skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've never really gambled; I've bought two lottery tickets my entire life, I've spent less than $10 at casinos, and I don't like sports so never bothered with sports betting. I did buy some crypto during the hype in 2021, but that's basically the extent of it, and I never got into "debt" or anything with it. I do buy stock, but it's almost exclusively ETFs pegged to the S&P500 or something, not exactly a huge risk.

It's easy for me to sit here with righteous indignation, acting like I'm super smart for not blowing my money on gambling, and for a long time I did just that, but recently I've kind of realized that my cowardice towards losing money is also why I'll never be wealthy.

I gravitate towards decent-but-not-amazing-paying W2 jobs. I like them fine, I'm comfortable enough, and that's the safe, nearly-zero-risk path. It's certainly not a bad life or anything, but you also do kind of top-out fairly early. By age 27, I was a senior engineer at Apple. I didn't really have any intention of becoming a manager, so I was only like two promotions away from seemingly maxing out my career. I absolutely hated my job, and it depressed me because it felt like this was the end goal, and I was miserable; there was no more substantial path "upwards", and the top was just not a place I was happy.

If I weren't such a coward, and had a higher tolerance for risk, I almost certainly would have started a real business. Starting a business is basically a fancy gamble; most businesses don't succeed. It's kind of hard for me to condemn gamblers at that point.
> It's just entertainment. Is blowing $100 on sports betting really any worse than $500 on a designer handbag?

Probably. A bag is an item with utility that can be resold. Typically the person buying the handbag also gets entertainment value out of the time spent shopping for the handbag and also enjoys using the handbag for some period of time.

Sports betting is pure entertainment. I don't know how far $100 goes in sports betting. If that's what you spend in a night, I'd say the handbag is easily a better value for a person who likes handbags. If $100 is what you'd lose in the aggregate over a month, with several hours a day spent enjoying sports betting, maybe the sports betting is the better value. I guess it depends on how good of a gambler you are.
Under the WTO definition of dumping it absolutely is. https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/adp_e/adp_e.htm
What a great opportunity to see what affect the fine tuning will have and possibly infer what they mean by harm reduction
Gambling should be treated like drugs.

Nothing good comes from it. It only increases the wealth gap.
You can't pop a trip, go to a music festival and except a new mindset. You can however use these tools to deeply connect with yourself and this is where life altering experiences happen.
Two remarks with postgres and lots of data:

1) I always wonder of there is a better way than COPY. I tend to quickly get 100% CPU without saturating I/O

2) The row overhead seems big. A row has 23 bytes overhead, this table has 48 bytes data per row, so even without page overhead, we lose ~1/3 of our storage. This is pure data storage, without any index.
Harmonograph (2005)
I came here to say the same thing but I searched if someone else mentioned it. so thank you :D insane nostalgia
It was found a bunch a decade or so ago. PuTTY is just a more obscure codebase.
But if you win..?
Concivably the number of shows/tickets might increase and the price decrease, since setting the price above the market rate is one of the inefficiencies that monopolies introduce.

For artists who are maxing out their # of shows and selling out you're right though.
I'm surprised that "you are not young", because this is the usual attitude I receive from Gen-Z: "you're not telling me in the way in which _I_ want to listen, so I'm ignoring you", rather than a mature: "Help me understand what I change in order to be more effective"
It's a routine random inspection of commercial freight. Gold is extremely dense. It's about the same density as Uranium and Plutonium (which is a big reason why they and/or software look for it in the x-rays).
> And if you want to force Afghan refugees (for example) to return and pay their taxes to the Taliban, then I don't know how to respond to that.

This is such an absurd straw man.
Yep, and even most of the gambling here is relatively harmless:
- Small stakes sports betting.
- Lottery.
- Scratchards.
(As with drugs - most of the consumption is people smoking small/medium amounts of weed, or perhaps taking stronger stuff maybe once a month.)

There are some people that are hooked, and I've no doubt it causes a lot of misery in certain communities. I doubt there'd be so many betting shops without the addicts. Had friends who worked in those shops as students and they saw some pretty sad stuff. We'd be better off as a society without the betting shops, but now it'd probably all just go online and perhaps become something even more pernicious.
If you're a young man in your prime without rich parents and you slacked or lack the ability to compete in the job market, unless you are very charismatic, you won't make a particularly interesting partner.

20 years ago your dating pool was far more limited to location and social circles you were in. Online dating has decimated that. The illusion that you are a big win away from achieving a fast track to status is the allure.
No, the term for that is gendarmerie.

If you've read my other posts you've probably been able to infer that I'm not a fan of the police, but I find that being quippy about them undermines actual meaningful conversation about their history and how they could change.
I don’t find gambling entertaining at all. I know it’s negative EV so it just feels bad to me. I’ve only gambled one time when I turned 21 and went to Vegas (a bit of a tradition perhaps) and I didn’t enjoy it.
Who approved the Ticketmaster / Live Nation merger to begin with?
I've audited this course and it's truly excellent! While you're taking it, try and have lunch with SREs in your organization or go to SRE conventions (SRECon, KubeCon, DevOps Days, Percona). There's no substitute for war stories from the trenches.
And some interviewers ask us to come up with it in a 45-minute coding session!
Anecdata: 3 men on my 7-man Engineering team are outearned by their wives. London millennials for reference.
MateriaDB KV, Functions: Discover the Future of Clever Cloud
This is the reason I stopped donating. They don’t even bother trying to look objective and impartial anymore. It’s no different from Fox or CNN. At least PBS News is still decent.
It's the same as supporting any artist / performer, IMO.
Yes, sorry. That's exactly what I meant to say! Pioneers.
You could also end up winning $100 from gambling $100. Or, on the other end, you could buy a $50 handbag instead of a $500 one. Both are tossing money into a fire.
Belief preceeds action. If someone believes there is no future for them they won't take action to build a better future for themselves. I don't quite understand how you think encouraging laziness and attacking employment is going to improve things. Promoting despair in others won't help you with yours.
Related: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/explosive-new-documents-u... ("BIG by Matt Stoller: Explosive New Documents Unearthed On Live Nation/Ticketmaster")
Have you read any climate science? These are not the (only) numbers that the knowledge is based on.
It's not weirdly overloaded.

'a'*3 == 'a'+'a'+'a'
Ouch. "period hardware". That does it - I'm officially old.
Once I got some “disposable” income I spent it mostly on music equipment and other hobbies. A lot of that stuff holds its value somewhat as well which is nice
The biggest bottleneck for LLM startups is UX
A reliable multicast network that preserves global order even during maintenance and doesn’t drop packets is not something you will find off the shelf.

A reliable multi-tenant multicast network also appears to be a rare beast. I’ve only heard of it in finance, and that’s only because it’s private and expensive and all the participants need to be generally nice to each other because it’s a repeated game and the operator can literally pull the plug if the rules are broken.
>I'm bit a tired of trying to help and being met with insult... so someone I've 'rolled up the ladder', in a way by not offering as much advice.

>The difference between a young 20s and the older generations is thirst.

If your version of "helping" is telling them that they're fine, other generations had it harder, and that they lack 'thirst'... No wonder they respond negatively.
> Qemu is just an ordinary CLI program.

To be honest, the qemu command line became more and more arcane over the years due to the large number of supported features, and is not very stable across major versions.

For example, until a certain point you could start a VM and install DOS/Win9x with

qemu-system-i386 -m 32 -hda harddisk.img -cdrom cd.iso -fda floppy.img -boot a

if you try to boot it like this now, it will complain that the hard disk has been guessed as "raw":

WARNING: Image format was not specified for 'harddisk.img' and probing guessed raw.
Automatically detecting the format is dangerous for raw images, write operations on block 0 will be restricted.
Specify the 'raw' format explicitly to remove the restrictions.

So the actual incantation to use is

qemu-system-i386 -m 32 -drive format=raw,file=harddisk.img -cdrom cd.iso -fda floppy.img -boot a

which is not as easy to remember, supports conflicting mnemonics (-cdrom and -hda vs -drive) and whatnot (for the added benefit of... what? I suppose the average qemu user can figure out that some stuff can be "dangerous". Why not print the warning and continue without bugging me?)... The network options are even more varied, and IIRC not even the official guide was up to date at some point.

I put up with qemu, but when possible I am happy to avoid it.
For what it's worth, I can remember "lottery tickets as financial planning" jokes from ca. 1985.
Nothing has changed besides current generation having more accessibility to the stock market, casinos, and other forms of gambling.

It all comes down to biology. The dopamine hit you get when your 0DTE you bought for pennies per option skyrockets the next day for a 1,000% return. It’s a dopamine hit unlike anything before it. Forget heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine.

That hit of dopamine from just 1 successful “trade”/gamble is enough to wipe out the previous 100 failed trades. Some people in the drug addiction trade would call this “chasing the high”. Same thing for casinos.

Same reason why your grandparents might spend hours pulling the lever of a penny or nickel slot.

Also probably why insurance companies tend to rate new drivers, especially young men, as “risky”
What an interesting post!

> At a sustained ~462k inserts per second, we’re waiting ~20 days for our ~754 billion rows which is not bad I guess It’s less time than it took me to write this post.

Hah, as I've been gravitating more to writing larger and more in depth blog posts I can relate to the surprising effort it can require.
Tuppance Arcade Machine (2004)
The money you give to steamers doesn’t enable you to watch them so it’s not exactly comparable to purchasing TV
> It's just entertainment.

No it is not. If it was, people wouldn't have those sad face and wouldn't look like zombies when gambling.
https://archive.is/UNHX1
The Democratic Party is a private organization, not the government.
If you choose React Native, you’ll save your team significant time and effort by using the Expo framework instead of the base CLI.
It's not just risk: it's taking actions that have negative expected value. 20-something men also tend to ride motorcycles and volunteer to go into battle, so it's kind of a thing.
Dead satellites could affect Earth's magnetic field
Founders need to be ruthless when chasing deals
>I don't quite understand how you think encouraging laziness and attacking employment is going to improve things.

How you managed to read this out of what I wrote is astonishing.
I totally forgot about this video, the amount of work is wild.
It's a good strategy but I think it's quite hard to notice that gambling is becoming addictive and a problem
This has been a St Louis trend for decades. I recall hearing in the mid 2000s how the population was 1/3 that of its its peak in the 1970s.

That said, it is a nice city, and cost of living is (was?) low compared to most other metro centers. I really enjoyed my time in St Louis.
My first thought is it's the same as how studies on the safety of phone towers are funded by their manufacturers, the safety of chemicals by theirs, etc.

https://www.nytimes.com/1997/12/19/us/cia-says-it-has-found-...
Thinking about the difference between purchase and resale price as rental has helped me reconcile negative differences.

Most potential solutions won't make my rig better. Without experience with ten different "widescreen monitors," I don't have informed opinions, just internet-hand opinions from people with different rig. Or people whose use case is writing reviews.
Writing Wikipedia-Like Articles from Scratch with LLMs
I think where they screwed up was shipping something heavy and not particularly valuable or obviously necessary to send by air freight via air freight. If it had gone the slow way on a few pallets via LCL ocean freight as mundane industrial machinery it probably wouldn't have been noticed.
This incident almost certainly revolves around capital controls in China, with the Japanese infraction only being collateral damage justified by the China problem.
> Yes. And this takes many forms, whether that's hanging on to property long past you need it, staying in jobs past retirement,

You don't get to be upset that someone keeps their property for longer than you deem they need it, or telling people they should stop working to do nothing for their last 20 - 30 years of their life.
Are these NPUs addressable with a standard PyTorch LLM stack?

NPU seems to mean very different things depending on device/vendor
Everybody would be making the same, but it would be apparent that your favorite band is the one asking too much for tickets.
I used to have NPR on in my car basically all the time since I started driving in the early aughts.

I am in no way a Trump supporter but the way the tone shifted into vitriolic acid spitting after his election, I just can’t abide or frankly listen anymore. I just want the news.
Many young men are no longer trying to succeed within capitalism. They are trying to exit it.

Faith in this system is dwindling, and whatever your political inclinations, that is dangerous. Fewer people believe that putting in a solid eight hours of honest labor is going to assure a decent lifestyle. Gambling is one potential path out, maybe not even that irrational if you perceive it’s your only shot.
"This article is completely false and misleading! We'll show everyone how fair and unbiased we are by... suspending anyone who dares to criticize us?"

That's a bold strategy Cotton, let's see if it pays off.
Happy little accident.
In fact, now, thanks to the higher interest rates there is a great possibility to save and earn interest (and compound interest) to buy a house. In addition, thanks to the higher interest rates, it will be harder for everybody to borrow to buy a house so the house prices will not increase as much or even decrease in price. This makes it easier for savers to buy a house.

If the central banks can keep from going down to near zero interest rates of course.

And I agree with you that younger generations, probably at large due to social media, are not patient enough to get rich by saving.
> I had a professor once say that when the lottery gets really big, at that point, it's not gambling, it's an investment. But keep it small.

This seems like funny logic.

My local provincial lottery can range from $5 to $50 million. If I were to accept that I could possibly win, anything in that range is a ridiculous sum of money for me - easily more than I am likely to make for the remainder of my career.

I know I won't win if I play, but if I thought I might I can't figure out why $5M is gambling, but $50M would be an investment. Either way, it's absolutely life changing "quit my job tomorrow" money.
In my life, eggs have been both bad and good. Butter vs margarine. Atkins vs paleo vs whatever else. Calorie restriction vs more exercise.

Lots of junk science. Lots of marketing fluff. But, also lots of recommendations that were assumed correct but didn't stand up to deeper scrutiny.

Note, I'm not saying any of this is bad, or that scientists are stupid and wrong all the time. Just always amazed about how much our understanding of the human body has changed in the last ~50 years.
Having mastered the art of the circular firing squad, NPR continues to practice it.

Juan Williams may be laughing now. Don't know about the person who fired him, then lost her job in the fallout.
Streamer are able to entertain you and give you a good mood for a day... Why not to give something back?
How bad do you have to be before the Gov files an antitrust suit these days?

IE/Netscape bad or this apparently.
Is blowing $5000 on sports betting any better than spending $100 on a designer handbag?

You can argue anything with made up numbers.
> I don't gamble, I don't know anyone who does

May I guess that you are not a soccer football fan? If you were I think this comment would be different. Football fans have been bombarded with gambling adverts for 20+ years.
I am an engineer, I read a lot and numbers are numbers, not a religion.
> It feels like the greatest minds of our era are

This is the new “we could put a man on the moon, yet…”. No, “the greatest minds of our era” are not working in adtech or building LLMs. It’s easy to forget, but there is a whole world outside of computers, and being good at it does not equate to being “a great mind”. It is absurd to believe the greatest minds are all working around the same problem spaces.
A 'metallic' smell is just body odour (2006)
The focus on TOPS seems a bit out of line with reality for LLMs. TOPs doesn't matter for LLMs if your memory bandwidth can't keep up. Since it doesn't have quad channel memory mentioned I guess it's still dual channel?

Even top of the line DDR5 is around 128GB/s vs a M1 at 400GB/s.

At the end of the day, it still seems like AI in consumer chips is chasing a buzzword, what is the killer feature?

On mobile there are image processing benefits and voice to text, translation... but on desktop those are no where near common use cases.
How Pluto got its 'heart'
Pretty sure he was just linking for the picture on that page which is a full vehicle x-ray produced from a system like https://www.smithsdetection.com/products/hcvg/

> The system’s high-performance imaging capability provides the operator with detailed radioscopic images of container or vehicle and its contents, with organic and inorganic material discrimination and colourisation based on atomic number, allowing for rapid and reliable results in a single scan.

It colorizes the x-ray based on the atomic composition of the materials so this system could probably detect a bunch of solid gold parts.
In the stories he’s listing in the article, plenty of organizations were taking the “team x” positions he describes. It’s not like NPR had the only newsroom having to make choices.

Summing it up as a lack of transparency (would he rather say “fairness?”) and viewpoint diversity (“balance?”) seems somewhat disingenuous. At a higher level view, different organizations are going to take different positions. Arguably, obligated to do so.

Surely he doesn’t believe every org has to pretend there are “both sides” to every story. But if he’s no longer aligned with NPR, then perhaps the suspension is in everyone’s best interest.
> Compare eg Youtube videos today to Youtube videos 15 years ago.

I see no difference. Their 1080p is still the super-crummy 1080p they had 15 years ago.

In fact, if you pay for YouTube Premium you can get a separate "1080p Premium" with a higher bitrate. But you have to pay. Their free version hasn't gotten better at all. In fact, it's gone the other direction -- they've gotten more agressive about defaulting to 720p or 480p streams when they used to show 1080p by default.

Sure, a tiny handful of videos have 4K versions available, but that's only for a tiny proportion of streams. And YouTube even removes higher resolutions after a video has been published a bit. Which is why you see lots of YouTube VR videos described as 8K but there's no 8K stream anymore. There was when it was uploaded, but YouTube removed it.

So, no. Even if bandwidth gets cheaper, streaming twice the bits is still twice as expensive. Streaming services aren't going to stream more bits -- they're just going to take more profit, as long as it's still minimally good enough for the average viewer.
State return was free for me with FreeTaxUSA.
Are you of the opinion that, upon arrival in Japan, the smugglers would've disclosed the gold and gone "phew, here's your $1M we owe in tax"?
As far as I can make out, SRS is actually the solution to the forwarding problem that the linked article is complaining about. Yes, it is a pain to setup, but it is quite doable.

I also forward email sent to my domain to gmail.
Apples memory is on package, not on die.
This does not sound like a real gambling addiction, it sounds like a group of friends who enjoy the occasional small thrill and doing something together. Losing a few hundred dollars every now and then is fine, even if you personally find it morally unacceptable. A gambling problem is taking your entire paycheck to the casino, taking out a loan, selling a car… Borrowing $40 is so far from being problematic, sounds like a group of people who trusts each other to occasionally borrow and pay each other back, and for things other than gambling too. And seriously, all this over $40?

I don’t really get skiing, it’s a very expensive and dangerous activity to me, yet to others it’s a whole lifestyle. Fine by me, put knives on your feet and fall down a hill. Life is short, find your dumb thrills, it’s fine.

You don’t need to gamble yourself, that’s not the point, just maybe understand that you’re talking shit about “friends” behind their backs? Kind of a dick move where I am from.
I think and exchange would use AWS Outposts to get hardware in their data center.
I genuinely didn't realize GP is being sarcastic. Thanks for helping me understand
I've done a good amount of geospatial analysis for work.

One thing you quickly realize with geospatial data is that it's incredibly nuanced. You have to be quite careful about understanding which coordinate reference system (CRS) and for visualization which projection is being used. The CRS is somewhat paranoia inducing if you don't have great infrastructure setup with the right tools to carry that metadata with your geospatial data.

I've tested everything AWS has to offer, Postgres/PostGIS, Spark/DB, Snowflake, Trini, and ARCGis.

I'm convinced the best tool for large scale geospatial work is Google BigQuery and it's not even close. It took an expensive multi hour query running on PostGIS deployed on an enormous m6a EC2 instance to less than 5 seconds that ran in the BigQuery free tier. It does make sense if you think about it, Google was early with Maps, but it is just stunning how much better they are in this specific niche domain.

This was using publicly available FEMA data that Snowflake and AWS services would just choke on, because the geometry column exceeded their maximum byte size. Spark doesn't even have geospatial data types and the open source packages that add support leave a lot to be desired.

This guy is running on-prem, so maybe this made sense, but I just would never bother. The storage for BQ would probably be less than $100/months for 20 TB.
I'd recommend Alex Wu system design interview books volume 1 and 2. Then Designing data intensive applications. It really gets to the point. Also there is added benefit of being ready for MAANG if that opportunity ever comes up..