skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If organisations really wanted "you can sue us when it falls over too badly" then the FOSS-but-with-paid-support-contracts business model would work much better than it actually does.

The companies who've aimed for that business model seem to do pretty poorly - judging by the number that end up pivoting to paid premium features, source-available licenses, or just getting acquired.
As some others suggested I would also recommend to try to make an experiment.
Identify one part of your software suite you think you can build, operate and do the maintenance for. Aim to do it as fast as possible. Test if you can resolve the issues, you have with your vendor, if you do it yourself. If that fails, it propbably isnt a good idea to go full scale on it. Again: aim to get some real world experience with your own build software AS FAST (and cheap) as possible. Dont go for a perfect solution.
Hi,I made a small framework that you can use with graphql-yoga or apollo-server. It is a type-safe wrapper for backend like GraphQL Zeus is a type-safe gen for frontend, but there is more.

I added also:

micro-federation - have multiple schemas and resolver files in one repo while axolotl merges them using open federation spec. It can also join resolver groups.

inspect command - inspect your resolvers in terminal to see which fields are implemented and which not

modularium - with just 2 modules now. A concept for schemas that are brought together with resolvers to attach to your backend and schema - for now users and teams modules.

custom scalars support

simplified directives support

Docs: https://axolotl-docs.vercel.app/
I started this framework after my talk on Programistok in December and I will maintain it. Tell me if you have any other ideas what I can add that can help small & medium projects to be started faster.

Artur
> I expect Nvidia to pre-emptively open up CUDA just enough to keep them (and most of us) happy

Besides how they've "opened" their drivers by moving all the proprietary code on-GPU, I don't expect this to happen at all. Nvidia has no incentive to give away their IP, and the antitrust cases that people are trying to build against them border on nonsense. Nvidia monopolizes CUDA like Amazon monopolizes AWS, their "abuse" is the specialization they offer to paying customers... which harms the market how?

What really makes me lament the future is the fact that we had a chance to kill CUDA. Khronos wanted OpenCL to be a serious competitor, and if it wasn't specifically for the fact that Apple and AMD stopped funding it we might have a cross-platform GPU compute layer that outperforms CUDA. Today's Nvidia dominance is a result of the rest of the industry neglecting their own GPGPU demand.

Nvidia only "wins" because their adversaries would rather fight each other than work together to beat a common competitor. It's an expensive lesson for the industry about adopting open standards when people ask you to, or you suffer the consequences of having nothing competitive.
Up until not long ago, you could get away with this test: "Do I, as the driver, have to stop, think, and make some choice to command the car to change some setting that governs whether or not I get across this patch of terrain?" The 'stop' step is important; certain classical 4WD shifts require the vehicle to be stationary. The automatic-ness of the AWD systems -- no pesky second shifter -- was the differentiator.

Now that we have knobs for different "driving modes," the the ability to slam it into whatever position whenever we want while an ECU figures out how to keep a gearbox from exploding, it's genuinely hard. Still, the presentation of a setting like "lock/unlock" and "two/four" and "high/low" is the standard I still go by (right or wrong).
Activity on the sun is the main driver of earthquakes.
Nothing wrong with bikeshedding, as long as everyone bikeshedding knows they are bikeshedding. It only becomes a problem when someone asserts that blue “is the one true color” to paint the shed and doesn’t recognize that a shed can be other colors.

At that point, you reach an impasse that the other team members must then bend to that person’s opinions or leave.
> I feel like we could do much better with a product catered specifically to us.

This is likely true, but still might have an overall RoI under 1.

I think you have to be in control of the fundamentals of what makes your company different ("don't outsource your core competency"). If you can't immediately see how software is part of that and you have a viable path forward otherwise, I'd tend to advise you not to bring software in-house.

Very few software projects are as easy as they seem, are delivered on a timeline that looks like the original schedule, and experienced devs are not inexpensive. (Yes, you can absolutely attract experienced devs to any industry; just give them interesting problems, competitive pay, and leadership that isn't utterly terrible.)

I have our logistics group (mostly outbound parcel, so a different part of the industry) reporting into me. We found a niche that we felt gave us a competitive advantage from having that team in-house [and I think that's been proven to be correct], but it was far beyond "the existing software is terrible" to drive that decision. OP: Email is in my profile.
* Load balancing is handled pretty well by ALBs, and there are integrations with ECS autoscaling for health checks and similar

* Log aggregation happens out of the box with CloudWatch Logs and CloudWatch Log Insights. It's configurable if you want different behavior

* On ECS, you configure a "service" which describes how many instances of a "task" you want to keep running at a given time. It's the abstraction that handles spinning up new tasks when one fails

* ECS supports ready checks, and (as noted above) integrates with ALB so that requests don't get sent to containers until they pass a readiness check

* Machine maintenance schedules are non-existent if you use ECS / Fargate, or at least they're abstracted from you. As long as your application is built such that it can spin up a new task to replace your old one, it's something that will happen automatically when AWS decommissions the hardware it's running on. If you're using ECS without Fargate, it's as simple as changing the autoscaling group to use a newer AMI. By default, this won't replace all of the old instances, but will use the new AMI when spinning up new instances

But again, though: the biggest selling point is the lack of maintenance / babysitting. If you set up your stack using ECS / Fargate and an ALB five years ago, it's still working, and you've probably done almost nothing to keep it that way.

You might be able to do the same with Kubernetes, but your control plane will be out of date, your OSes will have many missed security updates. Might even need a major version update to the next LTS. Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, Promtail will be behind. Your helm charts will be revisions behind. Newer ones might depend on newer apiVersions that your control plane won't support until you update it. And don't forget to update your CNI plugin across your cluster, too.

It's at least one full time job just keeping all that stuff working and up-to-date. And it takes a lot more know-how than just ECS and ALB.
Don’t even write Java like it’s Java!

Discussing curriculum and textbooks for a Java class today, someone recommended a book that was most recently updated for Java 7. When I pointed that out, the response was:

“The level we teach at, the new Java features won’t make much of a difference.”

Java is a culture just as much as a language, and the culture is stuck somewhere in the past in a lot of places, especially in education.
Nothing stopping you from trying this today :)

Health startups are bigger than ever
No, this is only true with equal traction at each wheel, which quite often isn't the case (mud, snow, ice, etc.). Locking diffs are very useful offroad.
to quote a former professor:

"marketing works, even when you know how marketing works.

if you think you're immune, then you'll be tagged as the 'thinks they're immune' demographic and hit with alternative methods, which usually work"
Isn't the hobbyist solution to just build a board to which you can attach an entire pico board? That does preclude some things and adds $3, but it makes for a pretty easy prototyping path.
take a complex solution that doesn’t actually solve the problem and make it more complex so then it solves it, yet still doesn’t.

a less complex solution, let companies like apple do what they do and allow ad blockers and develop an AI feature for removing them.

people still seeing ads these days are doing so by choice.
Typst, PagedJs and open-source typesetting
Well they quite literally have a paywalled post entitled "Why I stopped being a leftist" which is sure to be as compelling as the other seventy times it was written by others.
I was wrong, GPT4 didn't kill our startup. It made it viable
More than a year ago (when MS announced that it will introduce copilot in all of its office suite) I posted here. I said (with total conviction) that our bootstrapped, two-man NLP/AI company is now doomed and GPT4 will basically solve everything we ever wanted to.

Crowdprisma is a free-text survey analysis tool that aims to understand survey responses, extract topics from it and accurately assign each response to them. Then allow the user to cross-check these topics against non-text (ie qualitative) variables, through a unified dashboard. To be brutally honest, before GPT our text engine sucked, even though we worked a ton on it (the fact that we were two senior ML engineers with 10+ years experience between us, didn't make a difference).

It took us a whole year to realise that GPT4 cannot do this easily and in a single go, and another 7 months to completely rewrite our pipeline and make it water tight (yepp, we are probably not silicon valley fast).

Now it's better than it could have ever been pre-gpt4 and is super valuable for our customers.

So maybe it is truly the case that AI will not (just) kill old jobs and companies but make some of them adopt, then adapt & survive (or at least give them a second chance). Surely we are biased but for us, it certainly feels that way.
Looks interesting. API is cool, price is acceptable.

Only 2 real questions in my mind, both of which can only truly be answered over time: 1) price stability and 2) deliverability rates.

Rant: SMTP is just a bad legacy joke that should be augmented (replacement is probably not realistic) with some new API standard.
SOCRadar's Response to the USDoD's Claim of Scraping 330M Emails
in simple terms....gila pass glycose to neurons via lactate so that NH can be removed from neurons....next brain-washing moves that set of molecules back to the blood stream so kidneys can remove it...
I hear it in my coffee kettle every day. Boiling starts out as a high pitched fizzy sound. Then just before the kettle shuts off, it is a lower pitch, popping sound. I always assumed the bubbles get bigger as the water heats up causing lower pitch sounds when they pop.
Just as bad are heavy vehicles, which is pretty much everything marketed as "4WD" these days.
When someone is bike shedding you need to show how trivial what they are talking about is.

"Oh it won't work because it will break xyz" "Okay so what does it take to fix xyz?" "maybe a day or two" "..."

"It's going to cost more to have xyz" "Oh how much more?" "$100 a month" "..."

"It should be blue instead of red" "no customers prefer purple" "alright we will defer this to product team / customer feedback"

That being said, people who bikeshed a lot are pretty terrible to work with, they are usually the ones first to tell you how hard a change is going to be and why we shouldn't do it. They would rather do nothing and stay in their comfort zone. Toxic to work with, fire if they cannot change.
So, "it is really mostly a matter of luck", and just do so much work that they decide to fire someone else... sigh. If only there was some way for the workers to negotiate collectively for working terms that avoid mass layoffs whenever the interest rates go the wrong way.
I'm typing this comment on Lynx in the Linux framebuffer console.

I think trying to solve the problems of the web is an exercise in futility. The standard (or more accurately, set of standards) is too complicated to independently re-implement. Like C++.
Maybe a nit pick, but I would not accept the expert employees writing requirement documents that are "thrown over the wall" to the dev team.

You need personal access to talk to the experts anytime some question comes up. This means 1-2 experts work part time as PMs more or less, which will impact their regular work.

Costly, but I don't trust any other way.
Chrome's ability to control how people interact with the world is also contributing to the death of the old, independent web. From an email yesterday from the administrator of the Computational Chemistry List (which started in 1991), at https://server.ccl.net/cgi-bin/ccl/message-new?2024+08+08+00... :

> I have to redo the CCL Web Site, since currently all pages that are not "secure" (https) will not be displayed in Chrome and some other browsers. So http is gone and practically replaced by https. The http pages are treated as insecure, and you cannot view them as http://www.ccl.net like before. The whole site needs to be redone (I mean gigabytes of stuff). This will be a painful process and the problems will persist for a while. [...] I hope I will finish this conversion before I die... If not, then, Bye, Bye, CCL.
Every company is a software company, just some haven't realised it yet.

The only thing I would add to the great advice already here is start off very small, and get this tiny feature being used by the company as soon as possible and then iterate. Every two weeks the programmers should be adding value for your staff. Do not try to go with a big bang where you deliver something that does even 10% as much as the probably awful software you are currently using. This is where projects tend to fail.

If you want to filter out quite a few bad programmers I would use Elixir as the people who know about it and like it tend to be people with excellent programming taste in my opinion. Other programming languages are available of course, but using something slightly niche but excellent will attract the right sort of people to a project like this and help retain them.

If you want to chat my email is in my profile! Good luck!
Sometimes it is easier to arc dyn your way out of things especially in the async world and if you need to decouple two parts of the software. You get a sort of slower ref count gc similar to swift but it makes your life more enjoyable, always depends on your usecase.
maybe most of the users just don't care abt privacy
This is extremely recent.

Irish were seen as a subrace until WW1. Any 19th century racist would absolutely disagree with your message. In the same way, putting Ukrainian with turkomongol and genoese roots in the same bucket as Russians, or as Poles would be clearly decried by 19th century racists. As lumping Italians and Spaniards, why not, do you lump Greeks in that bucket too? Because 19th century racists wouldn't.

Also english are way, way closer to Spaniards culturally and genetically than eastern Europeans. And Irish and Scotts are way closer culturally to Spaniards than Germans. I never saw any German delegation in an interceltic festival, whereas Galicia is a recurrent participant.
Tendai "Marathon monks" in mount Hiei finish 1,000-day kaihōgyō with 9-day period without food, water, and sleep but they have to walk only 400m in those last 9-days. Only 46 men have finished.

If I remember correctly the 9-day period was shortened to something like 6 or 7 days, because too many of them died.
I got lucky, well, I found a job. But then nearly the entire company got laid off except for three of us engineers. I was only kept because I hadn’t been there more than 3 months.

Seems pretty brutal out there, but you might have to take a pay cut.
I can vouch for this. There were a myriad of cases I brought to my boss, the director of operations for a major wireless carrier that was absorbed into another one that still exists. "They are paying their bills, right?" was all I could get. I had text messages scrolling on my desk in a different workspace all day. Agencies would have me grep for homicide threats between gangs but that's about it. I was not only required to support spammers and scammers, but also required to make sure everyone's messages got through quickly, including those that were overloading my gateways from SS7 links controlled by obvious scammers. I was not allowed to get the hicap folks to decom nefarious SS7 links. This was a long time ago and I doubt the situation improved.
What if explanatory and response vars are sorted independently before regression
> Employees can already search through everything.

Not in the places I worked. Not at all! There were confidential matters that only people with dedicated responsibility can access and act on. Otherwise it would be a disaster whenever a less honest employee come accross data useful to act on the companies behalf or worse, act directly pretending being one of those eligible people.

Then I wonder how this bots handle the info. Are those scanning through what's there and build the knowledge into self? I guess so, otherwise how would know what is what when asked about, if something is a thing and being there at all. And then if having limited access then the bot would be clueless about some important things the people with elevated credentials need. Or, if can scan everything, I mean everything!, then that data is built into the bot, it 'knows' it, so it is just time tricking to give it out to those not eligible. Pretending being someone, or pretending getting received elevated credentails, or who knows what ways could be there to trick and squeeze that knowledge out from these chatty things. Or can be there several different bots, training multitude of bots, some left clueless like an ordinary employee and not let talk to, the CEO having an administrative bot that knows it all? I am jut trying to imagine being complete outsider how these things work.
While it is true that the justice system is often used to disproportionately hurt the poor, nobody is getting their door kicked in for not paying taxes on a venmo transaction.
did the judge say it had to be written in a memory safe language? Honest question. Otherwise, this seems just like they're looking for a loophole knowing neither their browser nor chrome or Firefox are written in completely memory safe languages. Seems like grounds for a big fine.
and jax, tinygrad and halide. God it's such an awesome time to be into that stuff.
Ugh, I feel exactly the same way. In fact, I've spent the last 2 weeks refactoring our entire LLM pipeline to completely root out LangChain. I'm just implementing basic RAG from scratch, which 1) has me learning a lot more quickly and 2) feeling much more in control of the entire pipeline.
the advertiser also doesn’t know what they don’t know.

if you hadn’t joined the robotics club, chances are very high you would tripped over robotics on your way off of the stage when graduating. it’s that prevalent these days. if not then you would’ve seen one of the many youtube videos convincing you to join some company. had you seen an ad for robot building school, most would consider it a scam and move on.
If your company is part of a large ecosystem underserved by software vendors, building solutions for yourself and others may be transformational (as AWS has been for Amazon).

The thing with software is that it is rarely (not never) commercially successful to develop single customer solutions. So if you can build something that works for your business and can be used by your suppliers/partners/customers in enough volume to pay for developing and maintaining it, you win.
You risk heart attack even if you are in water only diet (without salts and potassium) for longer periods of time (several weeks).
Some of those saved dollars got to political contributions. The return on investment on that is fantastic.
Check out dapr and workflows. Set up a MySQL state store, construct a workflow, and off you go.
My son was ruined after we started using mods. The ones he sees on Youtube are all paid things on the MS store, but now he believes I can just magic them out of my hat.

On the plus side, we have a great deal of fun playing hide and seek with the morph modpack.

His friends all play minecraft on the Switch, but they don’t have mods so he thinks it boring.
This is hard!
While I do take your word very seriously and believe it’s 100% honest, it seems incongruent with most things I’ve seen and experienced over the last decade or so. There’s to me a very real crisis or at least dilemma for businesses that would love to do FOSS but can’t or won’t for unfortunate reasons.

Products are frequently over-complicated so self-hosting is difficult. There are often outright rug-pulls or dark patterns, keeping basic features behind their cloud offerings. The mega corps sometimes swoop in and take all the candy from the kids. Products are designed suboptimally, eg kubernetes native when they would be much better as a library. Then you have honest well meaning players who lose customers to self-hosting, because they need on-prem for security reasons, or simply because they want better debugging and logs.

Some varied examples off the top of my head include Docker, Hasura, Redis, Hashicorp, Benthos. My point here is combining small-medium sized businesses with a core FOSS product is full of perils, risk and unhealthy market dynamics. I’d assume the iceberg is also much bigger than these prolific projects, from companies that chose not to do FOSS in the first place.
Zotero 7: Zotero, Redesigned
I agree with this article wholly, I had and still have all the described experiences and feelings.
Laser Fault Injection for the Masses
Why are you selling it?
See PEP 667, "Consistent views of namespaces" https://peps.python.org/pep-0667/ .

In Python 3.12, quoting https://docs.python.org/dev/whatsnew/3.13.html

> PEP 667: The locals() builtin now has defined semantics when mutating the returned mapping. Python debuggers and similar tools may now more reliably update local variables in optimized scopes even during concurrent code execution.

with more details at https://docs.python.org/dev/whatsnew/3.13.html#whatsnew313-l... , which adds:

> To ensure debuggers and similar tools can reliably update local variables in scopes affected by this change, FrameType.f_locals now returns a write-through proxy to the frame’s local and locally referenced nonlocal variables in these scopes
I run Prosody XMPP server on a cheap VPS, and appreciate how it's a stock Debian package, greatly simplifying security updates. It's delightfully lightweight on the server.

I use Conversations as a client in Android, and Gajim in Linux.

The basics like OMEMO, file attachments, push-to-talk voice memos (in Conversations, but not Gajim) work well. All comms are at least client-to-server-encrypted, and the OMEMO-protected comms are end-to-end encrypted.
Chinese rocket stage breaks up into cloud of > 700 pieces of space debris