skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't like this answer.

When I look at cloud, I get to think "finally! No more hardware to manage. No OS to manage". It's the best thing about the cloud, provided your workload is amenable to PaaS. It's great because I don't have to manage Windows or IIS. Microsoft does that part for me and significantly cheaper than it would be to employ me to do that work.
This was a huge technical problem I worked on at Google, and is sort of fundamental to a cloud. I believe this is actually a big deal that drives peoples' technology directions.

SSDs in the cloud are attached over a network, and fundamentally have to be. The problem is that this network is so large and slow that it can't give you anywhere near the performance of a local SSD. This wasn't a problem for hard drives, which was the backing technology when a lot of these network attached storage systems were invented, because they are fundamentally slow compared to networks, but it is a problem for SSD.
It's not unusual. If a river is small enough, as the city grows the river often ends up completely culverted and buried underground.

There are many in London, for instance: https://londonist.com/london/maps/london-s-lost-rivers-mappe...
When privacy is the price of participation in society, those who hold their privacy dear will live in a tent under a bridge or as an off-the-grid hermit in the woods.

Employment, credit, medical care, access to shelter, transportation, utilities are all hard-gated behind 'voluntarily' giving up your personal information to firms that will either sell, or share, or leak it.

(I just got a notification that Delta Dental is very sorry it lost mine, I guess I should add dental care to that list.)

In the US the political zeitgeist is to rail against any kind of government overreach, while closing both eyes and plugging both ears to overreach or abuse done by anyone who has a profit motive.
Generative AI's environmental costs are soaring – and mostly secret
What makes it a systems language and not an app-development language?
The problem is that you end up with two syscalls for every setting. e.g. chroot to change your own root, then newproc_chroot to change the root of a newly spawned process. Start making a list of all the ways you can change process state and you'll realize there are probably hundreds, here. Now imagine being the kernel author and having to duplicate all that code.

Having used both, I can easily say that CreateProcess is deficient, and fork/exec is kind of genius in how many things it makes possible. Could Windows fix CreateProcess with more API? Sure, but they didn't, probably because nobody wanted to spend the effort duplicating all their kernel code.
Most jobs aren't a source of those things. Why should software development be any different? Introducing unnecessary technical challenges just to make your work interesting often has a negative impact on the end user/customer, which you should give a shit about. Do you think lawyers and architects complain if they aren't allowed to jump on every fad and make their work needlessly complex?
It's true.
And it breaks on mobile when you use the menu.
There are real spies in this story, who are committing truly evil acts in the world, and using technology to further their aims of spreading malware and destroying international space conventions.

And yet the poster finds Microsoft the bad guys in this story?

This is a story about our international enemies using advanced western tech to develop malware, with which to attack us.

It's right to be outraged, but not at Microsoft
Gotta run some ducting for that server!
If the so called opportunity is the opportunity to "build a business case," what kind of opportunity is that? I have the opportunity to slap myself, but I don't think you would consider that an opportunity in the sense we are discussing - but maybe this is the problem, we never agreed on the definition of opportunity.

I find it rather hard to take you seriously after reading your bio where you decry the population diversifying on HN.
Not to mention the Federalist Society and their attack on constitutional law over the past twenty-some years.
Not sure about the currently available tools, given the break-neck speed of AI progress, but a couple of years ago I built a scraper that used a captcha-solving service, they sell something like 1000 solutions for $10, it was super cheap. The process was a bit slow because they were using humans to solve the captchas, but it worked really well
Yeah this was my impression.

I am but an end user, but I noticed that disk IO for a certain app was glacial compared to a local test deployment, and I chalked it up to networking/VM overhead
I don't think "lazy" is the word I would use, but I can see how some would see it like that. In my mind, GPT (and LLM's) are just the next layer of abstractions on top of a already massive stack of technical abstractions. For a SWE, this stack of abstractions crosses so many levels for a simple "hello world" to work:

1. Software (my code)
2. OS (Linux, kernels, etc)
3. Hardware (3090, 5090x, etc)
4. Electrical (Where is my energy coming from? how is it produced?)

Each of these levels could be broken into another 10 abstractions: On the software level, some people may understand how their compiler is working, but could they program in binary? What about understanding how their program interacts with memory? What about the kernel of where their software is deployed in the cloud? Do they know how their software is deployed in the cloud? Could they build the production server rack that their container is deployed on? Obviously this gets a bit ridiculous the further down you go- it's impossible to have knowledge about every part of what makes your code work.

I think that when people use terms like "lazy" or say that knowledge is being lost with abstractions like GPT, they ignore the massive list of abstractions that allow them to be productive.

I'd guess my thesis is that newer/GPT-aided engineers don't necessarily have less understanding, but their knowledge might just be shifted by one level up on the abstraction stack.
Core count plus modern nvme actually make a great case for moving away from the cloud- before it was, "your data probably fits into memory". These are so fast that they're close enough to memory so it's "your data surely fits on disk". This reduces the complexity of a lot of workloads so you can just buy a beefy server and do pretty insane caching/calculation/serving with just a single box or two for redundancy.
Again, I'm not in any way defending Putin's actions. But unfortunately your view on the state of the Russian economy doesn't match reality. According to IMF, in 2023, so one year after the invasion, it grew by 3%. And the IMF forecast for 2024 is 2.6% growth. Not many countries in the EU or even the US can match those figures.

See e.g. https://www.ft.com/content/21a5be9c-afaa-495f-b7af-cf9370931...
How do you suggest limiting donor influence, as a practical matter? How can they be forced to donate to organizations whose actions they oppose?
I feel like people in tech like to ascribe causality to evolution. As if “Evolution” is some sort of sentient, God-like entity that knows what’s best.

It’s not. It’s a theory. The core tenet of evolution is that organisms adapt to their environment.

All organisms are capable of modifying their environment such that they improve their odds of survival. Birds build nests. Beavers build dams. Trees drop seeds in clever ways.

Humans do an upgraded version of all those things.

Technology (in the broadest sense of the term) is really about tweaking the environment to increase our odds of survival. Sometimes, these experiments backfire. It happens to all species. It just happens to be globally-disruptive in the case of humans.

Frankly, all this talk about how “social evolution has hijacked the dopaminergic pathways of the brain” sounds like the ramblings of someone who recently read a pop-science book about the brain.
A year out of this world: NASA seeks volunteers to simulate Mars mission
Github scaled all the way to acquisition with Ruby on Rails, plus some C for a few performance critical modules and it was a monolith.

It doesn’t take a microservice to allow rewriting hot paths in a lower level language. Pretty much everything has a C-based FFI. This is what makes Python useable for ML—the libraries are written in C/C++.
I tried to do a similar thing, but in New Zealand, for engineering or ML engineering roles, without success. The folks I know of that pulled it off either knew people from previously working together in-person or were special in some way - PhD in valuable niche, wrote a book.
lol obviously not tax evasion. Keep paying those state and federal taxes and everyone is happy. Also pay any applicable EU taxes. The OP is prioritizing living in the EU. If that’s #1 then you have to accept you’re going to pay extra taxes.
Tyranny of silicon capitalism consuming the public commons. It's like a house with an HOA, only 1e9x worse.
I meant the users
Do they have a product that does NOT spy on users at all?

Pretty much everything they do is either cloud connected inherently giving them visibility into what you do, or they feed constant telemetry back of what you do in one form or another in the os, office apps, whatever you happen to use they make, on whatever platform you use it on, including non-windows systems.

Really do you expect anything more of Microsoft at this point in history?
>Newborn DNA Banking [in the U.S.; 2010]

https://www.aclu.org/documents/newborn-dna-banking
Smart glove teaches new physical skills
Why do they fundamentally need to be network attached storage instead of local to the VM?
I guess they didn’t teach ‘Hard Times’

"Fact, Fact, Fact!"
A cheap 45# plate with square edges lying flat on a concrete floor is quite challenging for ordinary (or older) mortals to pick up that first inch. So, please rack ‘em or at least leave them leaning.
the article provide 2 real world examples at Akamai and Google
So much of this.
The amount of times I've seen someone complain about slow DB performance when they're trying to connect to it from a different VPC, and bottlenecking themselves to 100Mbits is stupidly high.

Literally depending on where things are in a data center... If you're looking for closely coupled and on a 10G line on the same switch, going to the same server rack. I bet you performance will be so much more consistent.
I started writing a similar comment at this, but then figured that the situation is not so black-and-white. Some activists are using disingenuous practices to undermine science. Undermining science by itself might be a noble cause in some areas, but please just use the legal or political systems to accomplish that. Do not attack individuals directly.
There's an old IEEE article about the billions of dollars lost due to software project failures: https://spectrum.ieee.org/why-software-fails

We don't hear of such failures any more because software projects (or products) no longer "fail" in the traditional sense -- they turn into endless money sinks of re-architectures, re-platforming, tech debt repayment or expensive maintenance, that can continue as long as the company has cash. When the company does run out of cash, it is difficult to say to what extent tech expenses or lack of revenue due to slow software delivery played a part.
How high will you be "up in the tree"? Express your concern en findings and let them come first with a package. If you start it will be to high (per definition). What happend with the packages of the older dev's? Were the re-indexed?
I agree, I will change it.

Now that I look at at it properly, I look constipated :)
Since Swift UI is iOS-first, when the apps get ported to MacOS, they bring a lot of mobile-isms: the views and animations are often wrong, the controls are often wrong (like even the Apple's own settings app breaks a lot of established platform conventions and Apple's own HIGs), integration with system services is often incomplete (like proper keyboard shortcuts, I can't set a shortcut for Conversations->Delete in Messages anymore) etc.

Because of that I've seen people discuss that they have to reach for AppKit and/or ditch SwiftUI and got all in with AppKit, and that is easier to do from Obj-C.
> It has nothing to do with lifetime correlations

Yes it does; there's an implied `'b: 'a` outlives relationship that's required for the type to be well-formed.
the users don't care either
> It's just I can't name what the bank's asset actually is

The asset is a debt instrument, with everything implied by the specifics of that instrument.
> Since then, several NVMe instance types, including i4i and im4gn, have been launched. Surprisingly, however, the performance has not increased; seven years after the i3 launch, we are still stuck with 2 GB/s per SSD.

AWS marketing claims otherwise:

Up to 800K random write IOPS
Up to 1 million random read IOPS
Up to 5600 MB/second of sequential writes
Up to 8000 MB/second of sequential reads

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-storage-optimized-amazo...
Robotic Process Automation Will Crash Anyway
Makes sense. I should have read your comment more carefully! :)
The reasons to switch away from cloud keep piling up.

We're doing some amount of on-prem, and I'm eager to do more.
>> adopt a neutral stance and protect freedom of speech.

Neutral stances sound all well and good, but in reality they are fraught with difficulties. What is the neutral stance on anthropomorphic climate change? What is the neutral stance on the age of the earth? Or its shape? Adopting pure neutrality means giving voice to the fringes. While students can certainly benefit in principal from hearing such voices, I would have walked out of Geology 101 had we been tested on "alternative" religious-based models of geology. I went to university to learn about reality. I can get enough of the non-reality from the internet.
They don't. Some cloud providers (i.e. Hetzner) let you rent VMs with locally attached NVMe, which is dramatically faster than network-attached even factoring in the VM tax.

Of course then you have a single point of failure, in the PCIe fabric of the machine you're running on if not the NVMe itself. But if you have good backups, which you should, then the juice really isn't worth the squeeze for NAS storage.
Seems like it's basically impossible to ever prevent this kind of black box strategy. It's similar to the problem of secure DRM on videos-- at some point you need to decode the stuff to play it on the screen, and you can intercept it at that point. They need to send the commands to the drone in a timely way for it to work, and you can control those commands and know what commands you're sending. Although I guess they could XOR that command stream with some kind of one-time pad or something so you can never mimic it going forward, so maybe not? But whatever the stream of bits getting XORed to the command stream, that would need to exist in the memory in the drone unit, so with enough persistence and skill maybe you could crack it for a particular drone at least. I guess all they need to do is make it uneconomically hard to do for an arbitrary individual drone unit.
you can let the industry do the testing for you.

It's like changing to the new version of an OS on day 1 verses waiting 6 months.
Teaching has literally never been distinct from activism, but, good luck!
How much faster would the network need to get, in order to meet (or at least approach) the speed of a local SSD? are we talking about needing to 2x or 3x the speed, or by factors of hundreds or thousands?
Many smaller companies that use a PEO professional employer organization will be equipped to handle this.

Covering the night shift because of the time zones can be a competitive advantage for the types of rolls you listed. This is what my employer does, a handful of employees are in Portugal or other countries.
I've been fortunate (or not fortunate based on certain views here) to be working on a fully Swift app for the past 5 years or so. The upgrades have been painful but we've had a team helping for that process. But I don't see a good reason to write Obj-C unless I work at Apple or a huge legacy codebase anymore.
My vietnam vet dad, drafted, let the army knock all of his teeth out + break his jaw so they could (test?|practice?) some new orthodontia method to straighten GI teeth.

As someone who has spent a fortune on having pretty teeth I absolutely would not be willing to have my jaw and teeth beaten out of me and that fact always blows my mind. I have no idea what the status of ortho care was back then but the rest of my family have nice teeth without having chewed a grenade.

And he has had nonstop teeth/jaw issues since his service.
Vision Pro is to meta quest 3 what Starbucks is to local coffee shops.

Meaning, quest 3 is amazing, and Vision Pro is the best thing to happen to AR.

I hope steam doesn’t pull out. Zuck can preach about openness but the platform is still antagonistic to pc users.
Show HN: Eudemony, Your Virtual Workforce. Surprise for those in the waitlist
> And an engineering coordination strategy.

i've always felt the org chart defines the microservice architecture. It's a way to keep teams out of each other's hair. When you have the same dev working on more than one service then that's an indication you're headed for trouble.
There is no trickery with AWS instance stores, they are honest to god local disks.
It contains the tension between utilitarianism and the deontological act/omission distinction that the trolley problem is meant to isolate, but clinical trials are philosophically very different in that (1) the risks you cause during a trial are statistical rather than leading reliably to death of any one person, (2) trial participants can and are compensated for this risk, and (above all) (3) the trial participants have consented. In other words, there very little tension/inconsistency in saying that throwing the trolley switch is unethical but running human challenge trials is ethical.
Redundancy, local storage is a single point of failure.

You can use local SSD’s as slow RAM, but anything on it can go away at any moment.
Terms of Service for Telegram Peer-to-Peer Login Program
He wants to be in the tech billionaire club, that's validation that he didn't fall ass backwards into success.
> The short term risk is deflation, but I think the longer term would be still be reduced purchasing power of currency

Not really given the FDIC’s role: a threat to FDIC reserves would require the kind of broad collapse that would be produced by an economic collapse that would threaten deflation even before considering the loss of money supply from deposit accounts evaporating. FDIC coverage of insured (and even uninsured, as allowed under the systemic risk exception) amounts in such accounts can only reduce to zero the money lost from those accounts, it can never be stimulus that would go beyond neutralizing that additional deflation threat to actually deal with whatever the broader cause of the collapse was.

Now, the separate fiscal and monetary response to that cause beyond preventing losses to deposits might overshoot and produce excess inflation eroding purchasing power, but that’s a separate issue.
> There's no problem with individuals within academics being activists, but the institution itself should remain neutral. Its goal should be to foster an environment where ideas can be shared freely and considered by anyone.

Not all ideas are created equal. We have a long history of ideas, including sciences, that are discredited to a degree where they are, frankly, beneath consideration. Subjects like phrenology and eugenics, the creation theory for the origins of the universe, etc. IMO continuing to permit debate on some of these is not only harmful because the science itself was, in itself, harmful, but it's also a waste of an expensive institution's resources. At some point, further inquiry on a given subject just does not merit the time and energy of people who have far better work to be doing.
I can relate to this! Thanks for sharing your perspective :)
Over all, I like how it looks, but the price seems high. $3 a month is almost as much as I pay for email service.

Plus it seems weird to double drip. I’m already subscribed to you for the email service and you want me to almost double that price for a client to use it?

Will the existing Fastmail app be deprecated to force folks to the new subscription app?
> SSDs in the cloud are attached over a network, and fundamentally have to be

Not on AWS. Instance stores (what the article is about) are physical local disks.
This is the correct move. Students need to learn math, science, history, philosophy, and generally grow in critical thinking. There is instead a lot of indoctrination being foisted onto their minds, and a lot of it is even anti-American. That is fine for someone to explore on their own time, but institutions of learning becoming centers of indoctrination is a huge no from me.
I had a similar experience very recently (albeit within Europe). Did you try their manual verification process? It was available to me after two failed automatic attempts, and it basically had me send an email to Hetzner support asking if they needed any more information. I got approved manually the very next morning.

Maybe not the most customer-friendly experience, but I figure half an hour of signup weirdness is okay for a solid after-signup service in the long term, especially as that half an hour is likely to deter a decent chunk of fraud.
Reliability. SSDs break and screw up a lot more frequently and more quickly than CPUs. Amazon has published a lot on the architecture of EBS, and they go through a good analysis of this. If you have a broken disk and you locally attach, you have a broken machine.

RAID helps you locally, but fundamentally relies on locality and low latency (and maybe custom hardware) to minimize the time window where you get true data corruption on a bad disk. That is insufficient for cloud storage.
Only when the little guy does it. If you are high net worth and use a web of shell companies & various schemes to achieve the same outcome then it's no longer criminal.
I am _super_ impressed with Supabase. I can see how a lot of people may not like it given how reliant it is on Postgres, but I find it to be absolutely genius.

It basically allows me to forego having to make a server for the CRUD operations so I can focus on the actual business implications. My REST API is automatically managed for me (mostly with lightweight views and functions) and all of my other core logic is either spread out through edge functions or in a separate data store (Redis) where I perform the more CPU intensive operations related to my business.

There's some rough edges around their documentation and DX but I'm really loving it so far.
> How do you suggest limiting donor influence, as a practical matter?

Harvard, Penn, etc is far more important than bill ackman, trump, etc.

> How can they be forced to donate to organizations whose actions they oppose.

They don't have to donate. And their children don't get special privileges to these institutions. Besides, as I said, the organizations should take a neutral stance.
one big humblebrag
You don't need a borrow checker to write reliable programs. If anything the Rust obsession with memory safety has been harmful since it detracts from general safety. But don't take my word for it, maybe consider what the co-author of The Rust Programming Language, 2nd edition has to say [1].

If you really care about writing robust programs then focus on improving your testing methodology rather than fixating on the programming language.

[1] https://steveklabnik.com/writing/memory-safety-is-a-red-herr...
Finance 101: The Guide for Seed/Series A Startups
It's likely that Assange has spent more time self-imprisoned in the Bolivian embassy and then in UK prison than the actual sentence will be.

The charges against Assange have very long maximum sentences, but the actual sentence to be expected is unlikely to be more than little over 5 years.