skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I bet they could have 2 interns porting the thing to Google App Engine and then migrate the database

How can you possibly have this assessment without looking at the code/infra?

There are many things that affect cost beyond the visible features. The project isn't in a vacuum. It's interlocked with their other services infrastructure.

You can judge Google however you want, but they're not stupid or amateurs. These types of announcements immensely damages their image and affect their customers, if they could avoid it easily as you imagine, why would they not?

They've built the service and run it for many years for billions of people. A more realistic guess would be that for whatever reason, the price is higher than what's visible on the surface and they're not willing to pay it.
I don't think I've ever heard someone argue that the 85th percentile rule is actually a good invention - it's a disaster that codifies the behaviour of speeding drivers.

I agree that merely lowering speeds without changing the design speed is a bad move, though.
An embodied LLM make the entire setup so much more interesting and in my opinion, showcases the potential of current technology in the next few years. At the very least, in terms of entertainment.
Social scientists would say the IR was inevitable given the political institutions of Britain at the time. Military people might say similar from naval strength; the geopolitically inclined might argue it from geography/politics. Technologists lean on utility and feasibility of coal.

I think all of these arguments have merit. The IR couldn’t have happened in a desert country or one defeated by foreign conquerors or one with ancient Egyptian political institutions.
Right. In one sense, what we're talking about is different ideas on how companies / teams work. There's a wonderful book called "Reinventing Organizations" by Laloux that I recommend to basically everyone. In the book, the authors lay out a series of different organisational structures which have been invented and used throughout the ages. The book talks about early tribes where the big man tells everyone what to do (eg mobsters), to rigid hierarchies + fixed roles (the church, schools) to modern corporations with a flexible hierarchy, and some organisation structures beyond that.

The question of "who is ultimately responsible" changes based on how we see the organisation. In organisations where the chief decides everything, its up to the chief to decide if they should place blame on someone or not. In a modern corporation, people at the bottom of the hierarchy are shielded from the consequences of their actions by the corporation. But there's also a weird form of infantilisation that goes along with that. We don't actually trust people on the ground to take responsibility for the work they do. All responsibility goes up the management hierarchy, along with control, power and pay. Its sort of assumed that people who haven't been promoted are too incompetent to make important choices.

I don't think thats the final form of how high functioning teams should work. Its noble that you're willing to put your head on the chopping block, but I think its also really important to give maximal agency to your employees. And that includes making people feel responsible and empowered to fix problems when they see them. You get more out of people by treating them like adults, not children. And they learn more, and I think that's usually, in the long run, better for everyone.

I agree that if a company has a bad process, employees shouldn't be fired over it. But I also think if you're an employee in a company with a bad process, you should fight to make the process better. Never let yourself be complicit in a mistake like this.
We can the example from other species. When trying to explain why bees die when they sting you, i.e. why they evolved such a suicidal mechanism, it doesn't make sense on the individual level. But on the group level, if we consider them disposable parts of a larger super-organism which has evolved by multi-level selection, it does.¹

I think that scarcity vs. abundance plays a role into this as well.
If we consider an other species, the slime mold Dictyostelium discoideum, it lives its life as a single celled amoeba when given plenty of food. But when food becomes scarce, something amazing happens. All the individual amoebae send out a signal to aggregate into a multicellular slug (pseudoplasmodium). This slug then moves to an ideal location, collecting more amoebae along the way. It then morphs into a fruiting body that can release spores.² ³

[1] Why do bees die when they sting you? — https://www.subanima.org/bees/

[2] What is a biological individual? — https://www.subanima.org/individuals-1/

[3] Starvation turns slime moulds into multicellular organisms — https://www.mpg.de/16476527/0222-immu-sulfur-the-consequence...
Ask HN: Are there true random events even with better sensing resolutions?
Fundamentally, are there processes in nature (everything beyond that is not random given a 'seed' + 'process'?) where our understanding of physics say they would be random, even if we 10-100-1e10x'ed the precision and accuracy of our measuring instruments?

My intuition would be to search for processes where the sensing/observation is collapsing the process, thus not being able to formulate the dynamics without the observation happening.

Radioactive decay looks like lack of our capability to understand the processes in the nuclei, rather than the universe clicking with fingers.
Where are these mythical big, fast, wide roads?

Every road I know, no matter how wide, is slow. And making it wider doesn't help because of induced demand.
Of course they have a market. Not a market of real estate bubbles and NFTs, that's for sure, but a market of skills and cooperation. They may not have much job specialisation (or they do, difficult to tell without contacting), but even without, different levels in experience and physical fitness will make that a market nonetheless.

And what level of experience we are looking at! Remember the 10000h rule? Imagine a group developing exactly one skill set since childhood. Trained by a chain of ancestors following the same path that would make the Bene Gesserit blush.

This would all collapse under contact. A few years of handouts and/or one-time trades and nothing of those abilities would be left. And those years would be far too short to find a place in the new (to them) market above that of beggars and thieves. They would have trouble even working as prostitutes not knowing the cultural codes around that.
The irony is that, since I and most readers couldn't justify a subscription to all the possible sources posted here, posting a WSJ story becomes a waste of time and lowers their visibility.
Here's the link about neural scaling law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_scaling_law

Can you make a napkin calculation of how much better training should be, how larger models and datasets should be to overcome difference in widely separated but related pixels of the image?

I did that and results are not promising: 200 billions parameter model will not perform much better than 100 billions' one. The loss is already too small.

Also, the phenomena exemplified in the article is a problem of relation between distant entities in generated media. The same can be seen in LLM where they have inconsistencies at the beginning and end of sentences.

If generated eyes start to lie, there will be different separated but related objects to rely on.
> It blows my mind that a kernel driver with the level of proliferation in industry could make it out the door apparently without even the most basic level of qualification.

Discussed elsewhere it is claimed that the file causing the crash was a data file that has been corrupted in the delivery process. So the development team and their CI have probably tested a good version, but the customer received a bad one.

If that is true to problem is that the driver first uses an unsigned file at all, so all customer machines are continuously at risk for local attacks. And then it does not do any integrity check on the data it contains, which is a big no no for all untrusted data, whether user space or kernel.
The two are not related at all. Refresh rate is how fast it can accept input, whereas this is how fast it can do TDM of colors and intensities
The government metaphor is apt. Someone has overall authority over your compute and data on your PC. In general I would view the OS as the government.
What I'm really missing in this space is something like this for content addressed blob storage.

I feel like a lot of complexity and performance overhead could be reduced if you only store immutable blobs under their hash (e.g Blake3). Combined with a soft delete this would make all operations idempotent, blobs trivially cacheable, and all state a CRDT/monotonically mergeable/coordination free.

There is stuff like IPFS in the large, but I want this for local deployments as a S3 replacement, when the metadata is stored elsewhere like git or a database.
Texas / Tech’s ass - it was kinda a joke ;-)
Yeah I think you didn't get through the (admittedly very long) article. We aren't talking about git bisect.
Au contraire, the popular vote should be the only metric that counts. The electoral college and the per-state weighing of votes are pointless and detrimental, as is the first-past-the-post system that has brought about the U.S. two-party system, a system that is almost as bad as a single-party one.

Instead I suggest one should move to abolish the electoral college and instead count votes directly. The candidates should all be on the ballot. Then use Approval Voting where each voter gets to mark all candidates that they like.

There should be a French-style second round in case the top winners are too close together, say inside a 1% or 5% margin—in other words you could never win by a single vote, you'd always need hundreds of thousands of votes.
It’s much lower than what we have in Nigeria and Africa at large.

The worst EU leader is far better than the average African leader. Then it gets worse with civil service agencies over here…they’re corrupt to the point of being almost irredeemable.
Thank god we have porn now. No one is getting lured by perverted cheap slogan and upskirt photo.
If most of the knowledge retreats into a finite number of silo's they can probably afford to pay for backend data access to them.
Advanced Terminal Tips and Tricks
More Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41002195

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41010708
Probably career product managers finding it untenable to write self-reviews with such a low impact, low maintenance product...

And if nobody wants to take it on...
Sure, but ... thats not a spec. Specs have clear goals and limited scope. "All flights from all airports forever" is impossible to program, full stop.

The right way to write code like that is to start simple and small - we're going to service airports X, Y and Z. Those airports handle Q planes per day. The software will be used by (this user group) and have (some set of responsibilities). The software engineers will work with the teams on the ground during and after deployment to make sure the software is fit for purpose. Someone will sign off on using it and trusting its decisions. And lets also do a risk assessment where we lay out all the ways defects in the software could cost money and lives, so we can figure out how risk averse we need to be.

Give me scope like that, and sure - I'll put a team together to write that code. It'll be expensive, but not impossible. And once its working well, I'd happily roll it out to more airports in a controlled and predictable manner.
As an infra guy, it seems like all my biggest fights at work lately have been about quality. Long abandoned dependencies that never get updated, little to no testing, constant push to take things to prod before they're ready. Not to mention all the security issues that get shrugged off in the name of convenience.

I find both management and devs are to blame. For some reason the amazingly knowledgeable developers I read on here daily are never to be found at work.
Is it easy to obtain up to date firmware updates for old switches?

Their used 100gig on ebay are surprisingly "affordable".
Flems: A single file web playground and sandbox
I would also go same way and remove states. Just move everything under centralized federal government. Or maybe keep them for some regional offices, but all deciding power should rest on congress and senate. And even there, getting rid of voting districts and just electing top x number of candidates seems most reasonable solution.
Just to be clear, I'm not saying they can port everything to it, but only the basic functionality to not let the links die (then progress with it)

> These types of announcements immensely damages their image and affect their customers, if they could avoid it easily as you imagine, why would they not?

You're assuming they care. And the answer of how much they care is: can this be used to further my (that is, an engineer or manager) promotion? If not then no

Google has become dysfunctional
In S3, you can implement this with a single bucket, no code at all: objects can cause redirects, using x-amz-website-redirect-location

Since Google buckets don't seem to implement this feature, maybe they should point goo.gl at S3 :-)
That's like pointing at the occasional petty theft and mugging, and using it to justify establishing an extraordinary secret police to run the entire country. It's stupid, and if you do it anyway, it's obvious you had other reasons.

Antivirus software is almost universally malware. Enterprise endpoint "protection" software like CrowdStrike is worse, it's an aggressive malware and a backdoor controlled by a third party, whose main selling points are compliance and surveillance. Installing it is a lot like outsourcing your secret police to a consulting company. No surprise, everything looks pretty early on, but two weeks in, smart consultants rotate out to bring in new customers, and bad ones rotate in to run the show.

Yeah, that's definitely a good tradeoff against script kiddies metasploiting your ordinary finance employees. Wonder if it'll look as good when loss of life caused by CrowdStrike this weekend gets tallied up.
Yup, yet another service people rely on being shut down. Don’t rely on Google.
I bought a 3d printer years ago then let it sit collecting dust for like 2 or more years because I was intimidated by it. Finally started using it and was blown away how useful it has been to me. Then a long time later realized holy shit there are updates and upgrades one can easily do. I can add a camera and control everything and monitor everything from any online connected device. I always hated pulling out the sd card and bringing it to my computer and copying it over and back to the printer and so on. Being online makes things so much easier and faster. I have been rocking my basic printer for a few years now and have not paid much attention to the scene and then started seeing these multi color prints holy shit am I slow and behind the times. The newer printers are pretty rad but I will give props to my Anycubic Mega it has been a work horse and I have had very little problems. I don't want it to die on me but a newer printer would be cool also.
Ask HN: What is the best way to author blogs in 2024?
I want to share technical blog content but I want to author it as I am developing the content easily, screenshots and markdown would be ideal and I don't want to self host things.

What is the ideal tool to help create quality content?
I agree that monoculture is an issue that makes events like this more probable, regardless of OS.

That said, a third party being able to add/update a kernel driver ignores (even if out of business necessity) best practices for OS architecture.
Yes! I was suprised not to see this on the site, but I haven't used Ryanair for years so that explains it's gone.

If anyone is curious, "Don't Insure Me" was located alphabetically in the countries list between Denmark and Finland.
This line gave me pause. I was like, "Hunh? No way...they didn't seriously. Wait what? Oh shit wow...that worked?! Ehhhh~"

Impressive but yuck (personally).

If nothing else, they've proven they know how to think outside the sphere. I found it funny that Conde Nast sent a C&D.
Agreed. As I read this, "stupid influencer prank" is what comes to mind.
You can compile OpenBSD yourself though.
At that time compatibility was not an important aspect. For example only almost 2 years passed between the release of C64 and the Plus/4, yet the machines represent different worlds without any compatibility, and we are not even talking about the VIC-20 and the C16. The C128 had a 99% compatible C64 mode but in turn had a more limited number of SW available (that's the other side of the story - if you provide compatibility, old software will be used and maintained instead of starting new developments, and if no new software is developed for a platform it's dead). These systems were anything but cheap, and once you have bought a computer, you'd locked yourself to the platform.
> So, which industries did European countries develop in their African colonies, for example?

Racists usually bring up ports, railways and whatever resource extraction they set up in Africa as their gift to humanity. As the other poster said, that's a very common thing to say for imperialists who justify colonization. Incredibly funny that you keep doubling down on the same tropes without recognizing how they sound.

> Compare that to what USSR developed in Moldavia: power plants, large steel plant, metalworking, machine building, construction materials production, chemical industry, electronics, parts of defense industry, etc

... as if as a free European country, none of that (and much more) would've happened. The common case study is Estonia vs Finland, two very similar countries in the 1930s, both got invaded by Russians, one remained free, the other occupied for 50 years. Despite a very similar culture, language, history and socio-economic starting position, Finland ended up as one of the most prosperous nations on the planet, while Estonia was a "1 dollar a day" shithole (along with rest of the USSR and Eastern Bloc) by 1990. After Russian geniuses were overthrown, Estonia started a meteoric climb and is on track of catching up with Finland. All these Russian "factories and industries" were nothing but a horrible stagnation that robbed the country of 50 years of proper progress. They were wasteful and polluting, produced for USSR's internal consumption and had to be scrapped because they were utterly uncompetitive on the global market.

It's been the same externally forced stagnation, followed by meteoric success everywhere where they decisively got rid of Russian domination in the 1990s (Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, etc). The greater role Russia has played in post-USSR times in a country, the worse the outcomes (Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, etc).

This map sums it up: https://i.imgur.com/4bEf0Sr.jpeg

As does this chart: https://i.imgur.com/uDpWHNq.png (Polish GDP PPP per capita as a fraction of the US')

Even the most envied parts of the Eastern Bloc were depressingly poor by Western European standards, several laps behind the worst performers. Immense negative impact on Central and Eastern Europe is the reason why Russia and Russians are considered a cancer on humanity in this part of the world. Somehow, everything you touch turns to shit, and you can't stop sticking your fingers into where they don't belong.
To say it rather politely, the mindset exposed by introducing this feature is unlikely to go away.
JSTinker: An open source clone of JSFiddle
Several elevator controllers automatically switch to the safe mode if they detect a fire or security alarm (which apparently is also happening).
My personal view is that military adventures were generally a drag on economic growth that never paid for themselves.

People at the time argued slavery, resource exploitation and trade were economically important and could only happen through imperial strength.

But I’d argue that 1) those things generally happened anyway post independence 2) labour / resource costs aren’t that important for long run economic growth.
That is very long term. Not interesting to shareholders.
No-IT. Really. No. I. T. – R&a IT Strategy and Architecture
> Fascist movements are usually authoritarian but not all authoritarian regimes are fascist.

A simple example would be hundreds of years of authoritarian monarchies and theocracies. Nobody wants to retroactively label them as Fascist, and for good reason.

I prefer the "Palingenetic Ultranationalism" definition [0], where fascism is largely distinguished by what myths and stories people are using to demand power.

Often along the lines of: "Not too long ago This Nation was the best, but not anymore. There is one and only one chance to fix it, which will require a destructive resurrection that only Pure People Leaders can do. You have to give them all the power right now or else everything will be bad forever because impure people somehow."

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palingenetic_ultranationalis...
Oh finance doesn't care. Security is paramount and not something you can save money on, is the mindset. Besides, the real costs of this is allocated to many individual cost centers so in the bigger picture you won't see it.
>You’re definitely right about that. CharGPT is almost too accurate/structured.

I think a lot of the material was from standardized testing.

This very structured writing style. Many paragraphs, each discussing one aspect, finished by a conclusion. This is the classic style taught for (American at least) standardized testing, be it SAT, GRE, TOEFL, et al.
you are assuming hidden costs, I am assuming hidden incentives. It’s not that they are stupid or incompetent, but bad incentives within the org can and do produce stupid outcomes.
Are you saying that the compliance rule requires the software to be uninstallable? Once it's installed it's impossible to uninstall? No one can uninstall it? I have a hard time believing it's impossible to remove the software. In the extreme case, you could reimage the machine and reinstall Windows without Crowdstrike.

Or are you saying that it is possible to uninstall, but once you do that, you're not in compliance, so while it's technically possible to uninstall, you'll be breaking the rules if you do so?
Wiz is another bastard that impacted us yesterday. We had to fight it while it was making AWS snapshots constantly. Literally it killed our MTTR.

This whole sector needs to rethink itself. In the CIA triangle it's all about the I and a pile of cash but never about the A, which is what the customers give a shit about.
Are links generated from Google apps like

https://maps.app.goo.gl/xxxxxxx

going to continue working?
Oh cool, I've done this sort of thing (mass redirects) with Lambda@Edge which allows for more flexibility, but probably costs more.
I think Italian and French cinema of the era was also full of nudity.
If you want simple, free and flexible you can build a static site blog with Hugo and host on GitHub Pages.
1) build a society that requires a car to get around

2) exclusively sell cars with ludicrous acceleration and top speed

3) set legal speed limit at 1/6th the top speed of most vehicles

4) enforce strict financial penalties for operating one’s obligatory high-powered vehicle at more than 1/6th its maximum speed.

I’m strongly anti-car - I think we fucked up a whole lot designing society the way we did, but at this point, actual strict enforcement of speed limits with financial penalties is just robbery. If you want fewer people to die in car accidents, build a world that doesn’t obligate everyone to drive, or build a world where the vehicles for sale aren’t all SUVs with 0-60 times that would embarrass a Ferrari from 40 years ago, but don’t just start fining people when they use the vehicle you made them buy to do the thing it was made to do.
"enumerating badness"