized keys from a Github account, covering by far the most important SSH hardening step (disabling passwords). Most hosting providers will also offer a one-click deploy that may similarly add your keys and do other common config

A better example of something that hosted databases makes a lot easier out of the box would be backup, replication, and monitoring
And to add to that, the fundamental problem with novices relying on signals in financial markets is that past performance is not a guarantee of future results, and that applies particularly in short term trading where the "picking up pennies in front of a steamroller" strategies that generate superficially impressively consistent results do so because they're trading against a risk which will wipe out most of traders' capital and all their gains when it occurs every few years...
There are too many (bad) websites that have my number for 2FA, plus my lifelong network of contacts all have that number.
Interesting idea, but using columns for nested threads is too clever by half. Have two columns, one for the main page, on for the thread, and display nested threads normally.
The car should arrange for a singing telegram to be delivered to your home, office AND your child’s daycare to notify you before shutting off its engine due to lack of fuel. In my country this is required by law.
Sometimes you just put off sending an email.
Sadly cannot disagree :-(
resolutiin requirements change dramatically when vr is involved. you don't want to be reading blurry text and pixels don't map 1:1 when "projected" in vr
The California high speed rail project never made any sense, even before political dysfunction.
Politics seems similar. Chasing money or coverage most of the time because that's the system now.
I find the attitude of valueing money more than human lifes worrisome, to say the least. And I have been called a cynic more than once.
Never really got into Vim. I grew up on Emacs a happy with my Doom-eMacs setup.

But recently discovered the Vimium extension for Chrome and wow it is a life changer! It is what I have always been looking — a noiseless way to quickly go to any tab, history or bookmark.
it inevitably comes across my feed because people wont shut up about it
Russia-backed hackers unleash new USB-based malware on Ukraine’s military
What degen stuff are you referencing. I found reddit allowed me to explore my sexuality and discover new things about myself. I'm glad it was never very judgemental about people's sexuality.
To quote someone: RASP is like Matlab, designed by Satan.

There is an interpreter for a RASP like language if you want to try it out: https://srush.github.io/raspy/

And deepmind published a compiler from RASP to Transformer weights: https://github.com/deepmind/tracr
Women only become fertile at age 15, and socially acceptably fertile at 20. 45-50 is a very optimistic upper bound, even with that bound you end up with ~1/3 figure.
"crypto" in the title is talking about cryptocurrency, not cryptography generally.
Its old sci fi that seemed plausible at one point - hell I thought an ansible was still possible even a few years ago.
SETI is not how we'll find alien spacefaring civilizations.

Within 1000 years, barring some apocalypse, an incredibly conservative prediction is that we will be able to build permanent space orbitals. We already have sufficiently strong and readily available materials (ie stainless steel) to build O'Neil Cylinders at 2-4 miles in diameter and 10-20 miles in length that could house as many as a million people. These can be powered with solar collectors.

Build enough of these (ie millions) and you have a Dyson Swarm. With our Sun that can give our civilization upwards of 10^26 Watts of power to use (compared to our current estimated 10^11 Watts). This is also known as a Kardashev-2 (or K2) civilization.

There are a ton of advantages to this. While it may not be the route that every civilization goes, given it is relatively low tech and has massive advantages in living area and energy availability, it seems like this would happen at least some of the time.

These things would stand out from a huge distance because the only way to dissipate heat for a space orbital is to radiate it away into space. That has a wavelength determined entirely by temperature, which for any reasonable termperature range is infrared.

So you'd detect a Dyson Swarm from a huge distance away by its IR signature.

A galaxy of these (a so-called K3 civilization) would be visible from millions of light years away. A single star would be detectable now from a smaller distance but still a far bigger distance than any form of radio communication as you'd find via SETI.

The fact that we haven't seen any evidence of this thus far in our galaxy leads many (including me) to think the most likely scenario is we are the only potential spacefaring civilizatin in our galaxy.

The JWST is actually a way better tool for finding spacefaring life than anything SETI has done or proposes.
Awesome , looking forward to a blog post on this :)
I have the theory that this is due to digitalisation. We are now at the stage where "everybody" needs to know Tech, and everybody now wants to work in the hip Tech companoes, regardless of own technical skills or mindset: Project managers, legal, accounting, etc. nowadays all want to have a say in Tech aspects, and this creates pressure on the actual tech departments of a corporation to create reports and documentation and explain themselves much more than it used to be.

It's a bad situation for tech people to have to deal with the FUD of all other departments because those departments want to present themselves as knowledgeable and contributing to the technical aspects, when they are not able to at all.
Huh? This is what yojo@ wrote:

> I think best practice here is to hardcode all feature flags to off in the integration test suite

That's pretty clearly about forcing the flags to be off, i.e. altering them, and not about logging their values.
> About the "immaturity", I don't have a good grasp of what it's supposed to mean.

I interpret it as an infantile reaction to when events don't go your way. A classic example here in the UK is Boris Johnson's reaction to the just released "Partygate" report. A mature reaction to criticism would be to either dispute it if it's inaccurate or to acknowledge your own shortcomings otherwise. His reaction is more akin to a tantrum though that could be related to his narcissism.

Nowadays, I'm thinking that a lot of modern politics are becoming like a scene from Lord of the Flies.

(I wonder if climate catastrophes will make "Eat the rich" a popular slogan)
Utility scale PV projects are typically within a few percent of their promised cost.
> Bad example, really. Tools do matter.

Personally, I'm inclined to suggest that there are definitely "good enough" tools out there and you can get stuff done with those too, instead of spending a lot of money and time looking for the best out there, or getting attached to them. Kind of a utilitarian look, I guess.

As an example, I got a Chinese chainsaw (marketed as Lithuanian, but most likely just a white-label product) for cutting trees and prepping firewood, for about 100 EUR. It won't last me decades like a fancy Stihl saw, it will have more engine vibration and the fuel economy won't be great. Yet, none of that matters to me much, because it has the critical set of features that I need (it cuts wood, starts well, has decent throttle response and has a functional saw brake).

Whether the same applies to programming and how much is probably quite subjective. Personally I like something like IntelliJ IDEA or other JetBrains tools, but one get by with Eclipse or NetBeans or whatever. In my eyes, the same applies to programming languages - you most likely can write a decent codebase in Rust, Go, Java, .NET, Python, Node, Ruby, as well as languages like Perl and PHP.

Some might be more comfortable with one language over another for a variety of reasons and surely the average codebases will be a bit better/worse depending on the language, ecosystem and the community as a whole. But if it lets you pay bills and ship features, then I would be okay with someone picking PHP/Perl/whatever over one of the more favorable languages.
Have you played the remaster? It has a lot of subtle upgrades (and more polygons of enemies is one of them). It's really good.
Yes, Uber use Zig: https://www.uber.com/en-FR/blog/bootstrapping-ubers-infrastr...
> After all, at that point someone could just take your hard drive anyway right?

With full-disk encryption, taking the hard drive is not that useful. Firmware passwords are one link in securing the boot chain; secure boot is meaningless if attacker can just modify firmware or its config. So the password should offer protection against evil maid style attacks.
This story resonates with me — apparently we are on phase two. And we need dedicated team members to take care of this. Thanks for sharing your lessons this was hugely valuable. Don’t let the negative comments get you down, when building things it’s hard and it’s all a big learning game. Congratulations on building a great piece of software.
That already happened with the raw sewage dumping combined with huge dividend payouts to shareholders and bonuses for directors.

The crisis is real. But it's essentially a crisis of greed and shortsightedness which is trashing the one common ecosystem we have and impoverishing most of the population in search of short-term profit - just numbers on a ledger "owned" by a tiny minority, which will never be turned into anything tangible, never mind beneficial.
They should switch back to digitalocean when things were manangeable
This is cool but I think a more fundamental primitive is the probability distribution over next tokens and how that changes depending on each layers computation.
https://remarkable.com/ might be what you're looking for
Just curious, while stainless? There are better steels and it's not like it'll rust in space much.
Yes.

And the US should.

It should just die already. Crypto, NFTs, Web3, Blockchain, whatever, I mean ALL of it.

Nobody needs or wants it. It has really been almost 15 years with no viable legitimate use case at all.

For the crypto bro pedants out there, this also includes the biggest energy wasting, 'distributed sudoku solver' that is Bitcoin.

There exists not one use case that crypto solves at all that the current system already does better.
I'm not sure if it would've been John Carmack in this particular case. He was more concerned with the engine and rendering side of things, less with the gameplay logic stuff. More likely it would've been either John Romero or John Cash who wrote this code, but it's hard to say for sure. Best thing we can hope for is that John Romero pitches in with his impeccable memory :D
They had no idea if they were correct, and if more nuclear power had been built then we would be in a much better place globally than we are in now.

Only France, being the archetype of the unmitigated Gaul, actually pushed ahead despite all this Greenpeace pressure and established a great example of lowering CO2 emissions without burning a load of gas. Which to me implies that they weren't correct.

And no one is forgiving them or not. I'm just stating another large force that has been a nuclear power trip hazard for the last 50 years and prevented the economies of scale for nuclear that all forms of power generation need to lower their costs. The question was "who would lobby against?" which I was answering.
Is there a published way to cause nonlocal entanglement between (blue, sapphire) LEDs; with just high/low voltage regulation, and/or with better or different control of the electron lepton particle properties other than just voltage on or off (i.e. spin,)?
Are you measuring my capillary dilation?

We weren’t as clear on the network access point as we could have been. The AI Red Team is part of a larger organization that includes Pentest and the traditional Red Team. They often share/tip network or host access and it’s been a really helpful pattern.
Thanks a ton!

This matches my own micro-benchmarks in golang ish. I see basically either ~4ns for any write op, including store, swap, add, etc. And ~1ns for loads. I assume it’s all seq-cst.
It is possible to learn how to write concisely.
> the leaked wipEout source code

That's really cool, will you share your efforts anywhere? Love a bit of anti-gravity racing myself. I recommend you listen to the OST whilst coding it for maximum immersion.
I do a lot of scraping at my day job, and I agree the times we need to use a headless browser are very rare. Vast majority of the time you can either find an API or JSON endpoint, or scrape the JS contained in the returned SSR document to get what you want.
If there was a leak from this particular lab.
Brakes are mandatory, rails preventing people from ending up under the truck not it seems (in the US, in Europe they are). So, it is up to regulators to make the mandatory. And it is lobbyists preventing that, and those lobbyists are not working on behalf of truck drivers.