skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And people underestimate how well some solid, dumb solutions can scale. Boring spring boot with a decent data model and a bit effort to stay stateless scales to the moon. Or, we're having a grand "data export" system customers use to collect data from us for their own DWHs. It has survived 2 attempts at replacement so far. At it's core, it's psql + rsync, or was recently migrated to psql + s3 when we decomissioned our FTP servers. And it's easy to extend and customers are happy because it integrates well.
That's not the only thing either.

He also unpersoned Aaron Swartz, removing him from the Reddit Co-founder page, and saying that he wasn't really a founder... After Swartz died. Which is just incredibly scummy.

And then there were the comments about owning slaves after an apocalypse.

And then there's the Ghislaine Maxwell / maxwellhill theories [0], which bring the Swartz stuff to a very dark place...

0 - https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/r45a5n/here_is_...
Pipewire is invisible because Pulseaudio (PA) exercised a lot of sound stack features, exposing bugs (which were often attributed to PA) and prompting a lot of bug fixes. It wouldn't be nearly as good if it weren't building on PA's foundations.

Pipewire also doesn't need to bend the system to fit in, because the system is already the right shape.

(And I'm perennially annoyed that my work Mac won't upmix to 5.1. I've got the speakers, why only use two of them?)
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36073842
I think the GPL license kind of implies that you do have a license to use it.
Cache synchronization operations between CPU cores (MOESI) is cheaper (lower latency) between cores in the same socket than across sockets, often by a factor of 2x or more. But also limiting the program to one socket would reduce contention significantly. Both help.
As a good illustration, consider FEniCS[1], where you can write a few lines of Python code which looks almost exactly like the math you're trying to solve, and have it compute the answer. Very simple!

Except to make that work there's a lot of infrastructure, including runtime-generated-and-compiled C++ code that gets dynamically loaded by said Python code to perform the actual calculations. Quite complex!

The true skill comes in finding the right balance between simplicity and complexity for a given situation.

In the case of FEniCS, the complexity is worth it because it allows the system to be used by less skilled programmers (who might know more about the math and physics), and the complexity handled by experienced programmers.

For our codebase we've got junior programmers who might need to read and understand my code if I'm on vacation and shit hits the fan, so I err on the side of making it easy to read and reason about. Which might not be the "simplest" for some measures of simplicity (like fewer lines of code).

[1]: https://fenicsproject.org/
This resonates and one way to describe it is an incentive problem. Someone whose incentives are tightly aligned with the business is going to solve the actual problem and simply and effectively as possible. Someone who is incentivized to build career capital and experience other than via impact (e.g. so they can get uplevelled, pass an external interview loop, etc) is much more likely to focus on unimportant hard problems and/or over engineer.
I agree, seems like a really fundamental conflict you'd want to pre-solve before having children.
I haven't found the performance of cloud jira anything to write home about!

I'm sure web apps don't actually have to perform like shit, but it seems like they always do.
No it’s the part after that where the torrent was leaked to the public that I’d consider a leak.
It's a bad protocol and I hate seeing people wasting their time with it.
At least in terms of individual choices, it might be better to see it as some kind of a weighing scheme than as a rigid hierarchy. All kinds of individual and environmental factors can make you weigh some of the modes more or less.

Arseholes aren't the norm in public transportation where I live. Not non-existent but also not the norm. If your local system tends to have more of them, that probably makes it less attractive to you. Large and thinly spread out communities generally make public transport less attractive from a resources point of view because it's harder and less economical to have it efficiently cover the area.

But generally preferring community structures that do allow for efficient public transportation makes sense from a resource use point of view, even if that doesn't always mean it's preferable to you in a particular location. Giving a greater weight to walking or cycling makes sense both from resources and health points of view.
Don’t know why you were downvoted but yes, AMD uses MOESI and Intel uses MESI.
I barely use DVR because my OTA is so bad, but I do pay for ChannelsDVR and it's one of the best home server programs I've ever used.
Can you talk more about your experience? What led up to you quitting your job? How have you been feeling over the past few years? Post-quit, how are things?
Author gets it half right. Too many developers trying to have fun by doing new things. Affordable initial software development tends to come from places that have boring templated solutions using 1-2 tools.

But the main argument is off - What some classify as imaginary problems is actually building in the wrong types of affordances. The only way to know the difference is by knowing your tools and the problem domain.

The root of bad software is leaders lacking practiced learning.
In the imaginary case of the merch selling android app i dont think it is justified to solely blame the developers for the bad product. The root cause for a bad outcome lies in the simple fact that nobody wanted to tell the client that there was already a solution for 20 bucks and absolutely no need for something custom built. NOBODY except the business owner gains anything in this and the client deserves the ripoff too. It comes as no surprise that developers look for interesting challenges without appearing too distracted by the stupid and boring bs work they are stuck with.
I got started in I.T. at the end of the 70s and all the caps in SQL definitely put me off because well you know it's ALL SHOUTING. Unix was calm: Unix was lower case. IBM JCL WAS SHOUTY TOO.
NUMA can be such a pain, especially because it's really difficult to account for in code, and all sorts of stuff you'd never think of can end up impacting your performance too, that usually you'd never even think of, e.g. the linux page cache.

With the way that processors are going, with this focus on increased core counts etc, NUMA is increasingly being important to understand and account for, as processors are getting more "NUMA-ish" (to borrow a co-workers apt description). Especially Neoverse/Arm CPUs, etc.
India has 101M people living with diabetes
This has been discussed a bunch before:

How bad is my gas stove? (carbonswitch.co) -
369 points, Jan 15, 2022, 524 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29935939

I measured the pollution from my gas stove (distilled.earth)
- 174 points, 5 months ago, comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34316613

If you are considering switching to an induction hob, they are brilliant, I love ours. Just make sure you have good ferrous pans, I guarantee that all bad reviews you hear are due to people having the wrong type of pans.
Its an opinion piece, not a study in Nature
This was my take on ClickUp too. Lots of promise but not yet usable.
If someone says x86 decodes to RISC internally, they might be getting at one of two different ideas:

(1) RISC really is the fastest/best way for CPUs to operate internally.

(2) x86 performance isn't held back (much) by its outmoded instruction set.

x86 architectures were for a while translating into effectively RISC but stopped doing it. Now internally they are less RISC-like. This suggests #1 is false and #2 is true.

They could if they want to (because they have) but they don't want to anymore. Presumably because it's not the best way to do it. Although I guess it could be slightly better but not worth the cost of translating.
I wasn’t talking about the doctors. They are literally just agents of pharmaceutical industry and the medical establishment. They simply follow orders. And are more than adequately rewarded. The doctor at your HMO is not going to burn the mid night oil to come up with a patent free tool pain free gynecological exam.

I was speaking about research and development of non invasive and less painful management of women’s health. It’s abysmal.
Longest Piano vs. Small Upright Piano
It's not the network that's the bottleneck, but the Javascript-bloated mess of the frontend.

edit: That isn't to say that Jira and Confluence are the only offenders. They aren't even the worst. Slack/Teams/Rocket.Chat are all just as bad and make me consider switching to a career without computers on a regular basis.
We are all AI’s free data workers
That was already a misleading campaign at the time and certainly did not age well. When the G4 Mac launched at best 450MHz (delayed 6 months and derated from advertised 500MHz) it was going head-to-head with the 733MHz Pentium III "Coppermine" that was available, cheap, and faster from most points of view. By the time you could actually buy a 500MHz G4, you could also buy a 1000MHz AMD Athlon. To make it seem like the whole PowerPC thing had been a good idea you had to cherry-pick the best Mac and an old PC as a baseline.
Dumb question, but how do these pair/sync back to other devices?
I think it’s both, because I see it as chicken and egg.

Good urban design goes hand in hand with good transit route designs. Often one ends up having to accommodate the flaws in the other.
100% agree. All the best devs I know literally do not give a flying fuck about blogs at all (with a few exceptions). They read white papers and textbooks from 40 years ago (this is a bit of an exaggeration).
Have you actually looked at it/tried to contribute to it?

Servo was a promising experiment, but it eventually became a massive, complicated, unmaintainable mess.
> weird alt tube sites
What does this look like for you? I've failed to migrate any of my video consumption off YouTube due to lack of discoverability. (I know you can sub to yt channels via rss too but I'd like to do that less ideally to de-silo my video sources)
Reddit has 1M users and is half-broken, yet monetization is still a problem.
That's why I prefer the form "Do the simplest thing that could possibly work."

There's always going to be a minimum level of complexity. Sometimes that minimal level calls for throwing a PHP script up on some shared hosting provider somewhere. Sometimes that minimal level calls for an Enterprise-level design with ten layers of abstraction because you need to be able to individually unit test every aspect.

Being aware of where and when to introduce complexity is half the battle.
The approach I’ve seen work best was mostly in academic settings, where there were a bunch of real offices with 2-4 people, designated social space, and a few larger conference rooms. The cost isn’t that much higher but it meant that you could put people working on the same things together without the noise interrupting other work, and the common social space allowed for serendipitous conversations without feeling guilty about disrupting work.
If it wasn't clear, I was speaking strictly about their Sriracha style sauces. Like
https://www.tabasco.com/hot-sauces/sriracha-sauce/
At the level of funding needed to increase the capacity of metropolitan services, the possible additional income from more expensive classes is negligible. Consider that public transportation is almost always subsidised, hence current tickets are already well below the cost of a trip. This is why many transport services offer cheap season tickets for residents, while making some additional cash (but still well below cost) from infrequent users such as tourists.

At most, maybe some kind of new bus services which were "first class only" could be self-sustaining, but only at a very high premium which would make them ridiculously expensive and still barely worth it for anyone.
>where efficiency is of no concern and all you want is performance

That is not strictly true. If you allow 10W per core ( The A16 CPU Core @ 3.5Ghz only uses ~5W max in case anyone is wondering ), even a 32 Core CPU puts you at 320W. That is excluding Memory controller and I/O. Worth remember Apple's CPU is single thread only. Compared to AMD / Intel x86 counterparts which has 2 thread per Core. So once you factor in multithread usage, which is what most of the performance difference are coming from on desktop. It still matters.

There is a difference argument if you have a need of 300W CPU and 500W GPU though.
What part isn't mature? The bit where they set limitations for use of their hardware?
> The Kardashians are a household conversation topic, but that doesn't make them profound.

I would argue that AI has grabbed orders of magnitude more headlines in the past 6 months.

And AI is pretty damn profound, so I’m struggling to grasp the point this comment is making.
The author is right, but doesn't seem to mention that this could be solved, at least in theory, with better project management. Devs focusing on the wrong thing? Project manager should be on it. Scope creep? Project manager should be on it. Client asking for irrelevant features? Project manager should be on it.

Replace those devs with ones who are focused on the right things? Great, but you still have the other problems to deal with (scope creep, uninformed clients), not to mention a host of other things that can derail a project, such as poor communication.

tl;dr Most projects are poorly managed. Poorly managed projects tend to fail.
In Models We Trust–But First, Validate
The actual paper, which isn't linked from the article as far as I could tell: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/202...
> Spam from junior devs who started a blog so to build a name for themselves.

I often find this is the most useful category out of the 5 you listed. Junior devs writing something like "How to setup webpack" often explain things in plain words and just spell out how to get the thing working. There's humility to the post like "I don't know what all these options do, but this is what worked for me".

I find that a lot more honest/useful than say category 5 there where I have no idea if what they're talking about will actually work for me or how much effort it's going to take to integrate because the assumption there is you have big teams who can spend all their time maintaining these tools.
Wow, really? Cool!

The 29K was a really cool architecture and I’m sorry it didn’t make it. AMD’s pathetic marketing of the time couldn’t even beat MIPS’ terrible marketing, plus MIPS had SGI (and later SGI had MIPS).
And now we will have AAA games with poor performance and DLSS slapped on.

Maybe optimal performance is a feature? Feature worth working on from start?
After purchasing the Beyerdynamic DT 770 PRO, I discovered the Superlux HD 662 EVO on this website and decided to buy them for $38 to see how they would compare. I was pleasantly surprised by the significant difference in quality, considering the Superlux headphones were almost five times cheaper. This experience led me to return the Beyerdynamic headphones and approach overpriced headphone reviews with more skepticism.
Hong Kong has minibuses, which are smaller in size and make more frequent shorter loops. Not sure how viable they are in less dense cities.
I agree with this to some extent. but there’s a flip side too.

This mentality is often taken way too far. I had an old boss who wouldn’t allow me to write unit tests citing this thought process.

Even at places with decent engineering practices, I’ve seen so many examples of software where you’re limited to a one to many relationship for something that could and easily should have been implemented as many to many, rendering the product useless to many because a product person couldn’t stand to think a couple months ahead.

Some people seem to take this idea too far and basically assume that if a problem is interesting or takes away a tedious task, it must be overengineering, premature optimization, or an imaginary problem.

Perhaps a better way to phrase the issue would be “artificial constraints”, which would encompass the flip side too.
Yep. Facebook got pretty far down the road with PHP, MySQL, memcached, etc.
It is exempt from license requirements, not FAA regulations. Ultralights and paragliders are the same way. Most anyone can buy and fly a powered or unpowered ultralight without a license as long as they comply with the FAA's strict regulations:

https://www.eaa.org/eaa/aviation-interests/ultralights/getti...
Anectodally, Paris metro used to have two classes: https://www.messynessychic.com/2014/12/04/that-time-the-pari...
I like to call these "coin-operated comments". Someone sees an input phrase "cryptocurrency", a neuron fires, and they respond with an output phrase "money laundering". The pattern recognition is good enough to be able to emit a relevant predetermined opinion from ROM, but there's no higher-level ability to adapt to the flow of conversation or absorb any new information.
I think I’m going to need more details to understand exactly what you are claiming here.
Line workers have a better idea of whether their jobs make any kind of sense. Yes, they don't often have the executive view, but the executives frequently have no idea how the work gets done all the way down the chain; they have a huge amount of blindness as to the realities and limitations of things on the ground.

Especially at large organizations, they're relying on summaries of summaries of summaries observed by line managers summarizing information. Tons of information is lost that way.

This is why high-level strategy fails. Theoretical ideas hit reality and fall apart pretty quickly. Few executives are grounded enough to actually know how things work.
Innuendo.
no one is saying bsd support is a requirement, no one is complaining about jellyfin existing for free, no one said it is badly engineered. they're just saying that there's not a good fit for their use case, which sounds like it's the same as mine: running in a truenas jail.

so stop getting defensive. you could have just said "there is docker" and saved everyone the passive aggression.
By requiring full screen windows that method is a non-started for those of us who don’t use Apple’s full screen. I find that it isolates app from each other too much. I’m almost always working with multiple apps at once.
People are becoming more extreme, both left and right, to the point that I think an extreme and middle would have a hard time being a couple, let alone opposite extremes.

I know a couple where the guy is extreme right and the wife is middle. The wife had to prohibit all discussion of politics, in private or with company, because they usually got out of control.

This is also a problem between generations. I know a lady, leaning right but not what I'd call extreme, who no longer is speaking to her daughter who is extreme left. It's crazy to me that politics is being given this much power in some people's lives.

Here's a clue to everyone: politicians don't care about us, at all! They only want to keep us divided and fighting amongst ourselves so we don't unite and fight against them.
> They suddenly shoved my hosted media into a random sidebar menu and started pushing their "free" content on homepage and also started doing purchases and rentals, so is it just getting close to being another Netflix/Hulu?

The main annoyance was done once, and you can just go to the settings and disable it. Every once in a while they make minor changes that seem to promote their services, but they're very ignorable. I've only had to go to the settings once to disable/hide their annoyances.

I never quite understood the hostility towards them on this. I suppose if you insist on viewing Plex as solely for playing your own content, sure. But ever since I signed up over 5 years ago (before the streaming services), I knew quite well that I was signing up for a service and that I am not in control. I don't see people getting anywhere near as upset at Netflix as they are with Plex.

As much as they may have deprioritized local streaming - it's not at all dead. They continue to add features to it.
In our agency 10 years ago we build such websites, it would cost 3000-5000 dollars max. Just with PHP and a simple self build CMS. Including a simple responsive design. We also hosted around 250 of such websites on a single dedicated server. It was very very fast.
Awesome,, founder details?
You can reduce sharing probabilistically, for example -- because contention is an N-squared problem, reducing sharing by some linear factor is enough for a large reduction in contention. You aren't eliminating contested atomics entirely, just making them low-contention rather than highly contended.
I trust my dns. I have no idea what apple has done with their closed source software that clearly doesn't respect my wishes
> secure online banking is actually quite an easy problem to solve . . . The storage and transfer of numbers is not a particularly hard problem.

I don't know anything about banking software, but I have a hunch the author underestimates the complexity (as is typical for HN). The Efficient Markets Hypothesis would suggest that if it were so simple to make banking software, then someone would do it.
Oh, I agree, I meant to add something like "after the fact, a human needs to inspect." But it still feels like this would speed up time dramatically.
Migrating Netflix to GraphQL safely
I see you’re making a lot of points on this post, but I did some quick reading and it seems like you might have some facts wrong. Maybe this is because you’re reading a hype article from 2009 published just 1 day before Avatar was released in theaters and also relying on your memory versus reading a 10+ year retrospective article. I’m not saying that Cameron and Avatar did zilch for 3D in the film industry. I’m saying that some of your justifications about the level and ways of impact might not be accurate.

For example, you keep saying that a lot of theaters had to buy expensive projectors for Avatar. However, the article you linked to does not imply this. Sure, I imagine some theaters did buy digital projectors in time for the premiere. But all the article says is that many theaters didn’t have digital projectors even just 1 day before Avatar’s release. So no, most theaters weren’t buying digital projectors and 3D glasses specifically for Avatar. They couldn’t have. They bought them afterwards for all of the _expected _ future 3D movies. The retrospective article I mentioned above explicitly states this.

Also, the statistics used in your article are a bit misleading. Sure lots of cinemas around the world did not have digital projectors at the time, BUT the _big_ ones (that serve millions of consumers versus hundreds or thousands per year) did have digital projectors.

Also, for example, you keep saying that studios “needed to do something” with Cameron’s 3D technology since it was expensive to develop. However, this is not true at all. Only Cameron used his technology. Most of the films released after Avatar weren’t even shot in 3D. They were shot in 2D and then converted to 3D which led to poor viewing experiences.

Avatar’s influence on the 3D industry seems less direct than you’re making it seem.

Here’s the 2022 retrospective article titled “What James Cameron and ‘Avatar’ Did (and Didn’t Do) for 3D filmmaking”:

https://www.theringer.com/platform/amp/movies/2022/12/13/235...
In addition, it's also easy to use something like Matterbridge[0] to bridge Discord to other apps!

I do this for one of my projects as I find that Discord is where a lot of people are, and people find it accessible. But for those of us who do not love the closed ecosystem, it's nice to have alternatives.

[0] https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge