skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Backprop GPU Cloud for affordable and high quality VMs
Hey all!
I've been hosting a small fleet of GPU servers for 3 years now on a public marketplace.

A couple of months ago I started building my own GPU Cloud as I believe this way users can get a better service in terms of support, reliability and functionality. Now it's ready for the first users.

So why another GPU Cloud?
Well, firstly, high quality and reasonably priced cloud GPU providers are constantly out of capacity.

Another reason is the gripe I have with GPU marketplaces. It's difficult to know whether the server you're renting is in a proper data center or in someone's hot and humid basement. This leads to reliability and performance issues which drags down the quality (and therefore the price) of the whole platform.
This incentivises building cheap unreliable servers to save on cost.

Additionally, the current GPU marketplaces are all focused on hosting Docker containers instead of virtual machines. This is fine for most use cases but it is a fundamental limitation. I've seen plenty of user complaints about not being able to run their image because of a driver/kernel version mismatch. There are many more reasons which I could go into.

The goal of Backprop is to address these problems.
We're hosted in a tier III data center. All instances are virtual machines with root access and fully dedicated IPv4 addresses. We're reasonably priced (hopefully you agree) with no additional charges on storage/bandwidth.

We currently only have RTX 3090 servers but we're looking to expand our capacity soon.

Please share your feedback!

PS! We're looking to build a high quality marketplace so if you know a host that meets these criteria, please get in touch!
> how do I charge the tenant for electricity?

Just buy another electricity meter and install it after the inverter.
Had to read this a few times before I got the meaning of the confusing title.

The comparison is between a Mac with an Apple M series processor vs an Intel based Mac, using either a Thunderbolt 3 vs a USB4 external enclosure for the (unspecified) SSD.

The conclusion is that for the Intel Macs it does not make much of a difference, but for the M series there is a benefit from going USB4.

The article is very light on methodology or actual data.
The scenario is very real. Ad networks don't review ad content well enough, so scams and other malicious content are sometimes shown to users. This is also why the FBI recommends using an ad blocker [1]. Pretty embarrassing for Google that a public service announcement like this was needed.

[1] https://www.tomsguide.com/news/the-fbi-now-recommends-using-...
Some examples of Spectral ray tracers

Mitsuba is an open source research renderer with lots of cool features like differentiable rendering. https://www.mitsuba-renderer.org/

Maxwell has two spectral modes of varying accuracy. The more complex method is often used for optics. https://maxwellrender.com/

Manuka by Wētā FX is spectral and has been used in several feature films https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3182161 and https://www.wetafx.co.nz/research-and-tech/technology/manuka
> you're not entitled to make up whatever terms you want for consuming the work of others

But YT is, even though they're not the ones creating the work?

Anyway, I am in fact entitled to do so - just as creators are free to set their terms, and we're both free to decline each other's terms.
Another way to put it is how she became CEO of Yahoo at age 37.
I've used a CPAP for years, and I tolerated it pretty well. I was convinced it was dramatically improving the quality of my sleep - that I was waking up more well-rested and energetic.

However, I failed to notice any real improvement in my life. In time I became convinced it was basically just a placebo effect, and when I started developing some brain fog and waking up feeling light-headed I finally ditched the machine. And never felt the need for it again.

IMHO, some of this obsession with CPAPs is exactly this: a product of over-medicalisation, of companies that have found a new huge market to tap into (see Philips), and of placebo effect. In my case, learning to sleep on the side was enough.
> Humble men do not, by and large, take the throne or become captains of industry.

Citation needed. Other than Musk and Trump, how many throne-sitters and captains-of-industry do you know that blow their own propaganda trumpets as hard as those two? (Something which, incidentally, they both only started doing after they had money anyway, not as a means to obtain it, as far as I know.)
Thoroughly scraping is challenging, especially in an environment where you don’t have (or want) a JavaScript runtime.

For content extraction, I found the approach the Postlight library takes quite neat. It scores individual html nodes based on some heuristics (text length, link density, css classes). It the selects the nodes with the highest score. [1] I ported it to Swift for a personal read later app.

[1] https://github.com/postlight/parser
Maybe some signals just bypass the part of the brain which deals with well defined facts. I read somewhere about a construction foreman (HN comment maybe?) who gained the respect of the crew by having an unusually good hit rate in finding piping in the ground or walls. He started to believe in his superpowers but later came to the conclusion that he just subconsciously learned the typical patterns, plus an occasional non-obvious sign. Something like a vent pipe in the wall of the building telling you that sewer piping is probably below ground.
Indeed, they can. It's interesting that some noSQL projects add a stripped down SQL API eventually.
Earthquake Early Warning (Japan)
What's the ETA on the notice of proposed rulemaking.
> But can we agree that...

This is another concept that seems to be lost on so many people. The vast majority of people, myself included, have no problem with a reasonable amount of unobtrusive ads

The problem is it's just gotten worse - more ads, more tracking, more manipulation. Yet consumers are the ones at fault for getting sick of it. Hmmm...
They don't increase ISP, they increase thrust. This is also something you can do with an ordinary afterburner: Trade ISP for thrust. For space electric propulsion this seems reasonable, since ISP is usually extremely high, but thrust is ridiculously low. It's ok for keeping satellites in orbit, but even a 50% increase means we're not going to send humans anywhere with that any time soon. Additionally, their fusion idea works a bit differently by not directly using the energy created from fusion, which makes the 50% claim seem rather wild. I would wait for a peer reviewed paper or an actual flight test before getting excited about any of this. Small companies promising revolutionary space drives that end up as vaporware are quite common nowadays, because there are lots of simple minded venture capitalists out there who dream of funding the next SpaceX despite having no clue about physics.
hey cofounder of cal.com here. the plan has always been to: 1. start and go fast with a mono repo and trpc fullstack api to understand and learn the fastest. once we knew what we need, we were able to build an external facing API. we wanted to be very clear to externals that using our “trpc api” is with caution due to undocumented breaking changes. a lot of companies have an internal API + external API (built later)
Because cameras and screens are the main things which set the luxury/flagship segment apart and apple sells only in that segment.

If "good enough" is fine, just get a budget or midrange phone.
Security-oriented distributions solve the problem of managing vulnerabilities.
When that "de minimis" limit was introduced, importing singular <$800 orders were probably a lot rarer and/or more difficult. When the average shipment being imported was an order of magnitude or more larger, it wouldn't be worth the paperwork (or the crazy inefficiency in the system from any retailers attempting it).

Technological progress has allowed massive amounts of what are essential non-existent packages to just blast through the system. We are in new territories, and it is maybe time that the rules became updated.
If it's of any help in your battle with your installers the relevant part of the building regulations for external pipework is section 4.26 of approved document L: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

The table in there assumes pretty high quality insulation and the neoprene-looking stuff doesn't meet that standard so would have to be thicker. Note that the way the performance of pipe insulation varies non-linearly with the pipe and insulation radius so it's a bit unintuitive.

How do I know? I had the same problem with my installers.
Just because something is simple doesn't mean it's not broken. If we didn't allow speculation in the housing market, that person probably _would_ be credit worthy enough for a reasonable priced home.

The problem we're seeing in the housing "market" today isn't that people with no job or assets can afford a home, the problem is that prices have been inflated under speculation so much that we've passed the point where even a median earner can't afford a home.
From what I could find, I didn't break any rule, whlist teaching an user something he didn't know. Win win?
This video would certainly have been better if it was just Casey making a well-structured video about how CPUs work and how the article is wrong (and where the article is right).

And that video would've reached his already existing audience of people who already know they're interested in that stuff. Being on Prime's stream hopefully exposes a lot of new people to both him and the topic as a whole.
Real-time is unfortunately a sort of vague term.

If you mean raster rendering pipelines then I don’t believe it’s possible because the nature of the GPU pipelines precludes it. You’d likely need to make use of compute shaders to create it at which point you’ve just written a patthtracer anyway.

If you mean a pathtracer , then real-time becomes wholly dependent on what your parameters are. With a small enough resolution, Mitsuba with Dr.JIT could theoretically start rendering frames after the first one in a reasonable time to be considered realtime.

However the reality is just that even in film, with offline rendering, very few studios find the gains of spectral rendering to be worth the effort. Outside of Wētā with Manuka , nobody else really uses spectral rendering. Animal Logic did for LEGO movie but solely for lens flares.

The workflow change to make things work with a spectral renderer and the very subtle differences are just not worth the high increase in render time
You also have to be careful that the cold side doesn't get so cold that water condenses around it and into the CPU socket. That was an expensive mistake.
> Parties are a naturally emerging phenomenon in representative democracies, though.

My main point is about putting party affiliation on ballots. I have less of a problem with the existence of parties than I do as making it the only deciding factor in a person's decision to vote a certain way.

I want people banding together over ideas rather than labels. While this may be the intent of parties, we can observe that in our current form, labels are more important than ideas. So my point is about adding a rather minimal amount of friction between the two. So that we can better distinguish labels from ideas.
Official VSCode builds are also closed source binaries, which comprise of latest VSCodium stable plus Microsoft's secret sauce (per their wording).

And, I don't prefer to feed closed source ecosystems with open source plugins, since the core is not open to begin with.

It's not that I'm in need of an IDE-like code editor. I got that part covered already. Also for larger needs, I use the same tool for the last 20 years, which is Eclipse.

Lastly, while I love to support Free Software, I have limited time and have to choose my battles wisely. So, instead I build the tools I need in my personal and professional life instead of developing plugins.

If I have more time, I'd rather develop plugins for Eclipse, though.
For self-hosting I've found https://k3s.io to be really good from the SUSE people. Works on basically any Linux distro and makes self-hosting k8s not miserable.
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Of course 2 years of stress can lead to otherwise-good marriages breaking up. Didn't you know happy couples who divorced during COVID lockdowns? It was common.
some of us have very "stuffy noses". I frequently get blocked nasal passages, and only by religiously using a steroidal nasal spray can I breath through my nose. I've had to travel to another city just to get my nasal spray on two occasions, when there is literally zero stock in my city (just prior to hay fever season), so access to this is not a given.

Obviously yes, mouth breathing sucks for a variety of reasons, but if you can't breath through your nose it is significantly preferable to the alternative.
I agree that they write a lot of normal headlines, like most of the ones you list.

I take issue with the last one (and others like it) because of its intentional coyness in an attempt to get you to click through. I've been seeing this more and more from them lately, and the kindest thing I can say about it is that it does not befit a newspaper like theirs.
For what it is worth, which is probably not much, I don’t know that I actually believe she has sleep apnea at all. She does not snore, nor wake, nor generally have any trouble sleeping beyond initially getting to sleep - for which she is already on medication.

The only reason she even got checked in the first place was she paralyzed one of her diaphragms after a very bad bout of pneumonia, and her pulmonologist made a suggestion based on nothing other than an abundance of caution that we might want to make an appointment to see.

I remain largely unconvinced of the methodology by which she was diagnosed. It was an at-home single-night sleep study. She had to strap a box to her chest, place a handful of electrodes around and wear a breathing monitor. She only managed around three hours of sleep, largely because she could not sleep in her preferred position (stomach) and found the hoses in her nose anxiety inducing. It was, in my unprofessional opinion, completely unrepresentative of a normal restful night of sleep, and thus largely irrelevant data.

On top of that, the day we returned the device the doctor opened the appointment by checking what CPAP machines our insurance would cover - BEFORE the results came back from the lab.

It felt very … salesperson-y
Show HN: AI Travel Planner Demo
I wanted to try geospatial abilities of LLMs. I've plugged the new Mixtral (8x22B) into an interface with a geocoding API and an interactive map. Ask it to generate a trip for you and it will choose destinations and pin their locations on the map.
I was impressed at how good it was: it's really able to highlight interesting and geographically related locations.

Give it a try!
Sure... enterprise and gov customers. But I think their moves with win11 show that they view most windows users as products, not customers. Even Apple lets big customers sideload apps, but not the product class of customer.
More likely it was bokeh from a triangular aperture
Notepad++ would have been very new at that time. I don't know what those early releases were like.

But there were similar editors. I remember using SCIte which was similar to Notepad++. SCIte was first released in 1999.
Hard to evaluate given the author doesn't talk about the rationale or what exactly their goals are with this method.

Also what is the author's first language? Polish seems like a weird fit for a method like this if you were a native English speaker.

All-in-all a bit strange. Feels like picking up a conversation half-way through, but it's the only post on the site.
Supabase Announces General Availability (3 min video)
.... but there are number of pearls which are not ambiguous or context dependent at all. They are blatant. Whether we like it or not, even science is a human endeavor, corrupted by human motivations (not excluding prestige, group-think, belonging, etc). This blatant admission of using political position to influence what is or is not science (rather than the facts alone) is not available in the normalized and disinfected summary on wiki.

"Who can forget Phil Jones writing to Michael Mann on 8 July 2004 ‘can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"

(https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jul/07/hacked-c...)
Yeah it's very similar to C#, and in both languages you can pass structs by reference using the appropriate keyword.
No. This is not how reality works.

They are not starved of engineers who "give enough fucks to speak up", they are starved of management who are invested and take enough responsibility to solicit direct feedback from the "assembly line" engineers and then make short term concessions on behalf of long term interests in defiance of what shareholders prefer.

Here is a quote from (imho) one of the top 5 greatest engineers of the 20th century, if not the number 1 greatest engineering leader:

> A major flaw in our system of government, and even in industry, is the latitude allowed to do less than is necessary. Too often officials are willing to accept and adapt to situations they know to be wrong. The tendency is to downplay problems instead of actively trying to correct them. Recognizing this, many subordinates give up, contain their views within themselves, and wait for others to take action. When this happens, the manager is deprived of the experience and ideas of subordinates who generally are more knowledgeable than he in their particular areas.

It's also worth reflecting on Pournelle's Law of Bureaucracy: https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

The only result of fighting the incentive structure put in place by management (far too often: punishment for pushed deadlines, reward for cutting corners) as an engineer is mental illness.
Vernier guages are horseshit in anything but metric.
I don’t think macOS feels snappy to be honest. It is fast, but it is not snappy.

Mac OS always feels a bit sluggish to me, especially with the slow animations, but so does windows nowadays.

There are lots of problems with windows nowadays and personally speaking, snappiness/OS resource usage isn’t at the top of my list of concerns.

MacOS isn’t superior in every technical aspect, but it is in many.

Also, I highly doubt high performance ARM would magically make windows faster and more efficient. I also have a relatively high end desktop workstation and windows doesn’t feel noticeably faster there and it’s also not meaningfully more resource efficient. Fedora KDE on the same machine feels significantly snappier than windows, or my modern MacBook with Apple silicon
If instead of being a one day course it was a pdf file or a wiki.
I think one can definitely progress to becoming CEO of a large company by 37 if they make a lot of right moves, which I'm guessing she did. But yeah, to go from being the kind of manager that walks the aisles to the kind that regressed a bunch of great products - it seems like something broke along the way.
> As in C++, many Swift types are value types, including String, Array, and Dictionary, which are analogous to std::string, std::vector, and std::map

Dictionary is probably more analogous to std::unordered_map, since it’s an associated hashed-key container.

> The result is on the stack, not the heap, just like you'd expect in C++.

Even though this is likely true I don’t think it’s guaranteed, and if it does happen to be the case I would be cautious to bring it up anyway. Swift leaks things into the heap quite eagerly in ways that might be surprising to C++ developers, where this typically requires more ceremony (or is an express train to UAF :P)
It's always interesting that people will wait in line for an hour to save $2.
I really loved the overall design and functionality of kate back in the day, but I also really loved vim as my actual editor. kept hoping that the vimpart (vim embedded in kate as the editor component) would actually go somewhere, but it never did.
> TBF there is no good explanation why it works

My mental justification for attention has always been that the output of the transformer is a sequence of new token vectors such that each individual output token vector incorporates contextual information from the surrounding input token vectors. I know it's incomplete, but it's better than nothing at all.
The Joy and Pain of Coding with AI When You Suck at Coding
The calls with long context are done through specific APIs, that you can call for instance in Python or Javascript.

Here's a quick start guide with OpenAI: https://platform.openai.com/docs/quickstart?context=python
That's right. As long as you give back the source-code of any changes you make, you can self-host Stack. However, modifying without giving back is not allowed under AGPL, so companies that want to do that would need a commercial license. (Though we don't offer commercial licenses or anything like that right now.)
Trackerninja's Windows 7 FAQ (2024)
The explanation is just that NNs are a stat fitting alg learning a conditional probability distribution, P(next_word|previous_words). Their weights are a model of this distribution. LLMs are a hardware innovation: they make it possible for GPUs to compute this at scale across TBs of data.

Why does, 'mat' follow from 'the cat sat on the ...' because 'mat' is the most frequent word in the dataset; and the NN is a model of those frequencies.

Why is 'London in UK' "known" but 'London in France' isnt? Just because 'UK' much more frequently occurs in the dataset.

The algorithm isnt doing anything other than aligning computation to hardware; the computation isnt doing anything interesting. The value comes from the conditional probability structure in the data. -- that comes from people arranging words usefully, because they're communicating information with one another
kde6 has lost the ability to change the window manager :( I have a wonderful xmonad + kde5 setup on my work laptop but had to stick with mate on my personal machine (not worth fighting with my distro to downgrade to kde5)
Better adb shell
"AWS is expensive" is a thought-terminating cliche as well.
Yeah TV America is a different thing. Anime and Japan.
How to Use Feature Flags to Increase Deployment Frequency
That's only because strings are immutable in Java. It's not true for reference types in general.

In C++ passing a pointer by value is effectively the same as passing a reference, the only real difference being that the syntax for accessing the underlying value is more implicit for a reference.
Vanilla JS will come pretty soon, though we can't provide the "adapt to your design system" feature there. We have more features to get you started quickly than both Supabase and Supertokens on the frontend, but are (currently) missing some enterprise features on the backend in comparison to those (specifically 2FA and SSO/SAML).

Eventually, we want to catch up on the enterprise features but maintain the simple setup for the frontend.