skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
both vpn service and web browser are commodities, giving me a dedicated browser was a trigger for me to learn about them and buy their vpn service. I love that i can login with 1 number. So I think the future is bright for companies that can create differentiation like that
The Engadget article is a remarkably unhelpful summary, unfortunately, since they imply that there's actually some kind of textual analysis going on.
"Investors" seems like a remarkably generous, possible dishonest framing of these people. After all if this was really an investment, why was it totally unregulated?
Yes and no. Yes, all terraform does is wrap APIs and you could easily write a Terraform provider for just about anything.

But there is a very real difference between "Deploying a server" and "Modifying configuration files on that server". The former used to require actual physical actions in a data center and it's only in the world of modern virtualization and clouds that it has become possible to do it through an API. Where as the latter used to require secure access to an individual physical machine, often over SSH after someone had done the physical work of setting it up. Again, it's only in the world of modern virtualization and clouds that you can start to do that through APIs.

It is only modern clouds that has blurred the lines between these two by abstracting away the difference between the physical server and the software running on it behind APIs.

Conceptually, it can still useful to think of "infrastructure orchestration" and "configuration management" as different things and different categories. Like I said, in many cases cloud offerings significantly reduce the utility of those categorizations - because they often abstract both steps behind a unified API where you are launching virtual infrastructure (still largely using the same conceptions that were used when it was physical) and defining its configuration at the same time through the same interface.

None of this is marketing speak. It's just definitions and categorizations. Sometimes useful, sometimes not. And all of it is orthogonal to what terraform does do or should do. Whether or not terraform is "infrastructure orchestration", "configuration management" or both is neither here nor there for the definition of those terms and considerations of their utility.
> Filling the plane can easily take 20 minutes - which in a half hour turnaround is often the critical path

can you really reduce it that much, given that the plane needs to be refueled, cargo unloaded and reloaded, etc? like it may be the case that while it's inconvenient for passengers, the airline doesn't really care because it takes them a half hour to turn the plane around on the tarmac side anyway, so there's no benefit from reducing the passenger loading time.
Voting machine, weighing machine, all that jazz. Lots of unsophisticated money out there. Tell me about the investing prowess of Masayoshi Son or the Saudi sovereign fund.

If you want to hear the gods laugh, tell them your valuation and projections.
People are starting a lot of fires in the Pacific Northwest
Apple is an incredibly heterogeneous company and conditions from interview practices to tech stacks vary incredibly from team to team.
> In a brief submitted on behalf of the publishers, the Authors Guild argued that Kahle and supporters of the Internet Archive need to "recognize that rights available to owners of physical books simply did not make sense in the digital era," the Times summarized. Digital content is inherently different from print "because it is infinitely copyable and unprotectable," said copyright lawyer Mary Rasenberger, the chief executive of the guild. If "anyone could call themselves a library" and operate like the archive did when they shared copies of physical books, "writers would have absolutely no control over their work anymore," she added.

This has always struck me as a weird argument. Digital does not make copying infinite any more than the Gutenberg printing press made copying infinite. What both inventions did was make copying more democratic, and the instruments of the state and the creative industry had to spend time and money bringing it back under control. "Unprotectable" is a particularly strange argument because part of the CDL scheme literally involved wrapping all the lended-out ebooks with DRM, specifically so that they couldn't be copied further.

What IA (and ReDigi before it) wanted was a world in which copies made to effect the same rights that are associated with physical sale - and no further - were legal. The world in which the publishers and the law lives in is one where burning a book and then printing out a replacement copy is infringing. Which is stupid and petty. Publishers want to point out that the fragility of physical media was the price paid for first sale, but digital copies are similarly fragile. In fact, they're even more fragile because they die when the DRM server they're locked to gets shut down. And nobody was actually delicately balancing fragility against author's rights when first sale was put into caselaw. They were balancing author's rights against owner's rights.

Writers having absolutely no control over their work is laughable. First, because you are publishers. Your business model literally involves taking control away from writers and putting it in the hands of professional marketers and salespeople. Second, because the IA CDL theory doesn't actually take any more control away than what first sale did. You're angry that the 50-year-old campaign you mounted to completely strip everyone of ownership might have been slightly slowed by your own DRM tools.

Anyway, rant over, I'm just glad they decided not to completely burn down the Internet Archive. I can only imagine the RIAA is going to have even more mind-irritating arguments.
I dunno, but it's certainly higher than a bald assertion about something that is a factual matter. And move the goalposts? You made specific claims about Nanci Pelosi and the liberal establishment. Plus I think it's interesting that you claim liberals opened a spigot of money without mentioning the Federal Reserve's zero rate interest policy of more than a decades standing under both Obama and Trump appointed Fed Chairs. That might have had something to do with junky startups getting funding, and why the funding dried up and a lot of startups went south when the interest rates went up.
Open Previews – Preview Comments that run anywhere
This is a pretty egregious violation of HN's "don't editorialize in titles" rule.
This reminds me of the last time this came up in some committee and senior politicians were complaining how the app is just full of dancing teenage boys. It’s not. As a longtime user of both, I’d say the content is comparable, except on TikTok you can’t drag out a video to 10 minutes to make a bit more money. Also, all ads are skippable.
Seriously.

Although I would like to discourage anyone from getting a Eureka (Silenzio). grind retention is insane on those, and the higher priced models are the same flawed grinder with more LCD screens.
Good on them although I feel like including Amazon in the suit is a standard money-hungry lawyer play. Amazon just vends network connectivity via a mesh net, but obviously happens to have deep pockets so they’re an attractive target.
I support the ban. It’s potentially a mouthpiece for China. I see Chinese propaganda in my feed today. Mostly benign cultural garbage - here learn Chinese from some lady with a beauty filter - here let’s see how great the workers in luxury furniture factory live in our communist paradise, and then see the bosses new mansion.

Of course the tool can be gradually weaponized to push a Chinese agenda in their Taiwanese battle.

Should be banned today.

Alternate platforms will arise to fill the space, which aren’t CCP aligned.
Title ought to be changed.

Article title: State Water Official Who Delayed Water Release Has Been Reassigned
In late 80s you'd still have a significant cost difference between 8 (or 16) bit CPUs and more powerful ones like the 68K. 10k or 100k transistors mattered a lot.

These days most smaller cores are integrated with peripherals, which can easily take the bulk of the silicon area (+cost). Then it's effectively free to tack on a small 32 bit core like Cortex-Mx (or even small 64b core). Why bother with 8/16 bit one?

I suspect RISC-V may eat a lot of that market in years ahead.

For components where CPU core is a good portion of the silicon (microcontrollers, RFID tags, toys, etc etc), that may be different. That's why many old 8/16 bit architectures are still around in one form or another.
I use Windows every day at home and work. It’s far from perfect.

Linux, in my personal experience, requires faaaaaaar more debugging and tinkering and configuring. A full order of magnitude more time spent at least. This time is reduced if you’ve been using and configuring Linux boxes for 20 years. YMMV.

Now if you want to configure every little thing maybe that’s a good thing. If you want your computer to work consistently and without tinkering it’s maybe a bad thing.

And Windows + Visual Studio is still the best debugging experience for native code.
well it also works this way.
You don't need one, it's just a convenience feature in addition to the other indicators, alongside other Bluetooth features like anti theft.

Also that stuff is not always done by the same people doing more meaningful things. I could easily build a Bluetooth charger. I could probably teach a beginner to design that kind of thing in months.

I couldn't do the same for a solar inverter that was any better than existing stuff though. I couldn't figure out the DSP involved in making a better pacemaker. I'm not a mechanical engineer, so I couldn't do anything to make the physical part of a tool better, except by adding more software self protection for it. If I worked at a tool company, what could I be doing instead of Bluetooth?
And Romero just published his own autobiography: Doom Guy: Life in First Person. Haven't read it yet but looks promising!
Except you are ignoring energy storage losses for BEVs. Take that into account and it drops to the same level as doing it with hydrogen. It also helps to stop living in the past with hydrogen. Efficiencies are significantly better than you are admitting.
>You’re a wage slave when you work for yourself too, probably even more so.

It certainly can be like that especially early on. Hopefully you would grow enough to hire good people to manage the business. If you work for somebody though, that will never happen.
Overly engaging social media has weaponized conservative news media, among many other things.

Blasting propaganda over cable, radio, magazines and such is as old as America itself. Thats fine. Its part of the deal. But a device that lives in your pocket, essentially required for participating in society, with many billions spent on stopping you from disengaging is an entirely different thing. There is no good historical precedent for how psycologically manipulative that is.

Its unacceptable because China could quite probably start a civil war with such influence. Its not OK for Facebook, Google, or any government to have that unchecked power even if they just use it to sell ads or whatever.

So... I dunno where the line should be. But wherever that is, we are well past it.
people choose to live in bay area not because its housing situation, but despite of it.

mainly because cutting edge R&D type technology has been developed in the area and alternatives to SV have not developed yet. its not even pay - I would say bay area pay is bad, because of cost of living & taxation.

But opportunities for growth are unmatched in bay area
I'm about 50 miles north of ABQ. I have a 6.7kW ground mount array. Using its rated output, and the average of 9.28 hours of sunshine per day, and no adjustment for hourly insolation variation I should get about 1.9MW a month. I actually get about 1MW, with not much variation from month to month.

I am optimistic that Santa Fe will soon see a new utility scale PV generation install that ought to generate power (with storage!) corresponding to roughly 1/3 of the city's residental use. The standard NIMBY-but-I'm-all-for-solar-have-some-myself crowd is out in force, however.
Similar experience, but I did enjoy figuring that part out. I would also figure a way to increase the challenge over time. Maybe the asteroids get faster? Maybe the cows walk farther, or away from each other? Infinite level games are most fun when the challenge increases.
> Sotheby’s is among 30 defendants named in the lawsuit, with celebrities like Justin Bieber and Paris Hilton also accused of promoting the NFT collection without disclosing their financial links to it.

WTF??? Officially disclosed or not, when was the last time that a bunch of A-list celebrities promoted anything vaguely commercial, without being well-compensated for doing so?

This isn't 1637 any more, for speculative bubbles to be a new & mysterious thing. No competent investor believes that NFT's of stuff like "a Tweet" have an underlying cash value. And if you buy an oil painting by Simon Von Sneed from Southeby's - that's an obvious bet on the whims of the art market. If either the current owner or Southeby's actually believed the painting to be a can't-lose investment, then they certainly would not have sold it to you.
I'm honestly at a loss for what you want from this conversation. What "nonsense" are you even talking about? You said you don't see the quote written there (I presume on the website) so I told you to scroll down and you'll see the quote. That's all I was saying, but now you're asking what the point of the quote was, like, how should I know? Ask the parent.
Ironically, you just answered the "difficult" interview question in a few lines of casual commenting.

If you're not allowed to use atoi and itoa, it's still not all that difficult to do in C. Incrementing ASCII characters and handling carries is really trivial.

I'd be kind of worried if I was hiring a C developer who didn't know the basic things you described above. I'm not sure why you think those are esoteric concepts that we shouldn't expect developers to know.
You don't you build solar and wind, which have different seasonal productions.
Wind power is actually higher during winter.
See: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Estimated-normalized-mon...

And if you combine the graphs for solar and wind from this:
https://aleasoft.com/european-solar-and-wind-energy-producti...

You can nicely see that they are complementary in terms of energy production.
People always think of these companies as if all they were doing was simple credit card processing, delegating a lot to a bank. If that was the case, then yes, they are commodities with no moat. Reality is far more complicated.

It's not that a large merchant needs to support one payment type for one country: They need a collection of payment types that work on each country, without having to dedicate engineering to every single one. For companies that are marketplaces, like Amazon or Uber, you need to have payments, both ways, including onboarding. And for online companies, there's the shadow of fraud: Not just fraudulent purchases, or card testing, but, as a marketplace, fake merchants. And the larger your payment company is, the easier it is to do good fraud detection.

When you put it all together, the amount of engineering effort those companies are saving you vs 'use bitcoin LOL' is enormous. And instead of shrinking every year, it's growing. So, for instance, see how Amazon decided that maybe they wanted to do fewer payments in house, and have Stripe manage it for them. It's not as if Amazon lacks engineering capacity, or if they started without a payment system: It's that there's a bunch of value there, and they thought that it'd be more profitable to delegate more and more of the system to one of those not-so-commodity businesses.

But yes, if all you needed was the simplest payments, in a lone jurisdiction, it's a low margin business. The moat is elsewhere.
There are many options. The appropriate mix would depend on the project, popularity, target audience and skills/interests of the maintainer.
Off the top of my head: Hardware, hosting services, support, trademark or patent rights, custom development, consulting, features (open core), bragging rights, social/insiders club membership, swag/merchandise, educational materials, certification, job placements/recruiting/headhunting, marketing/ads/product placement.
Ah yes, good old 'cold storage'.
I have done this on Linux where my different WINE prefixes (like the ones managed by Bottles) can have different configurations. My gaming profile for example has none of the libraries or fonts needed to run Photoshop, etc.
Hydro is energy storage. It incurs losses. It also requires you to have hydropower.
The new spinning Nespresso is a lot worse than the original. Rotary extraction makes a watery americano with foam, not crema. The original is really nice to find in Euro hotel rooms, but most Euro hotels have quality espresso machines in the lobby.
Sex and the Sacred [pdf]
Linux DISTRIBUTIONS have their own set of problems. There are a lot of reasons to run Windows that aren't games. For example, the level of support you get for server-based stuff is very nice as a corporation. It's also more consistent. No, I don't mean "correct" all the time. I mean with Windows things fail consistently (well...except for drivers) and things work consistently. It's far more polished.

As a Linux daily driver it's not hard to see the benefits of Windows over a popular Linux distribution. You may be able to close the gap with a (rather expensive) support contract but at that point you also may have been better off with Windows. Using a Linux distribution is often a time commitment and change of philosophy. I, like you, are willing to make the trade.

I notice this opinion (that Windows is terrible) to be particularly pervasive among the tech literate but inexperienced. There is an entire contingent of the US alone (probably 80%) that is completely and fully served by a simple, easy to manage, easy to use Windows installation. If you've never tried to get your parents to use Linux even Ubuntu is often asking too much (though its getting better). That's not their fault. Once again, switching to the Linux Way (TM) is a lifestyle. Just your example alone (the UI is cleaner) can diverge into something almost worth an entire collegiate degree. It's only recently with snaps that Ubuntu and Co. have approached a degree of usability that might constitute 0.5% or less more uptake.

Perhaps for your use case Windows sucks. But having recently ported off Ubuntu LTS to the latest and greatest I can tell you that it was miserable. There's nothing quite like repeatedly crashing to a tty and having to parse boot logs to figure out what screwed up. It's a suffering I am willing to do both for the philosophy of Linux and the benefits I get. The further away from "consumer" Linux distributions you get the graph of difficulty goes hockey-stick real fast.

Let's not pretend Windows is useless spyware. It is nasty stuff for privacy but it is certainly not pointless.
Use hanging bags like you'd use on a yacht instead; no risk of fire at all.

Search for "hanging bag moisture absorber" on your favorite shopping site.
the best for backpacking! and i say that as a radical coffee snob.
Finally! I've been waiting for this to finally happen.

"randomly disconnecting from their host" has been going on for years.

...and while it's comical watching various people running around in circles on various tech support sites, being told to "update their drivers" or "modify their power settings"

I'm happy that perhaps consumers will finally get some justice, and force these idiots to QC and properly support their products.
If you want some nice examples of how undefined behavior results in weirdness, see
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20140627-00/?p=63...

An interesting example from there is how the compiler can turn

int table[4];
bool exists_in_table(int v)
{
for (int i = 0; i <= 4; i++) {
if (table[i] == v) return true;
}
return false;
}

Into:

bool exists_in_table(int v)
{
return true;
}
The development and enforcement of Berne and TRIPS have largely been pushed by US interests. We can push to change them.
Yeah maybe. I think that sort of rings a bell.
VC Free – How We Bootstrapped FusionAuth to Profitability
For long term applications I much prefer passive cooling (AKA a hunk of metal.) I have one Raspberry Pi 4B in a case with a small heat sink on the processor and a small fan driven from the GPIO pins. It keeps the processor within limits even when overclocked and heavily loaded. Some day the fan will stop working and the processor will overheat (under heavy load) and throttle to prevent self destruction.

I have two Compute Modules (CM4s) and found a passive heat sink that is finned aluminum that covers the entire module. There is no fan to fail. I can overclock the CM4 to 2 GHz and load it for stress testing and it remains well within limits. One of these is equipped with an NVME SSD and I was surprised to see it reach excessive temperatures under heavy loads despite the PCIe x1 connection on the Pi. I got a "hunk of copper" NVME cooler, cut it to fit a 2230 NVME and it keeps the NVME SSD within reasonable limits.
Doesn't change the meat of your argument, the 4000G series runs DDR4-3600 pretty well (even if the spec sheet only goes to 3200), and it's almost a crime to run an APU at anything worse than DDR4-3600 CL16. You can go higher than that too, but depending on your particular chip, when you get much above 3600, you may not be able to run the ram base clock at the same rate as the infinity fabric, which isn't ideal.
Using two channels of DDR5-5600, you could achieve at most 90 GB/s of memory bandwidth. It seems to me that you would need DDR5-8400 to hit 138GB/s.
You do know we hire people who have to _write_ these libraries, and they can't just defer to something else with no consideration to time or space constraints. None of the questions are designed to be brainteasers or 'gotchas' but to get you to start discussing the problem and show your depth of knowledge/expertise.

If I ask you a question along the lines of "write me a function to tell if two number ranges intersect" and your solution is to grab a library instead of writing a simple predicate...then perhaps the role is not a good fit.

"Use a library for everything" is how we ended up with left-pad on npm.
It is advertising.
> many (most) commenters in this thread seem to be claiming that this knowledge and skill is never useful.

Those commenters are making generalizations because many (most) jobs in the industry do not find that knowledge and skill useful. Certainly specialized edge positions exist.
Once they have a working prototype it is going to be 10 to 15 years for paperwork and building the first plant.
They were sitting at 2-4% for about a decade in the US. Pretty great deal if you ask me
> Invulnerable to SIM Swapping?

As long as humans are allowed to "override" settings in the systems, none would be "invulnerable". More difficult, maybe, but not "invulnerable".

If a t-mobile employee with the right access to t-mobiles database can reassign a t-mobile number (even if that number is used by a MVNO) then there is always a risk that an employee can be bribed or be in on the heist.
Circular saws sure do produce a surprising amount of wind, but the thought of using one for cooling is horribly terrifying.
I never said she should be persecuted by her government. You are unfairly attempting to put words in my mouth.
is it possible to reach out to your customers?
Asuncion, winter has been great, it's 36C/96F today.
A Zed Shaw's Learn C the Hard Way fan, I see.
The Whac-A-Mole game still exists when you randomize values, right?
How is this self-hosted if you're hosting on GitHub?