skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey, author of the too long; automated blog here!

I had a problem in one of my projects recently: how to deploy my application to multiple cloud environments? The list of requirements was rather short:

--- Git flow must be a no-brainer–we don’t want to deal with multiple branches that will have to be frequently synchronized with one another.

--- Application needs to be versioned.

--- It must be possible to deploy a required version of the application to the selected deployment environment.

--- Every environment runs only one version of the application at the same time.

As I’m a data engineer and enjoy automating repetitive stuff, I added an extra one:

--- Automate manual processes to a reasonable extent.

I think (and hope) that both the end result, and the path that took me there, will be an interesting educational experience for you.

This post is the first one in a short, guided series. It’s titled “One branch to rule them all”, because, as you’ll find out, I’m going to use one long-lived branch to configure all of the deployment environments I need.

If you have any thoughts/feedback on it, I’d be humbled to hear it. Here, or directly on Substack.

Thanks a lot, and stay tuned for the upcoming posts if you enjoyed reading this one!
I bought 16MB of SRAM for a Z80 project a few weeks back, they were £3/4MB(32Mb) chip
So if america wouldn't have invaded iraq, russia wouldnt have invaded chechnya and the cause comes before the effect and the excuse for bad behaviour comes before the whataboutism and it all makes way more sense.
You can just buy a very cheap module which does this directly, commonly called HC-06 or HC-05

e.g. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/33010159305.html?spm=a2g0o.p...
Himalayan basalm is all over the place by rivers in the U.K… its invasive and difficult to remove because in quite a bizarre and cool fashion, when it’s ready to disperse seeds, it’s seed pod explodes from actually quite gentle physical contact.

https://youtu.be/XUOEHDRLDFk?si=6ZyxKQR-SxhZcMWt
Interesting! Can you tell me the typical use-case for this? Is it more for dev-ops stuff? Like to query all your servers to do some dashboards of your infra? Or can that be used also for ML / datascience etc?
You would be drooling all over with envy if you learned about food prices in my country (not Japan). The problem is, we make 10-15× less than you do¹, so when you actually correct for purchasing power, it turns out that food is much more expensive than in the US. Are you absolutely sure it's not the same in Japan?

1: probably even less than that; last time I seriously checked this was in 2021, and our inflation runs at 20% per year, while income mostly stays the same.
Again, they are not perfectionist, that is a myth.

Second, I don't know how the average US city is, because I have never been to the US, but I think that you really overestimate how the average Japanese city looks like. People who have never lived here think that all of Japan is like the cool neighbourhoods of Tokyo, but that could not be further from the truth.

The average Japanese city suffers from serious urban sprawl, most are just a bunch of big box stores interconnected by stroads, and little houses scattered everywhere without any kind of planning. There are plenty of old, decaying buildings everywhere and streets in pretty bad condition.

Look, I live in Misawa, Aomori. Please take a look around on Google Street View, and then tell me how much of a masterpiece it is: https://maps.app.goo.gl/d5DDV3PT6MiSNYPYA
Jelly doesn't directly integrate with Office365 or any existing shared mailboxes, at least not at the moment. You just forward email into it, from any source, and then use the Jelly web application to collaborate on those emails.

In the future we'll be looking at ways to streamline the setup with existing mail providers like Google, Office365 and so on, but we're starting out simple. There are lots of teams sharing logins to single email accounts whose lives we want to improve.
Most train systems around the world are not automated. Even though electronics can do better than a human driver, most trains have a human driver. (in subway systems you should be able to keep all dangers off the track so the safety problem is much easier than roads where kids might be playing in the street. But this requires platform screen doors which is also rare)

The real advantage of automation though is without a human driver it becomes cheap to run a lot of trains that are not very full and that makes your system nearly as convenient as driving in the suburbs.
For me, just having something that you can check 1 time per year is much better than nothing. The anecdote: I was working two heavy manual labor jobs 7 days per week and felt absolutely fantastic, glowing with power. Turned out the heart rate at rest was 180 lmao. Like a rabbit. Took a few days off, it dropped below 70.
Thank you!

I think that's a fair point about potentially wasted resources, something like Pico would have been and a leaner choice if this was going to be mass-produced. But for me, part of the decision was my comfort level with system programming and what I desired to tinker with and learn along the way and still, it's a very affordable option (around 20 CAD I believe)

Perhaps I'll look into porting it to Pico in future as new challenge and learning experience. Thank you for your sharing your thoughts.
I think that's a miss for Claude, this doesn't look right at all. The accrual account is an okay solution, but the syntax is wrong! That syntax is only used for budgeting and forecasting.

I think the solution is effective dates, there is an example pretty close to this scenario in the manual:

https://ledger-cli.org/doc/ledger3.html#Effective-Dates
I started programming at 7, i was certainly telling my friends about all the random stuff i barely had a smidge of understanding while trying to program simple games myself - i could barely move a smiley face (DOS ASCII character 2) on screen to collect hearts (DOS ASCII character 3) and yet i was certain i could make a game like Prince of Persia once i figured out how to draw lines on screen with Turbo Pascal's BGI.
It seems like this functionality could be tacked on to "MSA" which I just learned is an FCC mandatory technology for most cell phones

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_GNSS
Them succeeding at stopping users from doing a normal computing task does not make it good UX.

When a company’s products go from “helping user do what he wants” to “coercing the user to do what company wants” then the company has lost its way.
In your opinion, what fraction of the small restaurants in a typical city are engaging in money laundering at this scale? And if weighted by volume, what fraction?
Didn't know about the sloths but osteoderms from glyptodons are quite different.
No doubt. Being able to directly talk to my objects is a level above anything else out there.
> Tsar Bomba is a potent example of how nationalism, fear, and high-technology can combine in a fashion that is ultimately dangerous, wasteful, and pointless.

Not to be confused with the way democracy, love, and science produce beautiful, useful and eco-friendly nuclear weapons.
I think the question would be how specific the prompt would be in that scenario. Is the prompt having to effectively describe the new idea, or is the prompt describing a general problem space and goal while letting the LLM do all the heavy lifting of innovation?

Either way, my issue there is actually with the fact that the LLM can only predict what a human might say in response to the prompt andz as far as we know, don't have any way of logically thinking through the new solution or modelling reality to understand if the idea might actually work.
Thanks for that!

More than I thought, but still, a relatively small amount for what will work out as a quite expensive retro build.
One can argue they are faring better than Iraq, Libya, Ukraine or Lebanon.
For example, being able to do online administrative procedures by using digital signatures, instead of doing them on paper with personal stamps.
Also uttered by others who thought borrowing money was more important until they could figure out a way to control spending.
Definitely been looking for the same. I thought I would have a little time before needing to worry about it. However, our newborn has additional medical needs, so my SO and I are needing more coordinated back and forth with medical teams. Also means that our newborn needs a mailbox of their own in order to register for medical secure portals, which we need to access on their behalf.
Backblaze Rate Limiting Policy for Consistent Performance
Google got big when being a dot-com URL meant something and the primary way the average person accessed the Internet was through a desktop PC. Neither of those things is true anymore.
That probably depends a lot on which group of tech bros you're talking about there. I'd expect most people working on LLMs every day understand the limitations and know that "AI" as a term was bastardized for marketing and fund raising.
Fair enough! I see your point.. But then I would submit that this is too narrow of a view to take in a complex interconnected enterprise, and that anyone who works this way will end up more behind than ahead.

I'll stand by my first line that nothing exists in a vacuum.

If you only make decisions in isolation or without broader context, whether based on ethics or otherwise, then you will inevitably make the wrong decision, I would argue, more often than not.

Context matters, and the same decision made at different times and in different situations can have completely different outcomes or impacts.

What if "making the customer happy" costs so much money that it puts the company out of business? Do you still focus on only making the customer happy?

What if you have to piss off your customers, for a period of time, to save the business so you can get back to making the customer happy eventually?

Or a less dramatic scenario, what if making the customer happy makes your co-workers' jobs hell, for reasons outside your, or their, control? Is customer happiness then still your singular focus at all cost? Because then you're a shit co-worker in my view.

Is your only responsibility to the customer, or do you feel any responsibility towards your co-workers and/or their jobs & livelihoods?

Life and work are messy and complicated, and everything is a series of trade-offs.
You can, of course, DIY something easily enough but you can also purchase devices like this off the shelf. Needing to make legacy RS232 devices wirelessly available is a common problem in industry. Search for "wireless RS232 gateway" and you should be able to find a ton of stuff.

If you still want to DIY, an ESP32 (BLE and Wi-Fi capable microcontroller) board, and an RS232 to logic-level breakout board should be all you need. Again, I'm sure if you search, you'll find existing projects doing exactly this.

If it's not actually at RS232 voltage levels and Classic Bluetooth is enough, then something like this will work just fine: https://www.amazon.com/Wireless-Bluetooth-Transceiver-Integr...
That's a great piece of software indeed. I use it to join and analyze data from multiple APIs with materialized view, as most data analysis software only connects to databases, not APIs.

It's also pretty easy to write custom plugins once you understand how it's done.
this drop seems very odd. why is this happening?
A use of LLMs by search engines that I would like to see applied:

# At indexing time
- The search engine use LLM to convert all the page content into a "common language" (English?!) before indexing.

- Use LLM to rank the page (detect page spammy/informational level)

# At query time
- My query is translated to the "common language"
- Result list most appropriate results unbiased by page language, but only by spammy/informational value.
> spent a penny in its spotless toilets

Now that's an expression I haven't heard in a long time.
Not sure if we're seeing the same site but this site is better than 90% of the web when accessed via mobile for me. No page number when navigating forward/back through scripts, true, but I doubt you want to go through more than 1 or 2 pages without searching first. Search worked for me and turned up what I wanted on the first hit. Descriptions being 3 lines is pretty much the best it can do with the limited screen space; to improve this I feel you would need dedicated summarized content for mobile, which is a price that most platforms don't want to pay. Your description made me think that this was in the bottom 1% of mobile sites but honestly it's above average.
Habitual Artificial Intelligence contrasts nicely with Artifial General Intelligence. It parses data and forms habits based on that data. When you want to discover something new, you have to break out of a habit and think. It forms some habits better than others also.

When i saw how Alphazero played chess back in 2017, different than other engines, that's what i described it usually, as a habit forming machine.
I think a better measure would be an average of averages of adjacent populations.

Define a node as a population center (say NYC) and then edges as cities (Boston, Philly, DC, Pittsburgh) with the weight being the population of the respective city. Average the populations for each mode and then average those averages.

The idea of this number is it would represent the average population of points of interest.
it has nothing to do with disdain of LLMs, i'm an extensive user of warp (a very good LLM-based tool) and at my job we use them in depth in the software i build for summarization and other tasks that LLMs are generally considered good at. i spend a lot of time working with LLMs and find that, in some cases, they can be extremely useful, particularly when it comes to completing simple tasks in natural language.

i am also aware of their limitations and have a reasonable and realistic view of what they can currently do and where they are headed. i have seen many failure modes, i am familiar with patterns in their output, and i understand the boundaries of their comprehension, capabilities and understanding.

not buying into the current silicon valley money pit du jour and misunderstanding studies to validate that view does not equate to just being disdainful. i'm being realistic, because i understand what they do and how they work.

i'm not going to circle with you - you don't seem all that interested in engaging with the meat of anything i say to you, and instead just want to continue to try and rationalize your misunderstanding of the single study you found in support of your position, which is your right.

i feel ethically obligated to say, once again, that an LLM isn't a doctor and you should under no circumstances go to one for medical advice. you could really cause yourself some problems.

if you do so, that's on you. best of luck. incidentally i suspect someone has an awesome picture of a monkey at a steep discount you might be interested in.
Why should Apple care if I want to leave the device plugged in all the time? How does this choice remotely affect them?

Same with this power button: why should Apple care whether or not I power off the device when I’m done using it and turn it back on in the morning? This all just seems like pointless behavior control.
1 and 3 are done. (2) cannot be done practically by any dominant search engine because, no joke, the spam site owners get mad.
Fun fact, people thought giants (patagones) lived in our land, hence the Patagonia name. I blame Thor personally for their eradication, otherwise we may have been 3m tall.
A "monad" is not really a "thing" you can make use of, because a monad is a type of thing. Think "iterator"; an iterator is not a thing itself, it is a type of thing that things can be.

There is probably a monad you could understand this as being, a specific one, but "monad" itself is not a way to understand it.

And just as you can understand any given Iterator by simply understanding it directly, whatever "monad" you might use to understand this process can be simply understood directly without reference to the "monad" concept.
The waste comes from everyone assuming that AI is a ticket to a successful company that does deserve to exist.
yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42114535
100% agreed.. But I still believe that over a long enough time horizon, enshittification will take those companies down. Value extraction is by nature a limited time strategy.

Most companies who choose to do this are taking advantage of a period of market or segment domination where they know users don't have good alternative options, and will tolerate some level of garbage because they still want the service or product.

Note that highly competitive industries or market segments typically don't see as much enshittification...
I'm in programming, not hardware, but people who's business is selling PC's told me that the main reason of continuing Intel dominance in long term manufacturers contracts, so laptops and prebuilt PC's are still dominantly based on Intel hardware, and that's what most people buy.
I'm not sure all the software you work forces on you is Intel's fault?
Cant reply, but how can japan cities have sprawl? They are usually one bay between mountains and the sea. Where do you sprawl in the us-sense from there?
The Empowered Programmer: The Searls Cut [video]
I see solar power + batteries + electric vehicles as a big win for the environment, which explains how we arrived at different conclusions.
Acorn Café
When you compare it with the prices of other realistic costs (housing, transport, etc) it is significantly cheaper than you'd expect in a country with equivalent costs in those areas.
Yeah, I have had a low-Hz BenQ 32" w/puck since 2020 (I think mine was aimed at graphics/visual artists) - and it has given me no trouble and performed beautifully.

Would buy again, first BenQ product and convinced me that they are good - paid maybe about $100 less.
More like AI fall - in its current state it's still gonna provide some value.
Trillium Surveyor – Trade Surveillance made elegant
Interesting is also the mistranslation of "Dame", a lady from a wealthy family, as 'princess'.

This is a governor's wife, not a princess.
Experience gained, I suppose.
Pretty sure people say the same thing about compilers even today. They insist of using interpreters instead of compilers.
That's funny, but only ~1/5th of federal employees work in DC, and most of those are for agencies that will be politically untenable for Trump to cut, like the DoD.
Back in the 80's having 10 year olds show off Z80 Assembly on their Speccy and C64 wasn't that extraordinary, what was impressive is the ideas many would think of without nothing else besides a couple of books and nothing else.

I am sure what I am telling here, because I was one of those kids, with whatever we could get from the local library, coupled with Input magazines, and some Portuguese newspapers with computing stuff on fridays (A Capital).

By 14 I was already into Demoscene stuff.

EDIT: Naturally it was 6502 on the C64.
As a user of Transit (thank you for such a great app!) this was always one of my biggest annoyances. Not just transit though — with any app that supports navigation on public transit (looking at you Apple Maps).

I figured someone was working on this but it’s so refreshing to read about the thought and level of detail that went into your design. What an effort too! Congratulations transit team, you all should be so proud for solving what I’d imagine is one of transit’s largest small gripes.
Rose-ringed parakeet (Psittacula krameri) in Portugal, my home country. It's very cute and super resilient, no fear of getting endangered.
Perception is reality. (For better or worse.)
A much more useful trick I learnt from Tyler Cowen's podcast is to ask what they think is the most underrated / overrated thing in the category. Everyone understands that the answer is going to be subjective, so there's no pressure to be diplomatic. And in my experience, the answers are also high variance, which leads to more interesting conversations (most people agree that Messi is the greatest of all time, but everyone has a different opinion on who is the most underrated / overrated).
The satellite also sends information about all the other satellites that a receiver should be able to see. This is what makes adding other transmitters hard/impossible I guess - no way to tell the overhead satellites that your ground station also exists (there would presumably be thousands of them - most not in range of your receiver which would be even more problems.)
How to generate Hex or Pantone color palettes from images in four color schemes
> and NATO (especially the US) has a credible red line of any attempt at a 'small-scale' use of nuclear weapons against Ukraine that will bring them into the war.

Do you feel that USA red line is still credible post election? I'm genuinely curious how you see it. To me it sounded like the new commander in chief wants nothing to do with the whole conflict there.
That’s a pretty wild definition of “fully shut down” that manufacturers (not just Apple) are pushing. When my device is shut down, I expect it to be fully de-energized and drawing zero current. How can a keyboard action re-apply power if the button itself is not completing the power circuit?

This is one of the reasons I’ve started putting all of my devices on power strips with physical switches that de-energize the AC mains. You can’t even trust devices to power off when they say they are off.

The number of devices in your home that draw current when they are “off” is too damn high.
Some people just want to fight. As a goal by itself. Sure you can say that if they want to fight, fighting is the rational choice, but that definition would make every action 'rational'.
Yeah, the problem is that Google today is still generally better than its competitors today, even though Google today is worse than Google yesterday.
Cell towers also transmit location data
If you’re using it for gaming, it would be preferable to leave it plugged in to avoid the danger of the battery running empty.

Why not let the users use it as they see fit?
What do you think diplomacy is? Why do you think it accomplishes anything? It certainly does, but you are discussing it as though it is not something that is formed against a backdrop of self-interest, geography, history, and military capability.

Diplomacy is distinctly not "just talking nicely".
Full support, i.e. actually throwing everything that Ukraine is asking for. If Russia is resoundingly pushed out of Ukraine, such that they cannot claim any victory at all, it may threaten the stability of Putin's power, given how much he's staked on success with the invasion.

How likely this is depends on who you ask, but the US seems to be trying to trying to avoid taking any risks at all there.
The feature that Observer would correspond to is simply Observers. Some of the patterns may happen to correspond to different names, but they don't all need different names or weird mappings, many of them are just "and now it's a feature instead of a set of classes".

That said, while the point "a design pattern is a feature missing from a language" has some validity on its own terms, the implied "and therefore a language is deficient if it has design patterns because those could be features" is nonsense. A language has some set of features. These features have an exponential combination of possibilities, and a smaller, but still exponential, set of those are useful. For every feature one lifts from "design pattern" and tries to put into the language, all that happens is an exponential number of other "features" are now closer to hand and are now "design patterns". This process does not end, and this process does not even complete enumerating all the possible useful patterns before the language has passed all human ability to understand it... or implement it.

Moreover, the argument that "all design patterns should be lifted to features" ignores the fact that features carry costs. Many kinds of costs. And those costs generally increase the cost of all the features around them. The costs become overwhelming.