skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The article honestly reads as if written by a very smart sysadmin with zero cloud experience.

1:1 lift and shift is always obscenely more expensive. In this case, if the author had been in charge of the migration, then yes, the services would have cost them dearly to operate in the cloud.

I'm sure if I was personally put in charge of moving some aspect of IT into an unfamiliar mode of operation, my inexperience there would make my approach insanely expensive as well.

That says nothing about the target, except that having undertrained and inexperienced staff in charge of its design and implementation is probably foolish from a financial perspective.

There are obviously thousands on thousands of scenarios where moving to commodity cloud is an absolute slam dunk in aspects that are important to the subject business.

Unfortunately we really get no insight into what the workload truly is in the article's comparison. There's no mention of solution aspects like app architecture, security, HA/DR, SLA, RTO/RPO, security or backups [1]. We only get what is plainly a tunnel-vision view of a comparison.

It's almost like the author doesn't make solutions for a living.

Maybe the author actually realizes their blind spot, and is secretly utilizing Cunningham's law to crowd-source a relatively free solution from the professionals and amateurs in the internet comments sections.

The good architects don't work for free. There's a reason why Troy Hunt's web services cost him vanishingly little to operate, and it's certainly not by running IaaS VMs 24x7x365.

[1] I mentioned security twice as part of an ongoing effort to make up for all the times CyberSec/Infosec teams have been forgotten in the planning process. =P
Book Excerpt: How Robots Have Become Trusted Surgical Assistants
With regards to debt is money - it's actually the other way around. Money is debt (by definition).
Counterpoint against that. Because optometry isn't considered part of the "healthcare" umbrella when I went to get LASIK it was the easiest medical transaction that I've ever done. They explained what they would do, said this was the price, then said they could offer a discount and when I was still considering they said they could give me another discount. I got the upfront price paid for it got my surgery and went on my way. This wasn't some shady Nick Riveria place either it was one of the premier LASIK facilities in the world.

By contrast trying to do something as simple as buying a new medical device for my wife has been a Kafkaesque nightmare with random charges, wrong billing codes, switching companies, fighting insurance, demonstrating need, etc, etc for something I am willing to purchase. The device is also marked up several thousand percent to boot.

Part of the problem with the healthcare discussion is that we need to clarify what we mean by healthcare. When I hear people complain about healthcare they either are complaining about medicine, or hospital stays with crazy and confusing billing processes, and these 2 problems are completely different than each other and require a whole different set of discussions apporaches and solutions, but everyone just talks about "healthcare" with no nuance and it obscures any possible forward progress.

As a final question for pondering how much healthcare does everyone deserve? I think we'd agree it probably isn't reasonable to say a 96 year old woman should get a multimillion dollar experimental cancer treatment that will extend her life by 6 months before dying, on the other hand simply having access to Ibeprofun and Antibiotics means you have access to better medical care than anyone else at any point in history longer than 40 or 50 years ago?
Ask HN: If the singularity is nigh, why be frugal?
Hypothetically speaking - if the singularity is indeed within the next few decades, why bother saving any money at all and instead live as lavishly as possible?

Practical reasons to save:

a) What if it isn't?
i) Maybe ASI takes a lot longer or the notion of exponential intelligence gains actually doesn't happen
ii) Perhaps we wipe ourselves out via climate change/nuclear war/etc (in which case money still won't matter much)

b) Money might still matter in a post-scarcity economy
i) Some resources will still be scarce - how do we allocate them?

c) Saving money is wise regardless of what happens
i) People still saved during the cold war when nuclear war destruction seemed imminent

Arguments for lavish living
a) A post ASI world would likely look radically different. Hopefully in a good way, but still different. Might as well experience the world as it is now.
i) If life becomes much worse, then either we will be dead, which means money doesn't matter, or life is terrible, in which case we might wish we'd enjoyed the good years we had.
ii) If life becomes much better, then our savings probably don't matter so much as we've figured out the scarcity problem.

b) Climate change might (and already has) result in the radical transformation of ecosystems, causing many experiences to possibly not exist in the future.
i) Ideally ASI would help resolve climate change? Or at least greatly mitigate it.

I, myself, am a pretty frugal person. I pay debts as quickly as I can, save as much as I can for retirement, and spend as little as possible. I think ultimately my 401k savings might useless by the time I'm old, but I do it anyways. My actions certainly conflict with the premise of my question.

I have no clue if I should even believe in the concept of the singularity. Perhaps, in a lot of ways, it is like a religion. We've replaced the second coming of Christ with the arrival of AI.

I think, ultimately, the sanest take is to assume nothing and continue to be frugal even if it's just giving myself the illusion of control over my own life into the future.
The AI Mirror Test — A Test for Self-awareness in AI?
When I was younger I had some episodes where I started to perceive distortions in distance and size. I perceived big things like houses suddenly as very little, like toys, and I felt I could grab then in my hand. Or I perceived little things suddenly as very large and far away. A toy soldier for example could grow to be the size of Statue of Liberty as if watched from the Battery Park. I found these distortions very fascinating. I didn't have episodes for more than twenty years. Last week however my older son told me about it and I told him, me too!
They’re still showing for me
We have decades of experience of insurance companies and utilities not being able to charge whatever they want without causing shortages. Now, in California there is an example where this price limitation is causing some companies to pull out of the market. Price controls can be used without causing a shortage and they can be used in a such a way to cause a shortage. Price controls in and of themselves do not cause anything. It’s how they are implemented that matters.
That is the best joke I've heard all day. Thank you for the laugh :)
QM is quite simple.

But then we also have QFT. The difficult things you were talking about fall more on the QFT side of things.

In my view QM predicts QC will work just like math predicts Turing machines will work.

But the practical realization of an advanced Turing machine can indeed be a very complicated thing - in fact we need quantum physics to understand how modern transistors work.

So if practical useful QC don't work, wouldn't that be more of a QFT engineering problem?

I fully agree that we might not be able to build a working QC, just like we are struggling with fusion power for over 50 years now despite theory predicting it should work, and in theory it being a simpler problem than QCs.

Maybe I'm being pedantic with the distinction between QM/QFT...
Yeah, but this is essentially the same as Google results now but instead of just links it uses AI to summarize the results into a text blob. It still contains links to where it got it information in the summary and it allows you to ask follow up questions.

It's not like it generating new information. It just summarizes information based on the same links you would have gotten without it.
Well, I don't know what you've missed, but Godless and Hell on Wheels were both decent. For a modern western, Longmire is pretty good.
My parallel is between AGPL and SSPL. The SSPL protects from companies like Amazon: it can protect other companies, or can protect hackers that don't want to see their work exploited (and make zero profits from their stuff). It's a tool. I don't know if I would use it, but it makes totally sense IMHO.

It's simple to see things from the POV of other smaller but yet VCs-backed companies only, when evaluating the damage of Amazon. Things are actually more complex. For instance OpenRedis was one of the very first Redis SAAS services ran by the same folks that contributed to Redis in the first days, that provided the logo and so forth. Guess who is also impacted by the Amazon monopoly?
It was hard to believe for me, too. And I didn't stumble upon it; I looked for it closely, and that was a point in the note. People did not look properly for nearly three decades. Many things have changed, but we computer people are still using the same tools.
I am not saying old is not good; the current solutions are great, but what are we, if we don't look for the better?

Yes it is that much faster, and a good part of it is because of the multi-thread design, but as a reminder, WinRAR or 7-Zip are too multi-thread, and you can see the difference.
To satisfy your doubt, I suggest running Pack for yourself. I am looking for more data on its behaviour on different machines and data.

Can I ask why do you need a version without ZSTD? If you are thinking that compression slows it down, I should say no. Pack is the first of its kinds that "Store" is slowing it down. Because its compression is smart, it will skip any non-compressible content.

On the same machine and the same Linux source code test:

Pack: 194 MB, 1.3 s

Pack (With no Press): 1.25 GB, 1.8 s
Good point, thank you. Note that SQLite format is very simple https://www.sqlite.org/fileformat.html
From the dead? I use Pug every day. All my Vue + Vuetify templates are Pug.

Not having closing tags makes things much cleaner & more readable. I like putting commas between attributes too.

I don't use any aspects of Pug other than this though- Vue handles all my conditionals and template injection.
I was hopelessly confused about what Soupault actually does, so I took time to understand it piece by piece and summarize it here:

1. HTML Manipulation: Unlike most SSGs that primarily generate HTML from templates and markdown, Soupault allows direct manipulation of HTML content, treating HTML as a mutable object rather than a final output.

2. External Tools Integration: Soupault automates the use of external tools for content processing and HTML modifications at build time, facilitating an array of content transformations directly on the HTML.

3. Metadata Handling: Soupault extracts metadata directly from HTML using CSS selectors, avoiding the need for front matter and offering more flexibility in content structure and metadata management.

TLDR: Basically, Soupault is a static site generator that allows for direct HTML manipulation of your sites by treating HTML as the source of truth instead of the final output.
Some years ago I visited an establishment in the jungles of Central America that looked exactly like Jackson's Bar.
Instead of visiting content creators or information sources directly, you allow google to insert themselves between you and them. The sources get starved and google later has the opportunity to shape what is said to influence you (ie, “advertise” in a more varied way, or else give a political spin or some pro corporate or PR approved way)

see also: amazons ai review summarizer will one day have a larger role and will surely skew things to increase sales
Cue the perl one line challenges.

Metrics that are team level dashboards and not shared outside of the team are different from pay and promotion incentivized metrics. The same metric can have very different behavioral outcomes between the two scenarios
It would be cool if there's a blog post on it.
Google has been on a mission for years to stop letting users click through to other sites.

They started with the info boxes that extracted info from sites so you don’t have to click and read.

This is just a natural evolution of that.
Correct, and I have my workflow to reduce noise/signal ratio, for example by adding: site:stackoverflow for programming questions, or by adding site:ycombinator.com for tech queries, and reading discussions how answer was derived.

For AI, I expect noise-signal will be not as good as I expect.
That actually kind of makes sense. The framework I'm using (Yew) compiles down to WASM. So the entire website is loaded up-front first. It's like loading an entire app on your browser. The idea is once you load it, it should go really fast.
Less bitcoin
Not totally convinced by the ORDER BY obstacles that the author raises..

table('test').project('a').orderBy('b')

> That's an error, because we can't order by a column that we just projected away. Right?

assumes that 'projection' completely eliminates part of the underlying relation, but why does that have to be the case?

If a relation includes 'selected fields' and 'hidden fields', and project just 'hides' the fields it doesn't project, while orderBy can operate on either projected or hidden fields, this ends up being perfectly sound.

Even the more complex example which is translated as follows:

translate('select a+1 as c from test order by b,c')
=>
table('test').project('a','b').addColumn('a+1', as='c').orderBy('b','c').project('a')

would work fine as:

table('test') // selected: [a, b, ...], hidden: []
.addColumn('a+1', as='c') // selected: [a, b, c, ...], hidden: []
.project('c') // selected: [c], hidden: [a, b, ...]
.orderBy('b','c') // selected: [c], hidden: [a, b, ...]

(not sure why there's a .project('a') on the end of their version)

Which is a reasonably local, algebraic transformation.
SAS Grounds 18 Airbus A320neo because a component needs inspection
Yep, and CS Lewis was religious as well- didn't stop me from enjoying the creation of narnia in the Magician's Nephew. It did stop me from enjoying the Last Battle, as that was too egregious.
Author here. I'm by no means an expert on 1848 politics, but I got this information from the cited source (Hamerow, "Restoration, Revolution, Reaction"). Quoting 191-192:

"In industry conservatism could afford to do more than merely outliberalize the liberals. It bid boldly for the support of the urban proletariat by reintroducing corporate regulation of production. Through the association of an economic with a political reaction it hoped to create a mass following for the policy of counterrevolution. Hence the royalist victory in Prussia was followed by the promulgation of the two emergency measures of February 9 revitalizing the atrophied guild system." (etc., it goes on to cite similar post-1848 regulations imposed by other German states.)
Agreed. And a point that keeps getting missed whenever this discussion comes up is there's a big difference between junior and senior programmers. What should a junior programmer do? Write as much code as possible! KLOC is a pretty good measure of progress for junior programmers, how else do you get better at programming? To know when not to write a line of code, you have to know how to write the line of code in the first place.
I really like this interpretation actually, I'll stick with that when people ask what it means nowadays!
One may decide that "summarization" be lower quality, add more errors to results, and pollute results page.
What are some good Python codebases to read?
Furries been making tail cores like this for years
It's not the quality of the AI that's at issue. In fact the higher quality Google's AI is, the less I will trust it. Google wants to extract maximum value from me. I want to find useful information on the Internet. These two goals are frequently at odds with each other. The better Google's AI gets, the better it will be at doing it's job (which I do not like).
Coffee drinkers have much lower risk of bowel cancer recurrence, study finds
Ultrarunning should be an Olympic sport. Vastly more interesting than the track stuff they show.
I did not live through the 70s, and I'm not British, but I have heard people say the same about the US now. That there is a sense of exhaustion comparable to the 1970s.

If I could put on my sociologist hat, I would say it's due to demographics. The 1970s were the "trough of disillusionment" for the baby boomers as their youthful idealism faded, and we're seeing something similar as the similarly large echo boom generation ages.
> best and brightest and visited by tech giants. If anyone can solve this problem, it is us.

I'd say this egotistical god-complex is exactly what got us into the current mess.
'Meritocracy is system justification'
American Isolationism
The quality of these results is in my experience quite poor, so this is worrying to me. (The other comment about "distilled blogspam" hits the nail on the head I think.)

It highlights a fundamental tension around Google's core product: Users want accurate information. From their perspective, that is the singular purpose of using Google. But Google's internal purpose is only to sell ads. It makes no difference to their bottom line whether the information they give users is correct unless it gets so bad they start losing ad impressions.

Speaking even more broadly, it's very depressing to me how secondary the goal of building a good, useful or functional thing is subservient or at best orthogonal to the goal of making money.
It is a data format, not a protocol. You cannot send a friend request with it.

Besides, FOAF is terribly designed. You cannot take seriously something that has aimChatID and icqChatID in it.
A couple, but simple.

No, you will only need Pack, everything is built into it. Pack is built for Windows and Linux, and more will come. You will be able to run it on almost all CPUs.
My read on the author's explanation story is he did actually solve the "consistency with time" and "consistency in position" problems that would make it a "rounds up to real-looking" at some zoom seam.

It's not cheating, but the trick is it's pre-computed.

Basically the structural patterns repeat, and you can pre-compute the patterns (which are also the sub-patterns), then basically tile the configurations and their transitions "across time". A naiive approach takes a few TB to store it all, but there's some clever optimizations that can bring it down. Finally once a "solution" through the tiling space was found, the author encoded it into a 4 mb png and built a display with some clever shaders.
> None of that is related to providing identities to the government

Agreed. But I disagree that the true reason is security. The true reason is better stalking which is valuable to adtech scum which now happens to be the vast majority of consumer-grade tech.

> I have never seen a service require 2FA

Try register on Twitter. They'll let you register but then randomly suspend your account for alleged ToS violations (even if the account was outright inactive) but will give you the option of instantly unbanning yourself following phone number verification. Microsoft will randomly lock out MS accounts without a phone number attached and will require a phone number for "security" upon the next login (the security angle being very dubious considering they don't have a number on file to compare to, so even an attacker can pass this challenge just fine). Etc.

> There's no conspiracy.

It's true, there's no conspiracy, it's just business and can be explained by common sense and economics. Phone numbers help tracking people. Adtech makes more money the better it can target its ads. Most consumer tech nowadays is intertwined with adtech. Said consumer tech thus optimizes for higher profit by collecting more data to help adtech.
I guess you are overestimating the "cobble together read/write support without even needing a library."

Let's imagine: You want to read a ZIP file. Will you write your own reader? I seriously doubt it, as the work, stabilising, and security (random memory access as an example) would be issues.
But let's think we are couraginous. OK, we read rather not so simple format and carefully read the binary. Now, will you write your own DEFLATE and Huffman coding? Again, a bigger doubt.

I would argue that if someone cares enough to reimplement ZIP, it would at worst be twice as hard to write a Pack reader from scratch with no ZSTD or SQLite. And for those serious people, reading a format that lets them store better and faster would be a prize that is hard to say no to.
But I get your point, and if you are in a desert and need something to put together fast before going out of water, tar may be a good choice.
Thank you for the check.

No index, as they take space, and I wrote the queries considering SQLite automatic indexes. They will be created on demand, at unpacking time. All the unpacking processes are made to read and decompress content just once, so there are no worries about slowdowns.

I suggest trying Pack for yourself and seeing the speed.
Or deeper, use `--activate-other-options --transform-to-sqlite3` to transform a Pack file to SQLite3, create your own indexes, and use `--activate-other-options --transform-to-pack` to convert it to Pack and then try unpacking. You will not see any worthy difference.

Yes, Contents are like packages of raw data from a chunk, a whole, or many of the items (files or data). They may be compressed if needed (With Zstandard). ItemContent table helps to find the needed Item parts.

The Content structure circumvents any BLOB limit, but it is also made to give better compression while keeping random access.
It's also interesting to see how this compares with Gerrit, which uses JGit as the git protocol frontend and stores everything, including all metadata about the code review process and permissions systems, within git repos using a format called NoteDb:

https://gerrit-review.googlesource.com/Documentation/dev-des...

While it does use separate file-based databases, these are generally only to speed up operations and are not a source of truth.
Sure, in that very small example, if you don't care internal about visibility.

But method(object1, object2, object3, object4) is different than object.method().