skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Cloning things makes maintenance harder linearly. Generalizing things makes maintenance harder exponentially. Counterintuitively, generalization only makes sense on small numbers or reiterations, not the vice-versa.

I started https://wordsandbuttons.online as an experiment in zero-dependencies architecture. No third-party, no self-reference. Every page is completely independent. I was told, that as it grew, it would inevitably become impossible to maintain.

Five years passed, including a two-year pause for writing a book. I did more than half a hundred interactive tutorials and quizzes, and continue to add them when I have time. The thing simply refuses to go "too complex to maintain". All the maintenance problems I ever faced with this design were handled within minutes. If there is too much typing, I write a Python script. If not, I do the change manually, replicate it in a few pages, and go on.

As a free bonus, since all my pages are essentially hand-written, no dependencies = no uncontrolled growth, they are all fewer than 64 KB each. Ultra-fast to load, and I never get a "Reddit effect" since even 1000 requests a second is only 64 MB of data. It's green then tea too. I usually have a few hundred thousand visitors a year, and they barely consume enough electricity to boil a kettle of water.

I think this rule of three, like many others is just an attempt to escape well-known complexity issues by putting them under a carpet of less known complexity issues. I'm very happy to have ignored it when considering design for my site.
CS61A in particular is important for understanding the nuts and bolts of how programming works. The people who tended to do well in the course had little prior exposure to specific programming languages outside the prerequisite class. I think that all the abstraction that other programming languages do get in the way of understanding why the languages made some of those design choices, which is why throwing all the abstraction out the window is important to understand what's really going on.

I'm reminded of an experiment I was told to do when I was learning how to be a better cook, and I complained that I didn't understand what bay leaf was adding to a dish. Someone suggested cooking some plain white rice with some bay leaf, and I could finally taste the peppery notes it added. Sometimes you need a neutral substrate to see the details of the thing you're trying to learn.
Eh, the "don't overthink it" is how all tech has become western centric, especially US-centric. In the grand scheme of things it's a small annoyance, but having your culture or norms constantly overwritten by some tech-bros is bad.

Like, my name still doesn't work in a lot of systems that expect ascii characters only. Like, thanks for deciding that names æøåü or similar isn't a valid name.
Well, that is until the old system inevitably fails and has larger and larger outages. Critical knowledge is lost with each generation to keep it running.
One example - the IRA bombings where they phoned in warnings, like Manchester 1996: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_Manchester_bombing
You don't need specialized hardware. You can use your regular keyboard. Although specialized hardware would be more ergonomic.
My biggest fear around this is that these solutions incentivise the biggest pharma companies to stop researching actual cures. I don’t want to have to deal with these devices, I just want it dealt with.
Isn't a lot of the cash coming from funds? Funds that diversify but still can pump billions into this sector without breaking a sweat. Individual investors don't have a lot of opportunity to buy in anyway, and they usually know the risks. But funds can blindly pump memes alongside modest strategies and still return on investment overall; and they aren't left standing when the music stops.
I had a book with these patterns once. The last few pages explained how you could make them yourself. Basically you make grid of lines with repeating patterns, like XXYYZZXXYYZZXXYYZZ. Then at certain places you can either make the pattern longer or shorter, like XXYYZZXYYZZXXYYZZ, or XXYYZZXXXYYZZXXYYZZ. One of them makes it appear to come forward, the other backward (forgot which ones). You can remove/add more elements to make them appear further or closer away.
I used to make this as a child on graphic paper with colored pencils. You cannot do that anymore with a job and children ;)
Regardless of wether it's the right idea right now, I am convinced that AI is at least not he complete vapourware that blockchain was. That really was some useless hype. There's something to show for and real applications, from self driving cars to other smart systems. Classifiers are everywhere.

I interact with chatgpt regularly. It's in my smartphone classifying my photos. I don't know when I have ever interacted with a blockchain.
Adopting Fabric: Moving from Synapse Analytics to Microsoft Fabric
Although there are many good resources online explaining how to start using Microsoft Fabric, there is a lack of guidance on adopting Fabric if you already invested in Synapse Analytics. Nothing prevents you from using Synapse Analytics and Fabric together.
Building Circuit Abominations in Factorio
> Some claim that if AGPL is very toxic, and that even viewing AGPL code might taint any project you work on later.

Oh please, that's nothing but FUD. If this were true, then working on closed-source proprietary code for your employer would taint any project (open source or proprietary) that you work on later. Clearly that's not the case.

> It's not dissimilar to a certain argument of patents.

It's quite dissimilar. Patents and copyright are two very different legal regimes.
No EU-regulation for that I think, it depends on the country. British Standard 1363 has had mandatory safety shutters since it was introduced in 1947 (not sure if you could still use the older British Standard 546). Here in Sweden there is a building regulation from 1988 stating outlets should be placed or designed to make it hard for children to insert things into them. I was surprised to learn that wasn't common in the US, at least until recently.
I went to Cal but for MechE. Im also a totally self taught full stack web developer, although just on a personal miniSaas with 34 paying companies.

I think you'll learn tons by starting a personal project, tiny, small, daunting, whatever your appetite for pain is, and just doing that.

I thrashed away on my crm like saas for 6 months before the first demo customers were using it. And then worked on it for another year till it was sellable to less friendly companies.

Recently I picked up a JavaScript book and read it. While I learned a few things, I was shocked how much I knew from what I learned from stack overflow and just random reading and thinking during the time of building that CRM.
Sure, if this is the best possible of all worlds then we should be happy, but is it really? Seems defeatist to think so. Are there economies which function in a healthier way than this? Do you remember the early days of computing, before the big money got tipped off?
This isn't a consumer ISP like Comcast where there's an effective monopoly over the underlying physical infrastructure. Hurricane Electric is a wholesale IP transit provider. Any datacenter worth its salt is going to have several independent IP transit providers on-site, competing for your business.
*oh and obviously echo chess has obstacles. The mazes would be significantly easier if you just removed every obstacle from the board, like Solitaire chess seems to do it
Can you clarify how ignoring the dots is a problem?
I'm not sure the question is quite right.

Google and Amazon don't use "the cloud" in the normal sense of a third-party public offering. They own the infrastructure that is also used by other customers as a cloud so in one sense it is private cloud but closer to on-prem than anything else.

Many other large businesses run on-prem instead of "the cloud" because the cost savings of a op-ex cloud system start to diminish when you already have your own infrastructure/networks/specialist staff as these large businesses have. Again, this is often a mix of traditional on-prem infrastructure and private clouds that offer some sharing of resources to applications that do not need an entire physical server.

Netflix, I think is a mixture of on-prem and public cloud but not sure.

So I'm not sure if you are asking "why mainframes instead of distributed e.g. microservices systems" or "why on-prem instead of using the cloud".
> In many countries - you have to regularly deal with drivers going full tilt, on the wrong side of the road.

I don't agree with most of your comment but this point is worth examining. I think it's not an argument against self driving for a few reasons:

1. There's lots of places in the world where people driving on the wrong side of the road is uncommon. We can start with self driving there. You can apply this to many other situations as well - AI can't handle ice yet? Well, let's start with non-icy roads. Even when you apply all the stipulations like these that you need, you'll still be left with a large enough percentage of the world to make self driving useful. Especially since a lot of the places that are suitable will be rich cities in developed countries.

2. Driving habits change. Thailand is a good example of this, it's a country in transition from the "developing country driving style" to the "developed country driving style", for want of better terms. Driving there 15 years ago was an extremely different, far noiser, far more dangerous experience than driving there now. It's still got a long way to go, of course.

3. If self driving becomes the norm, well then, problem solved. We don't even have to get to FSD. Partial but always on assisted driving that nags you whenever you drive on the wrong side of the road or go over the speed limit would probably be enough to cause a shift if most people have it.
Watch security breaches happen, by the hour
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Something like the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project(s) are best served by having their own dedicated quiver of mainframes coupled with dedicated instrument to supercomputing centre fibre bundles.

I used the phrase "quiver of mainframes" as the compute tasks are best served by having a cluster of architectures - dedicated RAM in the tens of terrabytes, dedicated fast local storage in the petabytes, large custers of computer nodes optimised for pipelined throughput, others optimised for hyper cubed deep mesh computations, other architures again purely for graphical representations, etc.

See: https://pawsey.org.au/supercomputing/
Most of these are global issues though in the developed world, even healthcare to an extent due to ageing population. I'm not sure what this has to do with an air traffic control outage either?

It does seem that a lot of infrastructure that was put in place during a golden age cannot be adequately maintained, but AFAIK this seems to be the case in USA and Europe too.
Words How to Reduce CAC Payback Period for Your SaaS
I don't understand the leap from "it's difficult and there are many special circumstances" to "it's never going to happen". I don't get why you think that any of these problems are unsolvable given enough time.
because my transaction is a legitimate one until proven otherwise (innocent until proven guilty principle), and i have the right to buy something without letting my bank know what or where i bough it.

I could or could not disclose that payment to my government depending on the laws and if there are fiscal benefits, it is my choice.
I should not be forced to use a middle man for those payments, even if this means i am open to be scammed or victim of fraud.

now, as other mentioned, what are some good reasons to FORCE ONLY electronic payments above 3000€ ?
Won’t cover all finance apps - your name will most likely need to be submitted for sanctions screening, credit check, KYC checks etc. where understanding first name and last name is very important for cross-checking against other lists which expect the same.
Early emulators had to emulate the super funky hardware that early consoles had.

Now a days consoles are pretty similar to consumer computers (I though the switch was basically a Nvidia Jetson)

Is the emulation now more like Wine - about providing the necessary APIs and then running on a VM, or is there actual hardware emulation ?
The point isn't that it's first and last, it's to avoid an implicit assumption that they are in a particular order. That semantic correspondence is exactly what changing to given/family is supposed to preserve.

Yes, there are people with only one. There is/was a fairly well-known example in UK network infrastructure circles. That's a problem in either system if you make the fields required.

Given/family removes ambiguity for a larger number of humans than first/last, but you're always going to run into something from the Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names list so unless you can get away with just a single "name" field (and you can't always) it's the better option of the two.
VISA does 500m+ transactions per day and Spanner does 1B queries per day, but it's quite unlikely that what a transaction means on VISA is the same as what a query means on Spanner.
I can't think of any valid arguments for moving anything important away from a well understood and proven-reliable system.
> This is a great reminder that Gmail ignores dots on the left side of the @ symbol

But sometimes handy to fool sign ups and use it twice (or more depending on length). I wonder if you can use multiple dots?
Is it OK to be content with how much better things are now than before we had modern dentistry and combustion engines, without questioning how entire macroeconomic phenomena contribute to our modern wellbeing? We improved, can we improve further?
> It would rarely be acceptable to produce lists of people sorted by their given names in Western Europe for example.

Luckily, it has become a bit uncommon to manually search a printed document by name.

In times of GDPR, the days of printed lists of personal info posted on some bulletin board are pretty much over.
For a list that is non-public, chances are you already have it on a device with a search feature.
AI Town: A virtual town where AI characters live, chat and socialize
When starting out as a SaaS it's very important to get early feedback. So I curated a list of places where you can achieve this. There are three major benefits of posting about your startups here :

1.Early Feedback.
2.Backlinks which can help with SEO.
3.Exposer to users that can convert into paying users which will help further validate the idea. I got my first paying users from some of these websites.

Hope it helps.
It's not so much an advantage of buying this particular phone; it's an advantage of pushing the entire industry to move in that direction. Either through market pressure, or though paving a path for regulation by showing what can be done.
One problem I've encountered is that usually sites won't allow you to register an account if the email address is already registered at that site. So if I register foo@gmail.com then someone else can't accidentally register foo@gmail.com. But they can register f.o.o@gmail.com just fine.

So I mean at my Gmail I have all manner of different Facebook accounts with various misspelling of my email address notifying me of stuff, none of them are mine. I'm sure they entered my email address (with dots) by accident, not on purpose.

I appreciate that sites not allowing you to register the same email address twice hardly solves everything, as I absolutely get email to my actual correct Gmail address from random sites I've never signed up for. But at least it would help in certain cases like Facebook where I do have an account.
To borrow an example from Internet domain names, consider:

experts.exchang@gmail.com

expert.sexchange@gmail.com

Those addresses would be identical by Gmail's parsing conventions.
If you want to be paid for some bit of work, license it such that payment is required.

If you choose to license it under a permissive open source license, you go into that expecting you won't get paid.

For the record, I'm an open source developer myself, and do not expect to get paid for my work. That's fine, and I'm perfectly ok with that. What I won't do is wait for people to depend on my work and then suddenly change licensing in order to exploit them.
No usb c displayport alt mode?

Man that sucks.
> there are few laws which seem more universally opposed by the open source community, and seems to me quite at odds with the values of FOSS - as is any DRM scheme.

My reading is that this is obviously a half-serious and half-sarcastic remark.

The serious message is that the author believes it's a genuine case of copyright violation. The sarcastic message is that - given the context that the bar of invoking DMCA is so low that almost every trivial check can be classified as "anti-circumvention devices" (including the GPL symbol check in the Linux kernel), making it universally opposed by the FOSS community - Thus, the author thought it would be fun to flip the table here to make the exact same legal threat back to proprietary software vendors.

It's simultaneously a copyright infringement accusation, a sarcastic comment on the excessively broad scope of DMCA, and a half-serious revenge in the form of a hypothetical legal threat.

It reminds me of a song about cryptography called Alice and Bob, which made a similar joke. The lyrics read:

> Sending data across the network in a safe way

> Protecting messages to make my pay

> If you hack me you're guilty under the DMCA

The joke of the song is that proprietary software vendors often use DMCA to suppress vulnerability disclosure from security researchers, thus, a security researcher who implements an insecure data encryption protocol can theoretically make use of the same legal threat to cover up their own incompetence - which is absurd from a technical perspective but also the point of the joke.
Or just "Hello, $reason_for_this_message"
So let's say you want to start a company that makes some stupid AI cookbook and you want money to payroll people. How do you do that without investor cash?
>What does Paypal, Klarna, or even maybe Amazon give up by not using mainframes?

Simplicity. Because instead of having an enormous team to maintain their multi-million line Kubernetes configuration files that automatically spawns thousands of servers, having an enormous team that tries to fix the CAP problem, you go grab IBM, you tell them "this mainframe goes down, you're dead, here's half a billion in cash" and you run all of your software on a single, massive machine.

Sure, it adds other problems, but to be fair I'd rather deal with a mainframe than yet another microservice that doesn't work because Omega Star doesn't handle ISO timestamps and it blocks Galactus

>Does any company founded in the last 10-15-20 years use mainframes?

The biggest issue with mainframes are:

- High initial costs (although that's been changing)

- Nobody knows how to work on IBM Z mainframes

- The current zeitgeist about having a billion servers spread throughout the world because it's really important to have an edge CDN server for your cat trading card game

These industries didn't care about that because they could absorb these high initial costs, had the knowledge of the people building the mainframes, and were already highly centralized. Decentralization just adds more problems, it doesn't fix anything.

>I think it's much more in the inertia-point, the cost of rewriting these enormous applications is simply too large.

Rewriting just because it's not following the latest trend is garbage. These applications work. They're not going to work better because you're using Spanner now.
Remember inertia goes both ways. As soon as you have a large system "in the cloud" or otherwise "distributed" (also only in your shed).

Rewriting your system to a mainframe architecture is equally as expensive.

Lets say that you save a hundred megabucks per year by going cloud (I am really not convinced, that you save any money at all, but lets say). That is what 1500 man-years of work? No way you can rewrite even a simple "banking" system in that amount of work, and the second problem is that you need to feature-freeze the old system (and hence your business) while you convert.
So maybe 5 to 10 years of lost competitive power on top of that..

Also, remember these are not "begin work; select * from table where id = 123; commit;" transactions.
These have maybe 50 to 200 queries (selects and updates) in each transaction (has the paying party the funds, is the receiving party blacklisted (terror organisation for example), does this look like money laundring.... etc... and a very detailed logging requirement by law). All of these MUST usually be in the same "snapshot" (in the RDBMS definition).

It makes no sense to talk about "transaction rates" without an intimate knowledge of what it does, as especially marketing departments have a tendency to use the simplest possible "transactions" to get a large number..

And in the end, it is only "money" the might loose, and any choice you make makes some other choices in the future easier (and some harder). That is called path dependency.
As far as I remember, not a Mac keyboard.

Although I do have some better keyboards, and to be honest one of the reasons I got them was some vague idea of learning this at some point. It's just the time investment holding me back at this point, tbh.
You're right, I fixed the model
> I am asking does the mainframe really deliver better cost/performance than the cloud

It is irrelevant because those companies don't care about cost/performance.

They care about risks e.g. operational, security, regulatory etc.

And I would trust a mainframe over the cloud for those criteria any day of the week.
I dont care what it is protected as, i am telling you what automatically happens once you try to poke holes into it. It shouldnt be a surprise to anyone with a functioning relationship to reality. Picture it as a shared communication bus everyone uses for navigation where somebody added a hidden packet drop you cant compensate for or detect. If you try to use that thing you are going to crash. Because you have no ability to determine how much gets dropped. And how much bullshit cant be challenged anymore. Thats the line in the sand for cascading failure.

It cant work. Those blind spots cant be detected, managed or compensated for. They are like a metastasizing cancer.

That blind spot is at the core of totalitarian regimes. Group think sets in and suddenly your farmers are told to plant the crops closer together to utilize the proletarian solidarity between the plants. Anyone who doesnt gets gulaged and the rest starves.

Its worth mentioning that my local constitution has a clause that simplified means anyone trying to get the society to e) can be shot by anyone. How ever much of a paper tiger this is, having had two murderous totalitarian regimes in the last 100 years its generally considered a good idea and the way back out.

That you have to rely on a extremely thin argument like it probably being necessary to uphold the rule of law should have you reflect. You are arguing with an abstract model of what ought to happen according to your favorite ought-to-be model while i am telling you what will happen if you dont prevent it. We have seen it times and times again, if you dont try something different the results will replicate. Acting in denial of reality is totalitarian. Thats how we got all those mass graves. They werent created by evil caricatures but stupid people caught up in a drunk fever and Zugzwang with disabled breaks.