skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Bracing for Traffic
With a bit of luck and the arrival of some stickers, I’ll be launching a website for my wife this week, who has Polycystic Kidney Disease. We’re looking for a living donor, and I’ve put a website together to funnel people into our hospital’s donor intake system. This is about as much as I personally can do besides raise awareness: I tried to donate my own kidney but found out I have a disqualifying structural abnormality with my own kidneys. I’ll be fine.

In addition to my own (middling, 110-follower) social media, lI’m budgeting for getting Cameos from one or two of her favorite actors mentioning the site and using those for sponsored Instagram posts focusing on our local area, along with free stickers and yard signs. I’m hoping we get enough traction that maybe maybe maybe we get a local news segment. What I’m worried about, ironically, is if that segment gets picked up nationally, or goes viral or whatever, and the website gets hugged to death. Our donor can actually be anywhere in North America.

So, I wanted this website to be high-performing and fast with near-zero infrastructure to worry about. The single-page site is vanilla HTML, CSS, and a tiny bit of JavaScript served from an AWS CloudFront distribution with an S3 bucket as its origin. The whole payload is 435K, and most of that is images and a font from Typekit (or Adobe Fonts or whatever it is now). Security certificates are all from AWS. Mail for the domain is being handled by a paid ImprovMX account routing to my Gmail (where I’ve got rules and things set up). The image of my wife is print-resolution for a single newspaper column, more or less. The mailing address is a UPS Store mailbox. Responsive design for mobile. High-contrast colors for accessibility. Perhaps it goes without saying, but my wife and I don’t have an expectation of total privacy during this period of our lives, but we would like to maintain our physical safety.

These are all the things I could think of, but my question is: What am I forgetting? If this website gets picked up by the New York Times, what technical fires am I going to be putting out? There is a near-zero chance this will happen, but near zero is nonzero, and every pair of eyeballs we get is connected to a pair of kidneys that might be a match.

Thanks in advance for your help! And you if you feel called to, please share: https://www.michelleneedsakidney.org/
The article is from 2021, can we add “(2021)” to the title?
MuseScore is one of those services that can benefit from the fact that a really good subscription service to the main publishers legit catalogues of sheet music simply doesn't exist.

Instrumental sheet music subscription service seems like an industry ripe for disruption.
Interesting -- having not had any experience inside Google I'm having difficulty painting a picture, could you give an example or two of some of these internal coups?
https://archive.is/kOzz7
Hard for it to be "ubiquitous" when 99% of schools would be risking everything to attempt it.
The key here is that it’s designed to deal with flaky and changing network connections, CGNAT, and small devices running on batteries.

It also runs great on big servers with public IPs! But you can use it on your phone without turning your phone into a hand warmer.
This was the ELI5 part. Of course that the wiring of the ifs is as importany as the quantity of ifs
I've always found it weird that people seem to obsess so much on how Google does things. From hiring to writing code and tooling.

Google is so much not like any other company, especially 20 employee startups. Trying to apply their recipes to 99% of companies is solving problems that don't exist and most likely creating new ones you don't need to deal with.
Thanks a lot for the pointer, looks like I need to front AWS with such a service.
> That basically forces every app company to make sure their main domain at least has an AAAA record that goes somewhere

They don't require that. They just require that it works on an IPv6-only network with some kind of NAT64/DNS64-type gateway.

I.e. they require that apps aren't manually using IPv4 addresses internally but either are using the OS APIs that protocol-agnostic, or doing the right thing manually.
"As a group they tend to be great Americans"

There is not a single group of Central Americans that have positive fiscal impact over their lifetime. Their kids are also not becoming doctors and engineers.
Maybe the article fails recognize that “being smart and innovative” is an ability too and it’s praise-worthy.

> Results are what matter in the end, and I think clever shortcuts are as praiseworthy as hard work. Later in life, people don't get paid for effort

I generally don’t agree with this. Result is all that matters but count many times you can get it with clever shortcuts, most time efforts do pay off and get you what you want. Praising clever shortcuts can encourage cheating that what I fear the most. Once that gets into your mind, hard to get out
Telephone numbers used to be short. Say 4 numbers - from 0000 to 9999.
Then it was extended to 6 numbers so 000 000 to 999 999.

Why couldnt do the old IP address space just be extended to have more octets? 16 octets instead of 4?

Obviously the old stuff wouldnt work but translation (when needed - similar to NAT) would be relatively easy.

Sinct you dont seem to grasp it:

Old adress 1.2.3.4

New: 1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8.9.10.11.12.13.14.15.16

IP6 is unreadable for humans. Having 8 or 16 or whatever amount of octets would be easier to read or explain on the phone.

Hardware had to be changed for IP6 as well so why do you even talk about hardware?

And one could do some magic by trunctuating new address to old to make old software work.
There are also more and more people getting paid for doing open source work.
Thanks for you perspective, Mike. Completely agree that the interface between data and code should be handled by a single tool. That tool must meet some minimum complexity, because it’s solving a very hard problem! Also just want to say that my team has benefited greatly from your work on SQLAlchemy, and we appreciate you immensely!
We all test in production but some people are in denial and refuse to accept it.
CA lawmakers want to make social media safer for the people. Can they succeed?
Too abstract to make an interesting Manga character. Shiva has so many visible/human characteristics that make him fascinating.
Last I talked to people about Apple's internal tooling, it was still pretty fragmented between different organizations.

I was told about e.g. multiple internal CI/build systems because one org didn't want to rely on the other, so they both built their own little software stacks.

That's a bit different than what I've heard from meta/google/amazon who seem to be more open to running centralized internal services
What, those are rookie numbers! I opened a pull request 13 business days ago. I even rebased it multiple times when conflicting code was otherwise merged. There’s been no feedback whatsoever. Everyone even remotely involved is now on vacation.

(It’s not like I care either, the project sucks anyway.)
Interesting! TIL!
Oxidation causes CDs to rot even if you don't play them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_rot#Causes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_disc#Integrity

If you play a vinyl record enough to wear it out, at least you listened to it a lot before it wore out. With CDs, you might never listen to the music even once and come back years later to find it has destroyed itself.
Mobile operators want to deploy something like NAT64/DNS64 and they're the ones pressuring Apple.

You app can require access to IPv4-only servers, as long as if your app looks up the DNS and finds a 64: AAAA record it will connect to that. That is fine by Apple.
You're not wrong. Google gets to sidestep a lot of problems other lower-margin companies have because they've spent their whole history being near market-leader on search and ads. Things like "deadlines" were foreign to the company for a long time; when you're already the pack leader, you release new features when you feel like it, not to play catch-up with competitors. You can see them struggle in spaces where that's not true (Cloud, for example).

There is one underlying technology special sauce they refined to an art form, which is building a reliable system on incredibly unreliable components. This comes from their inception when the two guys building out the company knew how to write code but not build custom machines; their initial attempts at racks (hard drives and motherboards mounted to flexible plywood) are hilarious-looking by modern standards and broke down all the time, so they had to learn how to write software that was fault-tolerant at every link in the chain. That resulted in building an infrastructure that was extremely supportive of experimentation (if the system can survive half of it disappearing, it can survive a software bug crashing half the machines), and the rest of the shape of the company kind of flows from that.

It is worth repeating a lot that most companies do not operate at the scale or constraints Google does, and their approach to engineering is emphatically not one-size-fits-all.
Thanks for sharing! I'll wait till it's on chrome store cuz I'm lazy and don't use Twitter.
I've been experimenting with using local LLMs (Llama of course) and building d&d games for my kids (not multiplayer but we just pass the phone around in the car so each kid can have a turn talking to the DM). It's going surprisingly well, and has been a fun way to explain LLMs and the tech behind them. I wrote up the initial experiences here:

https://blog.katarismo.com/2023-05-26-i-m-a-dad-i-replaced-m...

I'm doing all of it in JavaScript. I'm still not excited about langchain, and the JS version is lagging a lot from the python version. By the way, pocketbase is amazing for something like that.
Lot of crossover.

Libertarians typically don't get a candidate into the election, so they end up voting Republican.

In the Venn Diagram, Libertarians are a sub-set of Republicans.

Republican views are also administration dependent.

If there is a Democratic President then Republicans think government is evil, socialist and place a high value on reducing the debt, reducing the size of government.

But if a Republican is president, then debt no longer matters, increasing spending on defense, walls, and having a 'strong government of law and order' is the priority. So debt is ok, and the bigger the gov the better. It's a bit schizophrenic.
How so?

https://docs.flutter.dev/ui/layout/tutorial#step-2-implement...

There's not even a JS alternative required here, this step is showing purely an HTML & CSS alternative?

Flutter in my mind is 'competing' with Tauri or Electron, which give me an HTML/CSS/JS (or any equivalent traditional web) frontend cross-platform. But I haven't actually used Flutter (or Dart), just looked at docs, so maybe I'm wrong?
I also became a guy who "solve problems" at a church that I volunteer as the media/AV/computer/tech guy. If the audio sounds weird in our live production or if the wedge speaker sounds too quiet or if the youtube stream looked too dark, I'm not going to say that we need to increase gain level on mic, change EQ to prevent feedback, change ISO setting on camera, etc. Instead, I'd tell them that I'd make some changes in the sound mixer and also adjust some settings in camera to fix those issues. I just tell them just enough for the audience/client/people to understand, without having to burden them with unnecessary detail.
Having some marine background the first sentence confused me, I didn't realize people use the crab mascot for rust so much to use evolutionary terms. But there is already a term for the "opposite" of carcinization, it's just decarcinization. This analogy can come full circle if the next variant of this language uses the coconut crab or a hermit crab as its mascot.
For reference this is the form for requesting motor vehicle records in Kansas [0]

It asks for "your" information to find the record, but based on the allowed uses you can definitely get records for other people. I would say a journalist accessing DUI records would fall under permitted use case M. That accessing this is identity theft is a farcical claim.

[0] https://www.kansas.gov/ssrv-mvr-ltd/
CoreWar, Crobots, and RoboWar, 3 I remember discovering in 1990, fun times.
Yep! The Python API is the first one released, but it’s a wrapper around Veilid’s own JSON API. You can talk to a Veilid node using any language that speaks JSON.
That was a really interesting. I do worry about the effect of sort of aggregating forces impact on places where content is created. We've seen it with news and etc already.

Having said that with Stack Overflow the real reason I hit ChatGPT first in many cases is FRICTION. The UI, the users, the answers that are technically correct but "weird". It's a lot of filtering I have to do as a user that I don't do with ChatGPT or other AI tools.
How did they achieve monopoly if it weren't for the quality?
For all of this, Google doesn’t create very good products anymore. This is a guide that came into being _after_ Google was successful. It’s not _why_ Google became successful.

Yes, if you have a mountain of money and a horde of underutilized employees, it’s easy to gold plate your engineering and navel-gaze at your biases.
I'm always happy to drop links to my free (beer) books, no SEO, DRM, ads, or tracking. Simply knowledge for the sake of knowledge.

But it's kinda OT on this thread and feels too much like blatant self-promotion, so I'll refrain. :)
What are you talking about?

GCP support in Flutter is excellent. You know… because Google…
Show HN: Watermelon – Source-available passive documentation search engine
Hey there HN! We're a pair of devs and we are looking to get feedback for our source-available passive documentation search engine.

Passive documentation is the code context devs are generating as they talk about code in systems such as GitHub, Slack, Notion and Jira. Our search engine serves both our IDE extension (for individuals) and GitHub app (for teams).

As devs we know that there are certain PRs that stay unmerged for weeks or even months, not because of the technical complexity, but because of the debate that they produce around changes in the business logic: "Will this change really improve our metrics?" We know that non-technical stakeholders (managers and designers) can bring a more holistic view to these debates but code review is too technical for them. So we decided to build this with the premise of "let's contextualize devs with business logic".

We’re starting with a GitHub app that contextualizes Pull Requests with pieces of related passive documentation. Our big vision is to build a copilot for engineering leaders, starting by automating code review. If we're already indexing passive documentation tied to a new PR, we suspect that we can provide a "first health check" to a PR and say whether or not it's meeting the business requirements.

Here's the repo if you want to check it out: https://github.com/watermelontools/watermelon

And here's a blog post explaining why we made our search engine source-available: https://www.watermelontools.com/post/promoting-openness-star...

Please give us your feedback! Thanks.
"Try That In A Small Town"

<Edit>

Need to explain reference.

There is a video :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1_RKu-ESCY

It kind of glorifies small town justice/vigilantism. Like, the rest of the country is falling apart, but the small town wouldn't let that happen (wink, wink).

https://www.npr.org/2023/07/20/1188966935/jason-aldean-try-t...

But then the original post, story about small town sheriff raiding a newspaper kind of shows indications of small town corruption.

So the point is about the dichotomy of 'small towns' being pure and glorifying taking "American Justice" into their own hands, and also how they can corrupt those same values.

The original post is a counter story about how things can go wrong there too. You can have small town 'justice' also take the form of actions that go against American Values like freedom of speech.
Hi! I've worked a lot with ML algorithms, and I believe this is tied in with regret. Not only do huge steps (after an initial warmup) get to a rough minimum faster, due to the energy involved, the minimum found tends to be more shallow, because the parameters jitter around so much during training.

It sort of makes sense too as you're approaching a finite goal in an optimization problem -- first, tiny steps to take any initial steps that might be huge due to any initialization differences, then annealing up to huge steps, then small steps again as you approach the end of your optimization process, and your signal:noise ratio is much lower.
Yeah, those things are called "user settings". If you need them, you need them, but pretending they are feature flags and trying to port the flags development methods into your settings will lead to nothing but tears.
Sometimes, especially if you're on the mobile version of the site, the video will be an actual <video> tag you can open in another tab.

Also, the "Open With"[0] browser extension can detect a video/frame's URL when you right click on it, if you want to use that to quickly open it in yt-dlp/mpv.

0: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/open-with/
This page crashes Google Chrome
We added an AbortSignal (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/AbortSignal) to our frontend and noticed that Chrome started randomly crashing occasionally for engineers on our team.

At first we thought it was just bad luck, but after it kept happening after for a week we investigated. After managing to debug Chrome itself we narrowed it down to the 'abort' event on an AbortSignal. It seems that attaching an 'abort' handler in a certain way, and then aborting the signal, causes a hard crash of the content process.

Source code: https://github.com/calebj0seph/chrome-crash/blob/main/index....

Bug report: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=147273...
Nomad has more in common with Borg than Kubernetes does. The scaling limits are very real, not hypothetical.
>> Something is only an actual risk if it hurts the bottom-line.

Sometimes not even that. We have see many huge breakdowns in recent years that did hit bottom lines, but didn't impact stock prices. Perhaps, at least for a publicly-traded company, the only real risks are those that might impact stock prices. That might include things that hurt other companies if doing so might result in money leaving the entire sector.
How have layoffs impact group psychological safety?
It's not incompatible, but making money hand over fist can hide many problems.
I hope you experience unconditional love someday. I spent my whole life thinking, like you, that it wasn't real. That opinion was largely formed from infancy, by someone who did use it as you describe, to inflate his own beneficence at my expense.

All I can say is that I was completely and totally wrong about the nature of love (and, as I found out from that later, actually of the world). I don't think I could have understood that from someone's internet post about it. I may even have read their description of it as a condescending condemnation.

But it might have helped me hold out hope for what I now know to be true, hearing someone else insist it was real, against the unequivocal evidence of my entire life. And that hope would have been worth having.
The splash page says that Learndb supports the following: select, from, where, group by, having, limit, order by

I dont see "JOIN" there.

So either the DB doesnt support it or the documentation (on the splash page!) is wrong.

Thanks for the downvote.
> just that our hardware never developed any tech where writes are as cheap as reads. Or even close. I wonder if that’s theoretically possible.

I had it in my head that modern flash actually does read in a way that involves writing, and we just paper over that for the sake of the abstractions we use. Am I wildly misremembering?
I think you're forgetting the most important aspect of the show: the entire series was plotted out before the first episode was shot, which allowed for things like foreshadowing and multi-season story arcs that could be more "fundamental" because they weren't ad-hoc.
I completely agree with you. Every single time someone says: “Just write your own abstraction over an sql generator ”, it eventually devolves into a full blown ORM.

I swear the majority of these opinion posts against ORMs are from people who must have worked in a badly implemented project that left them with a bad experience and they blamed the pattern rather than the technology.

One of the best bits about an ORM is making it consistent for non-db users on the team to simply grok and work with, without creating monstrous and hard to debug joins everywhere. But when badly set up it can lead to a lot of debugging spaghetti. Which is the same as can happen with SQL but I suppose people think that at least there’s one less layer to debug while ignoring the problem is actually how they got where they are and not the technology

I switched a project from manually written sql to sql alchemy on a project that’s used by multiple Oscar nominated films daily for reviews. The SQL version was gross and impossible for the team to manage because it had bloated over the years, with no nice way to detangle the statement generations and joins. SQL Alchemy made it so any one of the technical directors on the team could step in and add new functionality, without serious performance footguns. Instead of me having to clean up bad sql every year (projects would fork per film and merge at the end) to keep performance up, I could trust the ORM to do that for me.

At its worst, it was way too easy for TDs to get the raw SQL to be tens of minutes per review session by structuring their logic incorrectly, but it was so difficult to see. Switching to an ORM meant I could get the performance down to seconds per session and they couldn’t destroy the performance in subtle ways.
Medical evidence doesn't support screening for that type of congenital heart defect unless the patient has some specific symptoms or risk factors.

https://www.healthcare.gov/preventive-care-adults/

There is no reliable evidence that going for regular doctor visits improves outcomes for healthy adults. Obviously if someone has a known heart condition then their doctors may recommend more frequent follow-up care but for the rest of us the old recommendation to get an annual physical exam no longer applies.

https://time.com/5095920/annual-physical-exam/
Is this at Google, or elsewhere? If it's at Google I'd be happy to try to persuade you via chat :)

If elsewhere, I think there are 2 kinds of tool: those developed by individuals/small groups in informal ways, some of these are bad, but much like with open-source tools, the ones that are good survive and become popular. The other type is those with more formal backing, dedicated dev/design/UX/PM resources, and those are good at surveying users to figure out what the right problem to solve is, so they're normally pretty good, and when they're not, they still accept fixes (I regularly contribute fixes to other teams codebases when I find issues).
So-called "intellectual property" is no property at all but a government-protected monopoly on distribution. You do not "own" copyright. This monopoly isn't free for society - both the enforcement and the loss due to restrictions on other peoples basic rights (namely, freedom of speech).
There are dozens of dozens of optimizers. Almost every single one of them claims superiority. Some of them, like MADGRAD, are great. But sticking with the basics is pretty good in my experience.
Can somebody post the job position here?
And in the case of merge conflicts, steamroll your changes over everyone else's, as you know what's best and everybody else is wrong.