skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Complaining about companies raising venture capital on hacker news! What!? No way!?

This is going to sound wild, but believe it or not it takes quite a bit of capital to reserve capacity in data centers ALL OVER THE WORLD in order to, like, deliver on your core value prop of enabling deploying normal apps AT THE EDGE. This used to just be called making a capital investment (because it takes a lot of upfront capital), but then it became en vogue to whine about venture capital.

You may want your hosting provider to be capital poor and running a razor thin balance sheet on the brink of insolvency (aka bootstrapped) but I don't. Or you might want to lease your own space in a colo and rack your own servers and hire your own remote hands and your own sysadmins and dev ops with 24/7 coverage so if you have a hardware failure you can deal with it asap but I don't. Not having to do all that shit takes...capital.

Where would you have them fetch said necessary capital if not from venture capital firms?

Honestly, do you even know what you're bitching about? A theoretical monopolistic reality that a. does not exist and b. would not exist if fly did not theoretically create a product so good it made all their competitors irrelevant (note: this is not a monopoly, it's market dominance; they are very different)?

And honestly, if they're still around in 5 years, they probably should raise prices so they can continue to be around. Fly is literally orders of magnitude cheaper than running on AWS, and orders of magnitude easier.

Take your aimless cope elsewhere.
Not actually batteries as such, but rather heat stores. Still quite useful, especially if the end result you wanted was heat.
> isn't this just moving to another extreme?
> It seems like both quality and efficiency have their place,

Actually, I would agree with that for sure. The real world is grey, and multiple things are true at once. I'm certainly guilty of leaning to the other extreme here.

> some aggregate of environmental impact metrics e and the number of times we use the bag n

I believe I understand, and I appreciate the overall push back.

But starkly put, and to be a little flippant ..

> would you still favor the cotton bag just because it is higher quality?

.. absolutely yes. Certainly in this case. The reuse number is incredibly (incredibly) flexible. In no world n=1 will be a given. The only reason we have reuse of one for a bag, is out of habit, simply put. Habits change all the time. A cotton bag will not have a reuse of one. It is more expensive to begin with. It could hold sentimental value. It may have a lot of other uses. Do we even need a bag? 80% of time, the store clerk gives you a bag out of muscle memory, not because you can't hold a couple of items in your hands or stuff in your pockets. The utility of a plastic bag might even be closer to 0 than 1.

> It's maximising a single (ill-defined) metric as well, no?

I think that is where we might disagree the most. Quality cannot be measured, it can only be known. I hate that this reads as touchy-feely, but I don't know a better way to put it. Once you accept that quality cannot be measured in numbers, it is liberating. Then it allows you to argue in a different paradigm; How your neighborhood "feels" because there's no plastic bags stuck in roadside shrubbery, the peace of mind knowing that your drinking water doesn't have microplastics in it, ... that's genuinely immeasurable. Yet it is the stuff that makes up quality of life. People can be convinced of those qualities, and their value, _without_ quantifying them.
I think you're right, it might. But someone has to raise the taxes to pay the expenses, whether it's quick as in the case of this hack ("make a few lanes usable quickly") or slow as usually the case. Local government has to either get the money from taxpayers, or from someone else, or not spend the money.

This is a real problem for organisations that received a subsidy to build something but none for the maintenance or repair. Organisations including local government. If they take the initial subsidy they're on the hook later, one way or another.

EDIT: Isn't this really a form of how rulers gain credibility by largesse? Roman emperors would build temples, churches etc. to gain credibility with the people. Infrastructure is nothing if not expensive, so isn't rebuilding car bridges really just a case of that?

Julius Cæsar killed a third of the Gauls and gained great popularity with Romans by using the spoils. Asking a wider branch of government to tax other people in other areas to pay the expenses the local government has assumed responsibility for is much less violent. Very much less violent.
How hard is it to hire people who understand how a physical server even works these days? Probably most engineers under 40 have never touch a physical machine, under 30 maybe have never seen an ethernet cable...
I think you’re confusing unstable with energetics it’s certainly unstable to UV but you’d have to look at the kinetics and enthalpies of formation
Yeah, those fall in the "I've tried everything I can think of" category. They don't help, the devices die too quickly to make it into any alternate boot modes.
I've been working solely remotely by choice for a little over a year now, and except for a couple weird months during a lurching back-to-office push in early 2022, I've been working remotely for nearly 3.5 years now. I've begun to really miss having an office to go to. I've increasingly been getting out of the house every day, but it's expensive to go to coffee shops, and I don't really like the feel of "coworking" offices where everyone is cloistered away working on something different.

It seems to me that the hybrid model of two or three days in office and two or three days at home is quickly gaining mindshare, and I've frankly become envious of that.
Great points. Don’t fret the downvotes. It’s cooler to be proven right in the face of popular doubt.
> "Conspiracy sports is quite entertaining; why it has ever been banned is beyond me."

How else would CIA and other government agencies disseminate propaganda and disinformation (e.g., "How the Military Is Using E-Girls to Recruit Gen Z into Service"[1])? Gotta keep people sheep so they can be herded (see also, Edward Bernays[2]).

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36471105

[2]https://theconversation.com/the-manipulation-of-the-american...
No, actually I want more accountability as ultimately the money politicians launder into their own pockets directly or indirectly comes from a power vested by citizens. Useful idiots who point fingers at one edge of the political spectrum are smokescreening the bigger issue.
California Strip Malls to Be Upzoned Saturday
Wait what would a king know about congress? Actually what would a philosopher know about wielding power? Anyway, here's what journalists and think-tanks say about it:

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-23/congre...

https://www.cato.org/commentary/its-time-make-congress-great...
Now is the perfect time to watch those old ones that you missed. I'm doing it with my son and love it, probably more than he does.
Why would it be better being it’s own program?
Tacotron2-DDC denial of service and bizarre behavior when input ends with “?!?!”
Probably everyone yelling at them not to do it changed their minds
You raise money to pay for costs of running the business. If you couldn't raise money, then only people who are already extremely rich would be able to start a business of any size, let alone one that requires deploying physical hardware in multiple regions. Good luck getting even four regions for less than $1M. The world would be far worse off if all tech businesses had to be bootstrapped.

That being said, there's certainly many businesses that raised too much money based on bullshit, had the founders take money off the top, and then have to drastically change to become sustainable, especially in the ZIRP era. But I don't see that happening here.
As a chat system workplace is inferior to slack. Discovery and organisation of chats are hard, especially group chats that would normally be a channel.

However the combination of the "newsgroup" and chat makes it kinda better than slack on it's own.

Would I use workplace at a new startup? probably not. I would use slack though.
I’ve been using since beta. It’s really smooth and pretty comparable to Bitwarden. It’s doesn’t have notes and such yet but it’s going to be a good competitor. I don’t think it’s open source so may not exactly be a good replacement for Bitwarden.
Like those "WARNING: This product can expose you to [name of chemical], which is known to the State of California to cause cancer. For more information, go to www.P65Warnings.ca.gov." stickers. Fortunately I don't live in California.
Experimental drug could offer more weight loss than any drug now on the market
You don't gave to, but it makes it easier. New tools that helps my work makes me happy.
Still doesn’t invalidate the fact that it’s a lot of surface area to hide a targeted attack.
I didn’t argue for it or make any claim, you’re way distorting what I said which is just that shooting down the simplest form of alien arguments doesn’t shoot them all down, and offered two.

The many-worlds quantum interpretations have many curious advocates within physics.

There are now multiple senators and high level military officers confirming this explicitly as well, so that’s also wrong on your part.
80% of bugs come back to memory safety… don’t think it’s overselling it.

Sure other language can do better here too, but you’re not just getting memory safety from Rust.
> Quite a few of those ~1 million lines seem to be in libc-type wrappers, which is roughly analogous to libc for C (which also isn't included).

I didn't know that Rust programs run without a libc.
That seems like the same difficult process, just without paying.
People need to be able to just get their docker image from dockerhub or similar
Perhaps what's needed is hibernation for apps? Just let all apps run forever and swap them out to disk when not in use. Hibernate the whole system instead of shutting it down while at it.
It's worse. For a 16 vCPU + 32GB RAM + 20TB traffic (fly.io has max 8 vCPU) I would pay around $750 on fly.io instead of €30 on Hetzner. People are willing to pay a lot for I guess an easy deploy story ?
Yep, the key to meditation is to reduce your distractions, and dealing with the remaining ones in a calm and unperturbed fashion.

There are some apps which purport to aid meditation in unobtrusive ways, such as playing background SFX, or simply bells to alert you that you're done. But that means your phone is on and DND is off, so you've already fallen for the trap.

Best thing to do is turn off phone and other devices. Sit in a quiet room with gentle lighting. You can't prevent all distractions, but with some practice, you'll be able to continue meditating without having your vibe broken.

I've seen people deep in prayer in a church and someone will try to interrupt them, and they stoically remain as they are. Usually it doesn't take much for the interlocutor to realize they've been rude and they go away. With our distractable culture these days, that sort of impenetrability and concentration is an asset that carries over into whatever you plan to accomplish.
That alternative only works in the absence of competitors who raise capital to pursue more rapid growth. It is an arms race to an extent, but if you don't play the game then you may get locked out.
You're right that in plain English, "compare" is a perfectly adequate word in this context. However, the person I replied to wasn't quite satisfied with it: they felt the need to add "(negatively)". I was trying to give them a more idiomatic word / phrasing that would add the extra rhetorical emphasis they were looking for.
> My new heuristic is that I avoid every single company that raises venture funding.

This is not what curiosity looks like, is my point.
It is here, right now. They are actively collecting this data as using it extra judicially to convict people of crimes.

You feel fine about all this because it does not affect you. Yet.

And the person who you are responding to is encrypting everything, which google, facebook ,et all are not doing.
Voice search gets better results than text
Mentioned in this WSJ article:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/search-engines-results-dictate-...
I have this shell function defined:

csv_to_json () {
python -c 'import csv, json, sys; print(json.dumps([dict(r) for r in csv.DictReader(sys.stdin)]))' | jq .
}

It converts a csv to a json list of objects, mapping column names to values. I find it way easier to then operate on json by filtering with jq or gron, or just pasting it into other tools for post-processing. The jq at the end isn't necessary but makes for nice formatting!
Further, it seems like these highly integrated “app platforms as a service” have been the primary type of dev tool that VCs are drawn too given the complete vendor lock in they provide/demand. It worked for squarespace, wix, Shopify, et al. Vercel has a softer sell on this, and firebase was one of the first to offer a fully managed database in this space.

My hot take is that these platforms are relying on an influx of new developers who need a friction free way to build and deploy applications to learn and showcase while selling to companies that don’t have time or budget to create a full dev team and CI/CD environment, creating both sides of supply and demand. Pricing is engineered in a way such that it gets very expensive the moment before companies notice how much cost it incurs but the cost to switch aways is much higher.

I agree with the heuristic of avoiding VC-backed products, it fosters incentives that often leave otherwise loyal customers holding the bag for a product who price does not match the service provided. It is for this reason I consider high vendor-lock-in products rather insidious.
C. S. Lewis: “When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/84171-critics-who-treat-adu...
"We make decent margins right now" - Funding and longevity [0] (a post from July 2021).

[0] https://community.fly.io/t/funding-and-longevity/1957
Doesn’t matter. It’s still quite a big haystack to hide some tactical needles here and there.
That's backwards. Profitability at scale is about the _only_ way for a cloud provider to be profitable. There's a reason you don't see a bunch of small cloud providers, the economics only work at scale.
You're probably running into this: https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/7058

`cargo vendor` will download dependencies and dev dependencies for all platforms, which leads to a lot of unused code being pulled in. In this case, the Windows API and Microsoft compiler wrappers.

In this instance, during the build process "tempfile" is used as a dev-dependency, which has a runtime dependency on windows-sys when compiling Windows binaries. I'm not entirely sure why (commenting it out in Cargo.toml doesn't seem to break the build).

After commenting it out and manually removing the spurious Windows API files as well as the unrelated packages (`cd vendor; rm -rf ctor diff output_vt100 pretty_assertions proc-macro2 quote syn unicode-ident yansi win*`), I get the following results:

0.0358 secs
┌───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
| Language files size blank comment code |
├───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
| Bash 3 939.00 B 7 2 30 |
| C 1 1.31 KB 5 6 44 |
| C Header 1 226.00 B 0 0 7 |
| D 15 31.75 KB 32 0 143 |
| JSON 22 39.69 KB 0 0 22 |
| Markdown 16 53.46 KB 425 0 1054 |
| Rust 396 4.98 MB 13852 9502 131650 |
| Shell 5 2.24 KB 11 18 50 |
| Toml 14 9.60 KB 54 61 319 |
| Yaml 2 10.14 KB 70 0 341 |
├───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
| Sum 475 5.13 MB 14456 9589 133660 |
└───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

As a comparison, this is the output for https://github.com/sudo-project/sudo:

0.0439 secs
┌───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
| Language files size blank comment code |
├───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
| Autoconf 124 1.90 MB 2618 4317 59031 |
| C 365 4.20 MB 15977 22626 111340 |
| C Header 90 1.14 MB 1816 4911 18803 |
| JSON 7 9.22 KB 0 0 236 |
| Markdown 10 133.62 KB 676 0 2498 |
| Pascal 3 33.63 KB 79 0 925 |
| Perl 2 12.81 KB 54 83 306 |
| Plain Text 1 15.00 B 0 0 1 |
| Protocol Buffer 2 5.54 KB 22 0 185 |
| Python 10 26.41 KB 152 259 295 |
| Shell 77 358.96 KB 1589 2534 8961 |
| Yaml 4 7.98 KB 16 38 205 |
├───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
| Sum 695 7.81 MB 22999 34768 202786 |
└───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

It should be noted that the sudo project's dependencies and autogenerated code aren't included in this overview
Even on an M2 Mac Spotlight takes a second or two to appear after you hit the shortcut. Apple notes takes an absurd 8 seconds to start. Apple music and Spotify are also take seconds to start. Skype takes 10 seconds.

I'm very happy with my M2 Mac. It's a giant leap forward in performance and battery life. But Electron is a giant leap backward of similar magnitude.
You can build a small ship and a track record of profitable trade with the next port, then the next country over before undertaking an ocean crossing.
We'll be hiring for many of these positions again shortly. We weren't funding constrained, just people constrained; there are whole sprawling threads on HN about how annoyed we managed to make some people (a small minority of applicants, but that doesn't make it any easier for us to metabolize) with our responsiveness in our hiring process. We halted most hiring to retool and nail down hiring processes, and also to onboard all the people we hired (so they can help us do more hiring stuff).

Raising lots of money to hire 2 people is a funny flex, so I sort of wanted to leave this unanswered, but I also don't want to miss an opportunity to put on a hairshirt and talk about things we fucked up.
FB's log shipping and parsing is much better than "industry" however we ship billions of logs to get a metric, because the internal graphite service isn't easy to use. and unidash really sucks compared to grafana for non-SQL based metric discovery and prototyping.
While I'm not religious, everything else in this wonderfully written, honest article mirrors much of my own past and psychological development.
Why can't I deny that it is readable and reviewable? I don't think it is, basically at all. It gets evangelized as if it is but I have yet to see a compelling argument that can convince me. I've had the displeasure of having to dive into some codebases and I specifically hate it for that reason.
PSA: Brandon Nozaki Miller appears to now be pretending his account was hacked
For those of you not aware, Brandon Nozaki Miller (aka RIAEvangelist) decided to protest the war in Ukrainian by launching a supply chain attack. After waiting for a while it appears he has adopted a new strategy of pretending that his account was actually hacked and someone else committed this crime [1]. He has recently started getting active again so beware.

If you are currently using node-ipc it would be a good idea to switch to the fork [2].

[1] https://github.com/achrinza/node-ipc/issues/44
[2] https://github.com/achrinza/node-ipc
Why are there so few of us :(

Besides, I think the sentiment that if it isn't flat and minimalistic then it is old-fashioned, betrays a bizarre lack of imagination on designers' part. Any time I mention skeuomorphism, 2.5D, shadows, density etc, people say I live in the 90s. Why? Are these features so onerous that one cannot conceive of a modern, or even trend-setting design that employs them? To me, this seems ludicrous. Designers brag about innovation and creativity. OK, then, here is a challenge: stop aping Apple and design tomorrow's skeuomorphic, dense, slick, rich Desktop UI.
Or maybe 20 customers who believe that having a shared ship might form a join stock company to take care of their respective 5%... and when the venture proves itself, they might convert it to a publicly traded company and let it scale up with demand.
If you want good integrity controls, treating the CA bundles as secrets (e.g., storing them in k8s secrets or something like Vault) can help there. We don't actually care much about confidentiality controls, but any secret manager worth its salt is going to have integrity controls as well. This gives you easy updates and lets you reuse containers across environments while remaining defensive against attackers adding their own CA to the store.
karma farming?
> It’s not secrecy that has prevented proliferation, it’s carrots and sticks that has.

Secrecy increases the cost, so it is, in effect, part of the “stick” end of the carrots and sticks. If there hadn’t been secrecy, would the return to sanity that stopped the South American nuclear arms race been too late? Secrecy should not be dismissed.
Walking and cycling go hand in hand in terms of neighborhood design and land use.

I guess a more accurate descriptor is “non car dependent living”.
Millions isn't really a high bar for revenue in software
I agree, but there are very real costs to having teams (at different levels) doing different things. A team with 8 people in-office and 2 people WFH is pretty crappy. The in-office people end up feeling put-upon to have to go out of the way to include the WFH people in things, and the WFH people inevitably end up feeling left out of a lot of things, because they are. At the very lowest level, it works best to have a single team all working the same way. At some level up the hierarchy it becomes more ok to have a mix; if five teams are collaborating, it doesn't matter so much whether two of them are in-office and the other three are WFH focused.
That's pretty good indeed! I don't like the keyboard layout (I want my delete key!). But that's a minor inconvenience compared to how good the machine appears to run Linux.
Finally my patent for cowcatchers that work inside the train will pay off!
These kinds of realizations have made me look into permacomputing [1], suckless [2] and related fields of research and development in the past few months.

We should be getting so much more from our hardware! Let's not settle for software that makes us feel bad.

[1] http://www.permacomputing.net/

[2] https://suckless.org/
I went a while ago to the same museum. Jean-François Millet's work is in the basement there, as he's one of Van Gogh's inspirations. Millet's work is all dreary peasants toiling in the bleak fields, really grim and depressing stuff, and I would probably never look twice at it online.

Then you get to see his work up close. It's outstanding. It's jaw-droppingly beautiful and intricate. Some of the pieces absolutely overwhelmed me. His paintings are mostly done with a line technique, where he'll paint lines over and over again until the canvas is complete with a comprehensible picture. I'm not sure what it is about screens, but they just don't convey the detail properly at all. On his wikipedia page, Millet's work appears to me as the bleak flat paintings I'd have ignored before I saw his work in person - copies of the exact same paintings I'd seen in person, which overwhelmed me.

I don't really understand why, but there's something fundamentally different about seeing some art in person.