skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a major depressive thought of mine; that computers and the internet started as this wild west in which capitalism didn't have a hold, because information that can be infinitely copied cannot have value, but capitalism being extremely adaptive at infecting everything and anything turned it into bland corporate soup, and will continue to do so until every personal terminal is a dumb remote access screen that streams rendered frames from The Cloud and it won't even be a general-purpose computer anymore, much less be capable of running what you want.

Today I'm 25, which puts me at older gen Z, younger millennial, which should have given me the experiences of the time when I was a teenager or kid, but by some cruel twist of fate, I keep discovering things from that time that I wasn't aware of that I still think are incredible as concepts, but make no sense in the modern world beyond being toys.
I mean you gotta put your server somewhere (I guess hosting it on your connection?)
You're also describing essentially all forms of music making, as well as many other creative disciplines.
yes, it's ridiculous. i'm really glad they didn't remove it.

you know what would have been better? not claiming that young children need guidance in case of "hottentot".

people these days are projecting their own delusional compulsive need to make everything P.C. and safe onto everyone else, including the sane people (and children). i guarantee no 5-10 year old suddenly picks up "hottentot" as a playground slur because they saw this without enough "guidance".

there are indeed much more pressing concerns. like stupidity and pandering. race-baiting. extremism... so no, the issue is not a big deal, the overreaction is.
Eh, I wouldn’t say that’s necessarily the case. AWS support, for example, tends to be really good about waiving charges for things that are clearly your mistake, like an unused instance that you forgot to turn off for a couple months. That’s not because hosting instances doesn’t actually cost Amazon anything! It’s because they want to keep you as a customer even if it loses them a bit of money right now.

In the Netlify case, though, insisting that this person still pay 5% is downright insulting. I’m sure they’re taking a hit already - just waive the whole thing.
This and that similar story recently about Vercel makes me feel iffy about these services at this point. I guess I’ll either use Cloudflare pages or simple dedicated machines from Hetzner going forward.
A lot less than 1%.
Netflix confirms it's cutting off Apple billing for grandfathered subscribers
The other major political party likes its make work program for its voter base, so it’s unlikely to accept a one time payment vs guarantees of organizational stability.
My previous understanding was that service would be stopped once you hit past the free tier.

Upon review, it does not look like this is the case. I have several very low traffic projects on which would have never been anywhere close to the free limit. However, if I get involved in a random spam attack, it seems I could be on the hook for several thousand dollars.

This is incredibly dangerous. Netlify is often used as a beginner friendly free tier for static hosting. Not as something that is cheap, but as something that is free. This is just an overall dangerous position to put people in.
What creators need is a better youtube algorithm. Is it just me, or has youtube recommendations become almost unusable by now? Some years ago when I spent "an hour watching YouTube" I'd watch a huge majority of videos recommended by the algorithm based on my current subs. Today it is 1%. Why? I'll give you an example.

I have varied interests, I sub and regularly watch a number if channels in each of my hobbies, but fixing cars is not one. However, one day I searched youtube how to change a bulb in a specific model of a car. This was a week ago. My youtube feed is still full of car repair howto videos. The people I'm subscribed to have produced new videos, but they don't show up.

Also I used to get recommended channels similar to ones I sub. No more. It looks 100% random now. I get recommended a random channel with 10 subs, but somehow I manage to miss one of the biggest channels in one of my hobbies for months.
Hetzner VPS + nginx works fine and goes a looong way. Alternatively, SourceHut pages or GitHub pages is okay too.

If it’s been a while since you did any server work: https://www.dannyvankooten.com/blog/2024/static-site-hosting...
I built a game using Rapier! Using its deterministic mode, I built an online multiplayer game whereby players take turn slamming bugs against the other team and capture the hill.

It doesn't have a single-player mode yet (writing an AI for it is a bit more challenging than the chess-like I made) but check it out at https://evrimzone.itch.io/crittershowdown and the physics/game logic source code at https://github.com/evrimoztamur/crittershowdown/blob/e4d9a19....

I plan to write a post about how I wired it together and what I learned, but overall very solid library and well-thought of Rust-y API that enabled me to do everything I needed it to.
But you need a static IP, stable internet, UPS, and permission from your wife to have a 24/7 powered noisy box in a room
Personally YouTube is ruined for me because of sponsorships. It just became advertisement packaged as content.

I understand from an economical perspective why people do it, but I can't shake the feeling that the content is just an excuse and the ad is the meat of the content.
Discord and slack figured out messaging, and the web development tooling now is infinitely better than 2014. On the front end, HTML5 and responsive web design were still new in 2013, and React came out in 2013/stabilized in 2015/released Hooks in 2019.

On the backend, Next.js brought us SSR in 2016, MongoDB brought us document databases by winning “fastest growing database engine” in 2013 and 2014, and Docker brought us disposable containers in 2013.

The list is stacked towards older tech but that’s maybe because recent tech hasn’t proven itself yet: svelte in 2020 is still maturing AFAICT, and ive never heard of Vite (2021) or SolidJS (2022). I personally think many exciting non-AI trends are also ramping up now, such as Local First development (formalized in May 2023).

I think that the economy and innovation in general were curtailed due to the climaxing rampant corruption in the US, but the internet is something of an exception IMO.

This is all talking about developer abilities, of course: the constraints of corrupt capitalism mean that many of the actual sites released in the past decade have been terribly bloated and over-featured. But I think that’s partially a consequence of businesses moving everything into mobile-first websites and apps —- you’re gonna see a lot more low-margin websites.
Since the author has gone viral I expect some netlify exec is going to take over and write this bill off to $0. In the words of Kramer “these big companies, they just write it off!”

A moment of silence for the people who got DDoS-ed, didn’t go viral and still had to pay $5k.
The primary purpose of these services is to be able to scale up and continue working under heavy load, shutting the site down when this occurs would defeat the entire purpose of the service. I would say that they are transparent about both of the things you have listed by virtue of being one of those scaling serverless hosting services.
More reasons why I avoid clouds with outrageous bandwidth fees, and prefer Hetzner's low cost fixed pricing with Cloudflare R2's 0 egress fees.

Even if the DDoS wasn't caught by Cloudflare, the total cost for 192TB bandwidth on Hetzner would be €172. Although even after 10 years on Hetzner I've never paid for any bandwidth, always well within their generous 20TB free bandwidth.
Just something to keep in mind: this also has about half of additional bandwidth costs (above 100GB) of the reddit post, so in your case you'd be billed for ~$57k or so with similar DDOS. At least they seem to provide monitoring/alerts based on their Security page.
It smells like a scam, because they can suddenly bill any user they want for a scary number like $100,000, then when the user complains they "generously" reduce that to only 5%, or $5,000, hoping the user will just pay the massively reduced cost. This kind of thing - showing a huge number upfront then reducing it to a "small" number - is a classic scam.

Who controls the DDOS bots? Are they truly a separate entity? There is no direct evidence to link them together, but you would think that an honest company would be more proactive in preventing problems like this for their customers.

According to the linked reddit story, this is a known issue with Netlify and their response to past incidents is basically to pound sand. It all adds up to them purposefully trying to find ways to generate a high bill for their customers and hoping a small amount will pay for it.
But there are very few public AI companies. nVidia, Microsoft, Google and Meta? None of them have too crazy of a P/E ratio and all are wildly profitable. The actual silly money is all in the private space and you can't short those.
Bemlo (YC W22) Is Hiring React devs to change how healthcare shifts are filled
dyingkneepad is talking about how the cpu actually works (x86-64 & cache hierarchy). It doesn't really matter what constructs a particular programming language does or doesn't have -- we can reason about performance in terms of what x86-64 instructions the cpu ends up executing.

Suppose we want to compute the sum of n scalars, represented as n 32 bit floats, say, and we're weighing up if we should store these n scalars in a linked list or an array. The "introduction to algorithms" analysis might be that both approaches require O(n) storage and O(n) running time, so they're indistinguishable, up to some constants that get absorbed into the big-oh notation.

The basic big-oh analysis is true as a first cut for some theoretical simplification of a machine, but with our performance hats on, maybe we're interested in the constants being small so our code actually runs fast on a real machine -- we need to understand how a real machine works in a little bit more detail, in particular we need to have some crude mental model of the memory hierarchy.

On real hardware, if we use a linked list to store our data then each node in the list may end up in an unpredictable region of memory. The CPU will need to load these fragmented chunks of memory into L1 cache memory. Depending on the whims of the memory allocator, each time we read a node into cache we may get a single useful scalar value surrounded by a bunch of other junk -- our precious expensive L1 cache may be 90% filled with junk and only contain 10% or less useful data. (this is the big downside of "pointer-walking" AKA "pointer-chasing"). If our calculation is bottlenecked by memory bandwidth, we're wasting 90% of our machine's memory bandwidth to read useless data because we chose to store our data in an unpredictable, fragmented arrangement throughout memory.

In contrast, if we store our data in an array in a contiguous block of memory that we linearly traverse, each time we read a chunk of values into L1 cache, all the neighboring values are ones we're going to need to read next as we compute our sum. So we're filling our precious tiny L1 cache with 100% useful data and 0% junk. Because we load multiple useful data values each time we load a chunk of our array into cache, we reduce the number of times we need to load into cache, and also unblock more useful compute-bound work (adding scalar values) that the cpu can keep busy with before we need to load main memory into cache again.

see also:

CppCon 2014: Mike Acton "Data-Oriented Design and C++" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0ItVEVjHc

2022: Andrew Kelley - Practical Data-Oriented Design (DOD) https://vimeo.com/649009599
This is the reason I've never used all of these user-facing serverless services. The price depends on the usage, but if anything goes wrong they are the ones to decide what you pay. It's not comfortable thinking that you could screw up, or get DDoS'd, and the remedy is hoping they wave the bill.
Navidrome + Play:Sub on ios and the awesome supersonic for the desktop (https://github.com/dweymouth/supersonic). This is the way.

Prior to this, take some time to tag your files with Musicbrainz Picard.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding the article, but there’s multiple places where they mention memory latency being the main bottleneck. At any rate, thanks for sharing! Interesting stuff.
Thanks a lot! I really love this superset of /now pages with your own great idea of an /ideas page.
I think the Penguin in Bloom County uses that word a lot.
It's called web scale.
Cloudflare has free DDOS protection.

Additionally, they own ( or co-own) their DC, while Netlify and Vercel doesn't. So they can fix any billing issues at their end.
Bitcoin works because you can prove it mathematically without Satoshi's involvement. He made a quote in the recent email dump that reinforces this: "self-evident proof of the majority consensus”. [1]

[1] https://twitter.com/pete_rizzo_/status/1760718747768087033

The world doesn't need Satoshi for Bitcoin to continue working. And so the reason people want to find his identity is because there exist people in the world who lie, cheat, steal and ultimately kill. Those people want to find Satoshi, to punish him for inventing a fair system of economic trade that doesn't cut them into it.
A lot of today's managed service solutions turn scaling problems into billing problems. While that's a useful tradeoff for many business use-cases, there should still be a way to set limits so you don't wind up with insane cost overruns.
As a speculative commodity, sure. But in terms of its original promises of utility? Granted, I understand the source of this thread is in terms of economic viability, so I'm not saying you're wrong in context. But I think the point GP is making is that it's fair to say that large parts of the tech industry were totally swept up in optimism and it took a while to sort out the actual facts and value. (That said, I broadly agree with most comments in this thread rather than GP that there is something more tangibly valuable here than with cryptocurrency.)
It does say it's pay-as-you-go on their pricing page. However they probably should have a giant warning page for new users who don't know that this is how this kind of service works if they want to target the beginner web-dev market. As far as I know, no other similar service has this though.
Don't worry, I thought it was.
What can go wrong? What are common issues?
> What's wrong with Plexamp?

Plex, the company.
https://www.netlify.com/security/ sez “Active DDoS mitigation — Netlify monitors for traffic pattern anomalies and spikes, and effectively controls for them as needed” and now I'm curious about what that actually means.
Github static page.
Because it's unbounded liability.

Not to mention the strong conflict of interest for netlify, who stands to gain from their customers being attacked. Netlify is getting paid for something criminal in nature having occurred.

It's like who is responsible for credit card fraud? If customers are responsible for credit card fraud, and it's their responsibility not to get scammed, then who implements fraud prevention measures and what effect would that have on the volume of fraud?
You don't need nvlink for inference with models that need to fit in multiple cards. I'm using a laptop with a 3080 ti mobile and a 3090 in an eGPU enclosure for running LLM models over 24GB.
Wouldn't it be possible to pay a company to setup and manage the bare metal infrastructure for you so as to reduce costs (they have multiple customers) and increase redundancy (the consulting company has more than one employee)?
Having built serverless apps and "old-fashioned" apps, I seriously believe the old fashioned way is better.

The best of both worlds is to host on AWS EC2 or a similar product from your web service provider of choice.
That sounds like a company that is happy to ignore customer pain. Agree, default-on telemetry that cannot fully be disabled is a red flag that on their side, the people with development experience have no say.
Especially since they admit it was a DDoS attack. What I find outrageous is first that they charge for incomming traffic (which is often free with other providers), but also 55$ per 100GB. For comparisson, Hetzner charges you 1€ per 1TB of outgoing traffic while incoming is free.
Our AWS TAM says they don’t do this anymore, and we spend tens of millions of dollars with them annually. n=1, ymmv
Diablo 2 is very hard compared to Diablo III, which I find is a major selling point.

I think the waste in D4 is that there is very little replay value, only the long grind or Seasons.

But starting over and over has very little appeal, so that leaves only one option: New content released regularly.

Which sadly is not planned for D4.
Bootable business cards have been around for a while. Eg

CD based:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootable_business_card

PCB based:
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/24/now-even-your-business-card-...

There’s also NFC based digital business cards, which are now really common. But they’re obviously it bootable / running Linux.
thanks for the heads up, need to do my due diligence here.

edit: refreshing that they highlight baked in ddos protection right up front on their marketing site: https://docs.render.com/ddos-protection
Measuring average distance between cities is incredibly naive, that's my whole point. If countries A and B both have 100 cities in the sam land area, except country A has 50 cities over 1 million people and country B only has 10 cities over 1 million then one of these is still much more viable even if average distance between cities is the same. You're right that if all 10 of those larg cities in country A are really close then it may be viable. But that's not the case in America, save for the Northeast corridor which is already served by passenger rail.
In other words, managing FFI resources will remain "manual" or otherwise deterministic. The mechanism will cooperate with GC by releasing an object to be collected once its interaction with FFI is done.

In absence of finalizers, I suspect, FFI resources could also be garbage-collected.

If looks like traditional GC-based languages (like Java or Lisp) are hurt by absence of static data flow analysis, which would guarantee that a finalizer cannot revive the object being collected (e.g. by creating a new live reference to it elsewhere). Finalizers can likely be made safe enough if their code is more restricted; that would still allow many reasonable finalizers that calmly release external resources.
Look more closely at the software.

It does not just magically conjure LLM model files out of thin air.

Where do those models come from?

https://github.com/ollama/ollama/issues/2390

The registry is not open source.

You think I’m being unfair?

https://github.com/ollama/ollama/issues/914#issuecomment-195...

(Paraphrased)

>> How do I run my own registry?

> email us, let’s talk.
It means they protect themselves from layer 3 and 4 DDoS. For layer 7 you're mostly on your own. That's what most companies mean when they talk about DDoS anyway.
Yet another example of Tesla's immaturity as a company.

At the automaker I work with, somebody would be fired over this. Things like this only happen if someone breaks purchasing protocols.
That’s not because hosting instances doesn’t actually cost Amazon anything

Except it doesn't cost them anything. The marginal cost of keeping your single instance running is $0 (unless they were 100% out of capacity and they could have sold that instance to someone else either at full price or spot price)
It's not even location data. A lot of stuff uses GPS to get time information and then propagate that using NTP or other timing infrastructure. Seeing a lot of stratum 0 or stratum 1 time servers go offline could potentially cause a lot of issues if systems start to drift away from each other.
To be fair Unity had/has a bunch of other businesses unrelated or marginally related to the engine itself. They went on a spending spree during 2020 and 21 buying random companies left and right.

Seems like they are mainly focusing on cutting that.
Defaulting to unbounded liability as the standard operating procedure for cloud infrastructure should be illegal.
Companies barely have enough time and money to keep developing their already existing 10+ yrs old tested and "working" codebases as is, how would anyone switch to a whole new language at this point?
Something like it! Setup for Windows 95 through Windows ME, when run from DOS, unpacked and launched a version of Windows 3.1 that was included in the MINI.CAB file.
I've been using Tableau since 2013 to deploy dashboards, which in my case are front ends to ML model output. (for me, I used it as a Streamlit before Streamlit existed)

People think of Tableau as a dashboard tool, which it is. But it's also a great tool for doing EDA (exploratory data analysis) on multidimensional data. Instead of writing lots of seaborn/ggplot code (and having to remember the syntax), you can just move things around in Tableau in a fraction of the time.

The downside of Tableau is that you have to have a strong relational database way of thinking to use it effectively. You have to think in terms of aggregations, and occasionally in terms of window functions (Table calculations in Tableau). Tableau was (is?) a much more powerful tool than Power BI (at least this was true in 2019 when I last used PowerBI).

Tableau has never been a simple tool by any means. I was a scientist but I used to run Tableau training in my workplace, and I could see how long it took for things to click for most folks. Once you got beyond a few bar charts, things got really complex (partly because you were unlocking a lot of power through relational operations -- in data analysis, there's rarely power without complexity)

Relational thinking is a very powerful way to think about (and execute) computation on large-scale data in a performant way -- it is after all the algebra of dataframes -- but I've come to appreciate that it is beyond most people. Even software engineers struggle to think relationally -- many still think in for-loops.

Also, things that were seemingly easy to do in Excel -- like doing a row and column cell calculation -- were very difficult. You had to think about the corresponding SQL manipulation and then reproduce it in Tableau....

... but I think most people just want to plot nice graphs from their Excel data and show it to their bosses. (which they can do with Tableau, but so can they with Power BI)

Side note: I have a copy of Tableau 2023 but it seems to have reached a feature plateau -- it is barely different from the Tableau of 2020.
USA: Most Citizens in 3rd World Conditions
Tod is a command line tool to test/debug OneDev CI/CD jobs against local changes to avoid the modify/commit/push/run/check cycles.

Under the hood, tod stashes local changes to a commit and pushes to server under a temporal ref to run specified job. Log of running job is streamed back to tod so that you can check job progress and status without leaving terminal.

Since job runs on server, it does not have many quirks and limitations of other tools (gitlab-runner exec or nektos/act for instance), such as requiring you to set up job environments, unable to handle job dependencies, etc. And you can still get fast feedback via shallow clone and cache.

For details, please check tod project at https://github.com/theonedev/tod
For personal servers you can use the dynamic DNS feature on your modem in combination with Cloudflare if you like doing it at home, if it's for your business you can see if you can afford the €2 per month for Hetzner managed hosting or your local equivalent.
How is this going to work exactly?
Show HN: I built a tool to help you search for CivitAI's models by art style