skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't have any numbers, but we know that the Meta family of apps has ~3B users, and that most of them are on mobile. Let's assume half of them are on Android, and you're easily looking at ~1B users on Android. If you have a nullpointer exception in a core framework that somehow made it through testing, and it takes 5-6 hours to push an emergency update, then Meta stands to lose millions of dollars in ad revenue. Arguably even one of these makes it worth to move to a null-safe language! I know your point is that you need to have that sort of crazy scale to make it worth it and that's true, I'm just annoyed at the comments suggesting that the move to Kotlin is just to pad resumes or because Meta let a bunch of bored devs run amok.
That's a great point.

There is a lot of spiciness in soccer where you see a player on your team get a red card and then your team works extra hard down a man for 60 minutes for a draw and then find out the other team has a player who specializes in giving out red cards.
I'm with you there, with stuff like fly.io, there's really no reason to worry about infrastructure.

AWS, on the other hand, seems about as time consuming and hard as using root servers. You're at a higher level of abstraction, but the complexity is about the same I'd say. At least that's my experience.
I had the pleasure of reading Montaigne before blogs were invented.

When I started reading blogs, the format reminded me of his essays.
You’re only about 20x as likely to die on a motorcycle as in a car.

What can I say? People like to live dangerously.
"It's Getting Personal" – Apple whitepaper about interoperability under EU's DMA [pdf]
I don’t have any experience with this, so take this with a pinch of salt.

What seems
novel about moderation is the frequency that you confront disturbing things. I imagine companies like Meta have such good automated moderation that what remains to be viewed by a human is practically a firehose of almost certainly disturbing shit. And as soon as you’re done with one post, the next is right there. I doubt moderators spend more than 30 seconds on the average image, which is an awful lot of stuff to see in one day.

A doctor just isn’t exposed to that sort of imagery at the same rate.
Cloud expands the capabilities of what one team can manage by themselves, enabling them to avoid a huge amount of internal politics.

This is worth astronomical amounts of money in big corps.
Most audiences wouldn’t like freshly butchered cow - freshly butchered meat is tough and not very flavorful, it needs to be aged to allow it to tenderize and develop.
I have seen a common sentiment that self hosting is almost always better than cloud. What these discussions does not mention is how to effectively run your business applications on this infrastructure.

Things like identity management (AAD/IAM), provisioning and running VMs, deployments. Network side of things like VNet, DNS, securely opening ports etc. Monitoring setup across the stack. There is so much functionalities that will be required to safely expose an application externally that I can't even coherently list them out here. Are people just using Saas for everything (which I think will defeat the purpose of on-prem infra) or a competent Sys admin can handle all this to give a cloud like experience for end developers?

Can someone share their experience or share any write ups on this topic?

For more context, I worked at a very large hedge fund briefly which had a small DC worth of VERY beefy machines but absolutely no platform on top of it. Hosting application was done by copying the binaries on a particular well known machine and running npm commands and restarting nginx. Log a ticket with sys admin to create a DNS entry to point a reserve and point a internal DNS to this machine (no load balancer). Deployment was a shell script which rcp new binaries and restarts nginx. No monitoring or observability stack.
There was a script which will log you into a random machine for you to run your workloads (be ready to get angry IMs from more senior quants running their workload in that random machine if your development build takes up enough resources to effect their work). I can go on and on but I think you get the idea.
My guess is False Positive. Weird abbreviation to use though.
I'm not sure your comparisons are close enough to be considered precedents.

My guess is even standing at the ambulance drive in of a big hospital, you'll not see as much horrors in a day as these people see in 30 minutes.
You're already expected to learn a number of exotic (Hack) or old (C++) languages at Meta, so I'm pretty sure that's not the reason.

To quote from another comment I made:

> I don't have any numbers, but we know that the Meta family of apps has ~3B users, and that most of them are on mobile. Let's assume half of them are on Android, and you're easily looking at ~1B users on Android. If you have a nullpointer exception in a core framework that somehow made it through testing, and it takes 5-6 hours to push an emergency update, then Meta stands to lose millions of dollars in ad revenue. Arguably even one of these makes it worth to move to a null-safe language!
Blocked for 2 hits in 20 minutes on a light protocol like rss?

That seems hilariously aggressive to me, but her server her rules I guess.
A good edition to own is the beautiful hardcover edition published by Everyman's Library titled Michel de Montaigne The Complete Works Essays Travel journal Letters and translated by Donald Frame - http://www.everymanslibrary.co.uk/classics-author.aspx?lette...
You could similarly say humans can't perform reasoning because it's just neurons sampling electrochemical impulses.
> The Terminal app feels essentially unchanged

Is this supposed to be a bad thing?! It's a rock-solid workhorse. If they changed it I would stop trusting macOS to be any better than the linux flavor of the month
"Tough guy dancing" is such an apt phrase.

The organizer is even called a "fight choreographer".
OpenAI's GPT-5 reportedly falling short of expectations
Uh, that‘s interesting! Do you have a source for this (or is it firsthand knowledge?)
That argument makes sense for PaaS services like the ones you mention. But for bare "cloud" like AWS, I'm not convinced it is saving any effort, it's merely swapping one kind of complexity with another. Every place I've been in had full-time people messing with YAML files or doing "something" with the infrastructure - generally trying to work around the (self-inflicted) problems introduced by their cloud provider - whether it's the fact you get 2010s-era hardware or that you get nickel & dimed on absolutely arbitrary actions that have no relationship to real-world costs.
> First, they really need to beef up the docs.

This is a common refrain I hear w.r.t. Apple and while
I write very little native mobile code I have to agree. It’s so sparse and rarely has more that I should be able to find out by hovering over a function/variable in my IDE.

Would it kill them to add a paragraph explain why or how you use the thing? To add code samples? Must be too much for one of the most valuable companies in the world… What kills me is that this is actively hurting their own platforms. I can understand some of Apple’s moves but this one is so incredibly short-sighted.
you mean, like here?

you write a comment only to see people downvote, only because they have different opinion. You don't like democrats? you are stupid. You like democrats? you are stupid too. You claim you avoid politics? you are certainly hidden lover of the other option, the one I hate(without really knowing why).

Level of negativity depends if the corridor you talk to is filled with people like you. And that in my opinion is very dangerous, people convinced of their superiority have no respect to others, who have different opinion on any topic. So they funnel into their corridors where their sense of superiority is reinforced.

I'm also of the opinion world is increasingly filled with egocentric narcisistic people Narcism is very toxic, and unfortunately narcisists will extremely rarely see it in them. Narcists think everything and everyone in the world is lesser than them and hence must submit to their will.

Anyways, the answer might be - less internet in your life is better for you. Talk to real people, in face-to-face setups people are less prone to tell nasty stuff, and by the very virtue of social interactions will have to confront different world views.

Peace.
Do developers use the app store? 99% of what I install on my computer isn't available through the app store. I just use it for Apple apps (Pages etc). Pretty much everything else is freely available and more fully featured outside the app store.

Plus, it's spammed with low-quality for-profit crapware—the iOSification of an otherwise fantastic platform
The value of synthetic data relies on having non-zero signal about which generated data is "better" or "worse". In a sense, this what reinforcement learning is about. Ie, generate some data, have that data scored by some evaluator, and then feed the data back into the model with higher weight on the better stuff and lower weight on the worse stuff.

The basic loop is: (i) generate synthetic data, (ii) rate synthetic data, (iii) update model to put more probability on better data and less probability on worse data, then go back to (i).
It seems to render each lane of the roads in my city seperately. It looks good at maximal zoom but worse if you zoom in.
The biggest win with running your own infra is disk/IO speeds, as noted here and in DHH's series on leaving cloud (https://world.hey.com/dhh/we-have-left-the-cloud-251760fb)

The cloud providers really kill you on IO for your VMs. Even if 'remote' SSDs are available with configurable ($$) IOPs/bandwidth limits, the size of your VM usually dictates a pitiful max IO/BW limit. In Azure, something like a 4-core 16GB RAM VM will be limited to 150MB/s across all attached disks. For most hosting tasks, you're going to hit that limit far before you max out '4 cores' of a modern CPU or 16GB of RAM.

On the other hand, if you buy a server from Dell and run your own hypervisor, you get a massive reserve of IO, especially with modern SSDs. Sure, you have to share it between your VMs, but you own all of the IO of the hardware, not some pathetic slice of it like in the cloud.

As is always said in these discussions, unless you're able to move your workload to PaaS offerings in the cloud (serverless), you're not taking advantage of what large public clouds are good at.
Cloud solves one problem quite well: Geographic redundancy. It's extremely costly with on-prem.
Because she didn’t legitimately work enough to own 30 billion dollars, as opposed to Jeff?
Funny. I was doing the same guided by some gut feeling, and then the Pixel vulnerability was published, where people would recover original images from the images cropped in Pixel album app
Insurance always balances between cost pooling and making people pay for their increased risk. Car insurance has always been more expensive for riskier drivers: young men pay more, driving “high risk” cars pay more.

If the overall liability pool goes down but the human drivers become an outsized part of it, the insurance company will likely shift that cost to them. If they don’t, someone could set up an autonomous-only insurance company (or google could just insure itself) to take advantage of the lower risk, making the human insurance more expensive (even more so that the liability since the overall pool will be much smaller).
If you don't mind me asking, do you have any cues or techniques that you use to help differentiate between a delusion and something real? Or are the kind of delusions you have consistent to the point where you've already categorized and figured out how to deal with them?
Different languages maybe? I find Sonnet v2 to be lacking in Rust knowledge compared to 4o 11-20, but excelling at Python and JS/TS. O1's strong side seems to be complex or quirky puzzle-like coding problems that can be answered in a short manner, it's meh at everything else, especially considering the price. Which is understandable given its purpose and training, but I have no use for it as that's exactly the sort of problem I wouldn't trust an LLM to solve.

Sonnet v2 in particular seems to be a bit broken with its reasoning (?) feature. The one where it detects it might be hallucinating (what's even the condition?) and reviews the reply, reflecting on it. It can make it stop halfway into the reply and decide it wrote enough, or invent some ridiculous excuse to output a worse answer. Annoying, although it doesn't trigger too often.
Is paranoia on the rise? It sure seems anxiety is ...
Heart tissue can regenerate – How Cold War nuclear tests led to major discovery
with a common understanding ("agent") and then conveniently redefines or re-etomologizes the word in an uncommon way that leads people to implicitly believe something about the product that isn't true.

What is the 'product' here? It's a university textbook. Like, where is the parallel between https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_agent and 'essential oils'.
It is also exploiting the fact that humans need food and shelter to live and money is used to acquire those things.
It gives me value but I am not even sure it is $20 a month of value at this point.

It was in 2023 but I picked all the low hanging fruit.

More importantly though, where is all the great output from the people who are getting so much value out of the models?

It is all privately held? How can that be with millions of people using these models?
It's overfitting when you train too large a model on too many details. Rote memorization isn't rewarding.

The more concepts the model manages to grok, the more nonlinear its capabilities will be: we don't have a data problem, we have an educational one.

Claude 3.5 was safety trained by Claude 3.0, and it's more coherent for it. https://www.anthropic.com/news/claudes-constitution
> I’m skeptical of the value in doing this.

Its Meta. They have enough money to spare not to need to worry too much about whether there is a good RoI on rewriting some mobile apps.

I very much doubt FB's mobile apps are written for any sort of efficiency, (either in engineering or financial terms) - 18,000 classes in the apple one! https://quellish.tumblr.com/post/126712999812/how-on-earth-t...
Germany has a very strong culture of dubbing essentially everything. Just finding any showing of a film in its original language at a cinema is very difficult outside of major cities for example.
Why does fb.com always erase your history so the back button no longer works once you click on the link to go there?
There's however a middle-ground between run your own colocated hardware and cloud. It's called "dedicated" servers and many hosting providers (from budget bottom-of-the-barrel to "contact us" pricing) offer it.

Those take on the liability of sourcing, managing and maintaining the hardware for a flat monthly fee, and would take on such risk. If they make a bad bet purchasing hardware, you won't be on the hook for it.

This seems like a point many pro-cloud people (intentionally?) overlook.
If you put MuZero in a room with a board game it gets quite good at it. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MuZero)

We'll see if that generalizes beyond board games.
> For example, by running ``sudo pacman -Syu`` I upgrade everything that is installed, including the kernel, standard libraries, Python packages, language packages, manpages and so on.

I actually view this as a liability. System package management should be distinct from userspace package management.
Earlier article with some info on freshrss: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2024/10/25/fs/
YouTube is such a great multimodal dataset—videos, auto-generated captions, and real engagement data all in one place. That’s a strong starting point for training, even before you filter for quality. Microsoft’s Phi-series models already show how focusing on smaller, high-quality datasets, like textbooks, can produce great results. You could totally imagine doing the same thing with YouTube by filtering for high-quality educational videos.

Down the line, I think models will start using video generation as part of how they “think.” Picture a version of GPT that works frame by frame—ask it to solve a geometry problem, and it generates a sequence of images to visualize the solution before responding. YouTube’s massive library of visual content could make something like that possible.
Anyone know what are some good data centers or providers to host your bare metal servers?
I've concluded that a selective backup of the homedir is a better strategy than having dotfiles under version control and such. Keeping track of every little file is just too taxing. The movie collection belongs in the ignore file though.
I have an original "NeXTstep Concepts" manual with the NX prefix. I can't remember where I heard the "NeXT and Sun" explanation for the first time, but a Google search shows that the prefix change could've actually occurred before the collaboration with Sun. It could stand for NeXT Software, as it's closer to the transition to a software company.
I found it very useful for writing a lexer and parser for a search DSL and React component recently:

https://github.com/williamcotton/search-input-query
Socratic questioning requires the asker to have a deeper understanding whereby they guide with their questions.

Do you think that’s what people see in yours?
> What's particularly fascinating to me, though, is how some people are so pro-cloud that they'd argue with a writeup like this with silly cloud talking points.

I’m sure I’ll be downvoted to hell for this, but I’m convinced that it’s largely their insecurities being projected.

Running your own hardware isn’t tremendously difficult, as anyone who’s done it can attest, but it does require a much deeper understanding of Linux (and of course, any services which previously would have been XaaS), and that’s a vanishing trait these days. So for someone who may well be quite skilled at K8s administration, serverless (lol) architectures, etc. it probably is seen as an affront to suggest that their skill set is lacking something fundamental.
> What do you imagine, directionally speaking, as a more elegant tool?

Joints

but seriously. We have enough to provide to all living people on earth. We do not need to work all day every day to consume. It is possible to create a society optimized for enjoyment where every living person has enough to have a fulfilling life.

We don't need to replace money, we need to make it less important. Something similar to 1 person, 1 vote that made modern democracies possible.
It wasn't the internet that was the problem exactly. 90s internet was still a haven for nerds because you had to choose to be there over somewhere else. You weren't carrying the net around.

2008ish was really probably the most massive change in this. About every cellphone turned into a web device at that point and social media started it's mega boom as a phone app.

Even when you were out in public everyone was on the net.
I am stupid, why not just return an HTML document explaining the issue, when there is such an incorrect second request in 20 minutes, then blocking that IP for 24 hours? The feed reader software author has to react, otherwise its users will complain to him, no?
New Data Reveal Climate Change-Driven Insurance Crisis Is Spreading
For centuries writing was a lonely task. Take a moment to see if publishing right away is helping or hurting your mindset and the work. Sometimes prompt feedback is great, other times not so much.

A great way to improve your writing is to write. Then let it sit for a while and re-read it. If you don't see anything to change it's either done or you've stopped improving.
I don’t think this makes sense as the reason. Surely the problem is the stylistic decision to have many one-sentence paragraphs rather than the mechanism of separating paragraphs?
> Not everyone wants their app to look and behave like a bundled Apple app.

As (now just) a user of macOS, that’s EXACTLY what I want - consistency, not the output of some branding or UX person trying to mark their territory.
From wiki it looks like David's emulator is perhaps uses interpreting as wiki says Eric's uses dynamical recompilation and Connectix' is even faster so maybe more optimization.

I tried to find the source code of any without any success.
> If its an outage at AWS its their fault.

Well, still your fault, but easy to judo the risk into clients saying supporting multi-cloud is expensive and not a priority.
My theory is people watch more video than they read prose. Then they end up "thinking in video", even as they write for readers.

So we get little textual storyboards for unproduced video content. Easy for them to write, annoying for most to read, but "good enough".
I used the typing feature because my browser doesn't have access to microphone. Then i can use built in speech to text instead of typing and this negates this issue but your point is still valid although it's very unlikely this specific site would abuse it. The again, what payment method do they use? XD
I’ve been using the same dotfiles git repo for 16 years across Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD. Config files all go in the same place on all those systems: a bunch of symlinks in ~ like ~/.ssh/config -> ~/.dotfiles/ssh/config, ~/.config -> ~/.dotfiles/config

The contents of dotfiles are all versioned controlled so “rollback” etc is all `git checkout …`.

That’s the same as home manager gives you right?

The difference between systems is how to obtain software, but it’s usually pretty similar across OSs, something like INSTALL_COMMAND[os] (PACKAGE_NAME[os][pkg] || package). Probably my setup is not as diva as yours but that difference seems quite small and easy to maintain to me in an install/$os.sh script and the problems between systems come up so infrequently for me that I’m fine not having declarative management.

The dotfiles cross-os scripts are all POSIX sh + git, both are available everywhere.

The only real annoyance I have is if macOS brew installed tmux v9001, but my OpenBSD system has only tmux v1.2, and the config is mutually incompatible. But in these cases would Nix help? The OpenBSD system would need a bunch of upgrades to install Nix, but then I can probably just install tmux 8009 or something directly.

The main advantage to “just git and posix sh” is that I can often use 80% of my dotfiles without root on arbitrary systems over ssh, since I don’t need any software to bootstrap the setup. If I used GNU stow or HomeManager I can’t easily have my setup on random EC2 jump boxes, university servers, borrowed netbooks, mobile phones, etc. I’m not using default configs but ideally I don’t need root to live a happy life.
In the public sector, cloud solves the procurement problem. You just need to go through the yearlong process once to use a cloud service, instead of for each purchase > 1000€.