skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So if I'm reading it right, the quote from the original article that started this thread was ballpark correct?

> we are still stuck with 2 GB/s per SSD

Versus the ~2.7 GiB/s your benchmark shows (bit hard to know where to look on mobile with all that line-wrapped output, and when not familiar with the fio tool; not your fault but that's why I'm double checking my conclusion)
> There's actually some good ideas there...

Have any in mind?
> If you find yourself enjoying ObjC, by all means keep using it. Or C.

I didn't say I enjoyed ObjC. That's not really how I choose my tools. It's a job. The choice is utilitarian.

> Or Pascal.

I seem to recall enjoying Pascal somewhat, though that was a very long time ago.

> Or Lisp.

I definitely recall not enjoying Lisp. Not at all. Yuck.

> that doesn’t account for extra-hours and bugs it takes to get there.

If Swift helps you, that's great. I'm just writing about my experience. For me, it doesn't help. I'm certainly not deliberately avoiding a tool that would help me. I do write my share of bugs, but I rarely write the type of bugs that the Swift compiler would catch, and I never ship them. YMMV

I'm not intending to offer advice of any kind to others. I'm not much for giving or taking advice. And like I suggested, if I needed to find a job, then I'd probably have to go all-in on Swift. My goal, though, is to never get another job for the rest of my life. ;-)
Did you see the link I posted? The decline began well before Reagan, although Im sure Reagan didnt help.
I've tried this for the first time recently in 10 years - it's really become a miserable chore. There are so many countermeasures deployed to web scraping. The best path forward I could imagine is utilizing LLMs, taking screenshots and having the AI tell me what it sees on the page; but even gathering links is difficult. xml site maps for the win.
Not me. Nor did I get hit with the recent Fediverse SPAM run.

But I think that I'm probably still getting the usual several thousand email SPAM attempts per day, so the world is normal!
If the equilibrium is always reached, then why wouldn’t I make it easy on myself by making things that are easy to maintain? I want fixing issues to be like blowing out a birthday candle, not dealing with a forest fire? I’d rather blow out 20 candles than deal with a single forest fire.
Backrest: A web UI and orchestrator for restic backup
The flaws are major.
Optimizing the Unoptimizable: A Journey to Faster C++ Compile Times
I work on embedded systems so userbase isn't really a concern.

However we have > 10 million lines of C++, and the change would have been a major refactoring of most of them.
Elon Musk nominated for Nobel Peace Prize for defending free speech
What I find most effective, is to wrap `get` with local cache, and this is the first thing I write when I start a web crawling project. Therefore, from the very beginning, even when I'm just exploring and experimenting, every page only gets downloaded once to my machine. This way I don't end up accidentally bother the server too much, and I don't have to re-crawl if I make a mistake in code.
How much do people trust that VSCode isn't spyware?
Ask HN: If social media didn't exist
How'd your life be if there was no social media, you can mention both pros and cons for you.
Some studios have tinkered with the idea of games that can be played while the download completes. There has to be a way to trace all assets that are needed for the first chapter. https://patents.google.com/patent/US11123634B1/
Always funny seeing SaaS companies pitch their own product in blog posts. I understand it's just how marketing works, but pitching your own product as a solution to a problem (that you yourself are introducing, perhaps the first time to a novice reader) never fails to amuse me.
This is true in almost all of the commercial gyms I've ever been to. In the more specialized gyms I've never seen this problem until this particular occasion.
It was mostly an old-school kind of wargames.

There was an article about a giant real 3D map in a room with all the commanders there discussing what each one has to do, contingencies, ...

The reason for the counter-offensive failure were multiple and complex, good or bad software would not have changed the result significantly.
Which is a weird sort of limitation. For any sort of you-own-the-hardware arrangement, NVMe disks are fine for long term storage. (Obviously one should have backups, but that’s a separate issue. One should have a DR plan for data on EBS, too.)

You need to migrate that data if you replace an entire server, but this usually isn’t a very big deal.
I’m not even going to take a specific stand or call out the specific things that make me loose hope for the future. But if you don’t notice that activism and books praising activism (as opposed to seeking knowledge and revealing truth, or even just having deep knowledge of craft, like medicine), are a large part of modern academia, then we live in two different worlds.
Gentrification and displacement are distinct concepts, even if they are usually conflated in colloquial usage. Obviously nobody wants to be forced out of 'their neighborhood' if rent is raised, but this isn't an inevitable consequence of improved conditions. This Vox article does a great job explaining possible policies to mitigate this harm, like building more housing, stronger tenant protections, and upzoning wealthy segregated neighborhoods.[0] As you say, existing residents of a neighborhood should be able to enjoy the benefits of increased investment and improved conditions in their neighborhood.

[0] https://www.vox.com/22629826/gentrification-definition-housi...
They only review the initial experience with the product. If a car has an engine that explodes in a few years, or an electronic device loses updates in a year from purchase and turns into a brick - CR will not capture this.
Damn, what combination of: an insane pain tolerance, high levels of curiosity, big desire of beauty. I wonder how many other people this procedure was tested on?
> Don't start with a complicated architecture because "well once we scale, we will need it".

> You want the architecture to support growth that will more than likely happen

The problem is even very experienced people can disagree about what forms of complexity are worth it up-front and what forms are not.

One might imagine that Google had a first generation MVP of a platform that hit scaling limits and then a second generation scaled infinitely forever. What actually happens is that any platform that lives long enough needs a new architecture every ~5 years (give or take), so that might mean 3-5 architectures solving mostly the same problem over the years, with all of the multi-year migration windows in between each of them.

If you're very lucky, different teams maintain the different projects in parallel, but often your team has to maintain the different projects yourselves because you're the owners and experts of the problem space. Your leadership might even actively fend off encroachment from other teams "offering" to obsolete you, even if they have a point.

Even when you know exactly where your scaling problems are today, and you already have every relevant world expert on your team, you still can't be absolutely certain what architecture will keep scaling in another 5 years. That's not only due to kinds of growth you may not anticipate from current users, it's due to new requirements entirely which have their own cost model, and new users having their own workload whether on old or new requirements.

I've eagerly learned everything I can from projects like this and I am still mentally prepared to have to replace my beautifully scaling architectures in another few years. In fact I look forward to it because it's some of the most interesting and satisfying work I ever get to do -- it's just a huge pain if it's not a drop-in replacement so you have to maintain two systems for an extended duration.
There are posts going around X that Gemini image generation is very biased toward minority preferences even when factual data and real-life statistics don't support the outputs. For example, can somebody ask Gemini to generate a picture of a typical Swedish women?
Now that moxie is no longer there how about getting rid of the requirement for personally identifying phone numbers as IDs at all?
Even if you pay it is hard to get such a high quality content!
On AWS yes, the older instances which I am familiar with had 900GB drives and they sliced that up into volumes of 600, 450, 300, 150, 75GB depending on instance size.

But they also tell you how much IOPS you get: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/WindowsGuide/stora...
There’s no point in having this discussion, it is extremely specific to different locations.
To be fair, even for someone who is comfortable in Rust, the example is definitely on the rather confusing side of the language. (Not entirely surprising--it's a bug about a soundness hole in the language, which invariably tends to rely on overuse of less commonly used features in the language).

In particular, explicit use of lifetimes tends to be seen as somewhat more of a last resort, although the language requires it more frequently than I like. Furthermore, the soupiest of the syntax requires the use of multiple layers of indirection for references, which itself tends to be a bit of a code smell (just like how in C/C++, T * tends to be somewhat rare).
They do amazing first party research, but that's not quite the same thing as an aggregator like Rotten Tomatoes.
I'm convinced there is a gold mine sitting right in front of us ready to be picked by someone who can intelligently combine web scraping knowledge with LLMs e.g. scrape data, feed it into LLMs do get insights in an automated fashion. I don't know exactly what the final manifestation looks like but its there and will be super obvious when someone does it.
Nobody actually bothers with Popper today, especially liberals themselves.

"Historicism is bad" -> "Trump/Bolsonaro/insert random right wind populist have rhetoric similar to early Hitler, we must stop them to prevent Nazis/fascists rising up again"

"History is not our judge and historical success does not prove anytihing" -> "Here is my Whig historiography identifying me, the open society enjoyer, as the descendant of Union soldiers/ US soldiers landing in Normandy / etc."
I'll say that groups on facebook for various interests still seem quite active, but these are more targeted for a shared interest, like espresso machines, rather than a group of people that know each other and are interacting in a group, like XYZ High School Class of 2024.
Of course room-sized computers from the days of NASA were incredibly expensive. I was just replying to a comment about 4MB of extra memory for a PC in the early days.
Testing products costs a lot of money.
Yes, Gemini and previously Bard has a lot of confusion about its own capabilities. I use it to translate Chinese text in aliexpress product listings by taking screenshots. It’s perfectly capable and quite helpful in translating the text from those screenshots, but I think depending on how you phrase the question while uploading the photo, it will sometimes say “I’m only a language model I can’t help with that” or even “I can’t help with images”. Once it says that, I think it poisons the chat history and I start a new session to try to get it to work. I’ve not translated many images but so far this error happens maybe 20% of the time. It’s very strange.

I have another issue which is that when I paste a C++ code file in to the web interface, I get an error from the web interface and Gemini never even sees the code. The web interface is refusing to accept my code file. I opened up AI studio instead of the normal Gemini window and that seems to work, but I’d rather just use the normal chat window.
Using it is fine, but you need to know it is horrible and you should already have a this is what new stuff is done in plan in place. Or at least try to make that plan, there may not be a better alternative yet, but you should be looking.
Given AWS and GCP offer multiple sizes for the same processor version with local SSDs, I don't think you have to rent the entire machine.

Search for i3en API names and you'll see:

i3en.large, 2x CPU, 1250GB SSD

i3en.xlarge, 4x CPU, 2500GB SSD

i3en.2xlarge, 8x CPU, 2x2500GB SSD

i3en.3xlarge, 12x CPU, 7500GB SSD

i3en.6xlarge, 24x CPU, 2x7500GB SSD

i3en.12xlarge, 48x CPU, 4x7500GB SSD

i3en.24xlarge, 96x CPU, 8x7500GB SSD

i3en.metal, 96x CPU, 8x7500GB SSD

So they've got servers with 96 CPUs and 8x7500GB SSDs. You can get a slice of one, or you can get the whole one. All of these are the ratio of 625GB of local SSD per CPU core.

https://instances.vantage.sh/

On GCP you can get a 2-core N2 instance type and attach multiple local SSDs. I doubt they have many physical 2-core Xeons in their datacenters.
Over 50 million units sold and the most popular wearable device ever made. Yeah, total flop.
For things I would formerly use a web browser to look up, Gemini is often a lot better than gpt-4. The more obscure the query, the better Gemini does compared to gpt-4.

But gpt-4 is still best for ML Python coding. Gemini hallucinates non-existent libraries and often adds unnecessary junk to its code. For example, Gemini often defines spurious variables and then never uses them.
I'm not certain that's true if you look at TCO. Yes, you can probably buy a server for less than the yearly rent on the equivalent EC2 instance. But then you've got to put that server somewhere, with reliable power and probably redundant Internet connections. You have to pay someone's salary to set it up and load it to the point that a user can SSH in and configure it. You have to maintain an inventory of spares, and pay someone to swap it out if it breaks. You have to pay to put its backups somewhere.

Yeah, you can skip a lot of that if your goal is to get a server online as cheaply as possible, reliability be damned. As soon as you start caring about keeping it in a business-ready state, costs start to skyrocket.

I've worn the sysadmin hat. If AWS burned down, I'd be ready and willing to recreate the important parts locally so that my company could stay in business. But wow, would they ever be in for some sticker shock.
I had a job like this for a while. My boss always wanted to be involved in the new stuff and I was the one he threw it at to kick the tires.

Some stuff got done, but nothing too mission critical that kept me up at night and it was pretty relaxed.
I am starting to learn gamedev, in specific I would like to make a stealth game.

Ever since I first read about steam audio, I've wondered if it would be possible to use the sound propagation to determine if a npc has heard a sound. There are probably better ways to do this. And not always the most realistic approach is the best approach.

But I've always found that some games are very inconsistent about how npcs hear you. Sometimes you are in a closed room and make very little sound, and they hear you from outside, other times you are in an open place and they don't hear anything. It seems like some games only check the distance to sound origin, without taking occlusion/attenuation into consideration.
What animal looks like it's from a different planet?
There are already 435 members of the House of Representatives. I don't think most Americans would like there to be too many more -- it would get unwieldy. Also, expanding the House will likely lead to a decline in representative quality, since it's easier to be the "best" candidate among x people than 1.3*x people. Already there are numerous people in Congress who I think are utter clowns.
Looks like a really useful library - thanks for the tip.
Thank you, ctxc! Topic is decided but it's going to be a tricky one to get right, so it's a few months away at least I'm afraid.
What German tech - AMD, Intel or Nvidia?
It's interesting to see people rail against China's social credit score which seems quite similar in function to the what we in the US just call a credit score. People really miss the forest for the trees.

I also tell people who support strong immigration enforcement that this sort of ID scheme would be quite fundamental to identifying citizens, but most people don't seem to want to hear it.
Hope that the new generation Z won't become slaves to work like we millenials, gen X's and so on are.

Well, not so much slaves to work, but get so little leeway from corporations that own us. It's not like we like it.

We need a shift in our relationship with employers and they will help us.
"I also care, but actually I don't" wow
> I'd refine some things if I were making a new language.

Which parts would you change?
I'm wondering if this scheduler is for something like user-space threads. And What is the relationship between such scheduler and go runtime for goroutine and JVM for Java virtual thread?
Totally agree with this. I remember when I first got on Facebook (it was when they just started opening it up to non-college students), and I was so excited about an easy way to keep up with old friends I cared about but had lost touch with.

I remember the very first update that I hated, when Facebook moved to much more of a "Twitter-like" interface, and the feed felt like much more disjointed, "stream of consciousness" stuff. Now it's all that on steroids - none of the social media platforms actually care about keeping you connected with your friends and family. My current FB feed is a joke, 95% of my friends rarely/never post anymore, it just got too exhausting.
Well, consumer reports is still kicking. I don't think an aggregate review service does much good though.

Reviews for physical items are super inaccurate. The average consumer doesn't have the money to buy 10 laptops and compare them, so they buy one and hold a biased opinion about it. In 5 years when shitty battery and defective hinge become apparent, the laptop is already off the market and the user isn't interested in reviewing it.

Besides, a ton of reviews are fake these days. You just can't trust them anymore. And for many products, the manufacturer cheapens them oven time without telling the public. So a review from 2 years ago may not reflect the quality of today.
I wonder why people don't want to give their private data to yet another platform. Absolute mystery.
For one thing this is the mother of all two-sided markets.

I made my own content-based recommender which only needs 2000 judgements from me to work really well. If I wanted to make a social network of some kind I am going to need thousands if not millions of users, with the exception that there is some room for products like discord where somebody makes a private instance which will not need to get that big. In the past, people who started social networks and communication apps of various kinds would use spammy tactics to get enough users to have a scene. Today I think it’s a lot harder to do that and when companies try to jumpstart the process, like TikTok or Temu, they spend hundreds of millions or more on advertising.
I ended up buying a SATA SSD for 50 euros to stick in an old laptop that I was already using as server and, my god, it is so much faster than the thing I was trying to run on digitalocean. The DO VPS barely beat the old 5400 rpm spinning rust that was in the laptop originally (the reason why I was trying to rent a fast, advertised-with-SSD, server). Doing this i/o task effectively in the cloud, at least with DO, seems to require putting it in RAM which was a bit expensive for the few hundred gigabytes of data I wanted to process into an indexed format

So there is demand, but I'm certainly not interested in paying many multiples of 50 euros over an expected lifespan of a few years, so it may not make economic sense for them to offer it to users like me at least. On the other hand, for the couple hours this should have taken (rather than the days it initially did), I'd certainly have been willing to pay that cloud premium and that's why I tried to get me one of these allegedly SSD-backed VPSes... but now that I have a fast system permanently, I don't think that was a wise decision of past me
1,000 electronic warfare-hardened drones vs. 1,000,000 drones using simple, documented radio on ISM bands?

Exactly 0 of those 1,000,000 consumer drones will be flying in US operating areas.
I don't see why it's even a dichotomy as pushed by GP. Russia is now the junior partner in the Russia-China relationship against the US/EU international order (as opposed to the Cold War). Putin is actively testing the strength of that international order, Xi is mostly passively watching and biding time. The outcome of Russia-Ukraine will most certainly determine how aggressively China acts going forward.
Oh don't feel bad. I had to look up every one of those numbers
> Apple preemptively killed 32-bit apps even on hardware that could technically still support them, and their current hardware doesn't support 32-bit at all, not even in Rosetta.

Slightly related: visionOS references "iOS" for old 32-bit apps when you view them on the App Store. https://rr.judge.sh/Acaciarat%2FIMG_0002.PNG
I'm a huge fan of Signal, but I'm disappointed that this still means that I cannot have the same account on two phones (work and personal).
Same story from the US. I think they mostly worry that you are trying to avoid paying VAT.
> Note that even once these features reach everyone, both you and the people you are chatting with on Signal will need to be using the most updated version of the app to take advantage of them.

> Each version of the Signal app expires after about 90 days, after which people on the older version will need to update to the latest version of Signal. This means that in about 90 days, your phone number privacy settings will be honored by everyone using an official Signal app.

Which is also an example of a challenge for open ecosystems where everyone can create apps.

I understand that it doesn't outweigh the benefits to everyone, but it is a valid reason.
I was originally going to ask that but felt it was a bit leading. Understandable - low trust societies require low trust social interactions to ensure stability.
Out of the loop: what happened to Moxie?
> In the context of a cloud computing network, there's a lot more overhead to splitting out a million tiny modules.

Don't get me wrong - this can be taken to an extreme and from my experience the places where MS seems to fail (the service is not used, or hated by the engineering teams) is in scenarios where it was absolute overkill.

> The trade-offs are very different and so the UNIX philosophy is not equally applicable.

There is a reasonableness standard that exists in both contexts and applies to both in the same way.
I know it doesn’t solve the problem for everyone, but many public libraries offer free access to Consumer Reports.
It's easy to review entities that all exist in a single database.

Consumer electronics products are far harder to find categorized in a single place.

You also have to contend with the fact that movies are essentially immutable - if you watch the same edition as someone else you are seeing an identical product. Consumer products might be damaged, might be counterfeit, or might be incorrectly classified. All of these makes it really hard to build a single source of truth for reviews.

The bigger issue though, IMO, is the duration of the experience. A movie lasts for 1-3 hours. That's the extent of the experience, and thus all reviews are fairly constrained. Consumer electronics can last for decades, so it's very hard to know when a review should be left, how long a person needs with a product to feel ready to leave a review, whether it should be a "long term" review, etc.