skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your last paragraph identifies the reason that running their own hardware makes sense for Fastmail. The demand for email is pretty constant. Everyone does roughly the same amount of emailing every day. Daily load is predictable, and growth is predictable.

If your load is very spiky, it might make more sense to use cloud. You pay more for the baseline, but if your spikes are big enough it can still be cheaper than provisioning your own hardware to handle the highest loads.

Of course there's also possibly a hybrid approach, you run your own hardware for base load and augment with cloud for spikes. But that's more complicated.
Doing It Wrong Since the Gilded Age: Why Universities Have Failed Us
I've lived places where the cops make $100k+. It all depends on location.
I know the feeling. I like to picture it as a kitchen, and those “bat-whatever” gadgets are like those silly infomercial cooking tools that are only good for one specific thing. Meanwhile the good abstractions are like a nice knife, that can be used in so many different contexts.
> I doubt it was idiotic but simple corruption.

Why not both?

Certainly Schröder, or Gazprom-Gerd as I call him, got his.

For the Greens it's more idiotic ideology.
Why Products Built by Large Teams Fail So Often (2017)
I'm seeing some address ranges in the US clearly serving what must be VPN traffic from Asia, and I'm also seeing an uptick in TOR traffic looking for feeds as well as WP infra.
You haven't actually explained why it's bad, only slapped an evil sounding label on it. What's "exploitative" in this case and why is it morally wrong?

>they're imprisoned within borders

What's the implication of this then? That we remove all migration controls?
> 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?

Nothing is real. Not for me or for you. That is my greatest insight of my illness.

You all have very narrow band schizophrenia, mine is just more, uhm, loose.

So if I feel like some shadow agency is tracking me I just say; "So what.", If I think what I picked up from the supermarket I just say; "So what if I die." I really had to stop caring about dying or suffering.

The only time I know when I am alone in my perceptions is when I ask someone. For example, I was sitting in a restaurant and I these four Mexican workers were turned around staring at me. I asked my friend if they were and she said no. Now I do not know if I am able to pick up on something, maybe I could somehow tell they were talking about me adn my brain made me aware by making it look like they were looking at me. But again, so what is my answer.

The day before that I felt my dead great uncle was telling me to go to Dillon, MT to make amends for him getting arrested there in 1954. So it was a tough week for me.
> Guinness is an indifferent to bland stout and the Sam Smith's Oatmeal Stout is a vastly better example of the style.

For what it's worth I agree with you but this is a non-starter for most people even in the US. I briefly tended bar someplace that specialized in higher-end, small-batch products; we didn't stock any of the usual suspects and if somebody asked for a Guinness we'd have them try the craft stout that we had on tap. The majority of the time people wouldn't be into it because "it's not Guinness"... not because "[they] don't like it", but because it isn't the exact thing that they have been drinking for the past 30 years of their life.

Grey Goose and Crown Royal drinkers were the worst offenders in this regard. Triple-filtered Polish potato vodka at 1/3 the price? No way - too cheap. Organic single-grain wheat whiskey? Not today - it's a Crown and Diet, not a whatever-the-heck-this-is and Diet! Also can they have the purple velvet bag since the bottle is already open?

All of these exchanges went towards my realization that for this crowd of people it's more about the ritual than the taste. If something is decent and consistent enough to provide familiar respite in a chaotic world then it serves a noble purpose. Just because I'm a hipster doesn't mean everybody else has to be too.
I didn’t see a pricing page on the homepage, what’s your pricing model?
Personally I prefer Migadu and tend to recommend them to tech savvy people. Their admin panel is excellent and straightforward to use, prices are based on usage limits (amount of emails sent/received) instead of number of mailboxes.

Migadu is just all around good, only downsides I can find are subjective. The fact that they're based in Switzerland and unless you're "good with computers" something like Fastmail will probably be better.
Which means: do not place extra mechanisms in the RSS when you can do the same with HTTP.

But then there is the problem of RSS clients that may not work properly (may not use that trick), without the user knowing it, and that of RSS servers that do not work correctly with "If-Modified-Since" (as noted in a nearby post).

Edit: but if the burden were placed on RSS instead, we could have had the trick of "I already have ...#10050, #10051 and #10052: just send me from #10053 on" - the feeds XML that is updated recently will contain more items than just the new ones. Similarly for the gaps: "the XML would contain from #10050 on, but there had been a surge of publications and now I am missing #10045 to #10049..."
>we got rid of our old database greybeards and replaced them with "DevOps" people that knew nothing about performance etc

Seems a lot of those DevOps people just see Azures recommendations for adding indexes and either just allow auto applying them or just adding them without actually reviewing it understanding what use loads require them and why. This also lands a bit on developers/product that don't critically think about and communicate what queries are common and should have some forethought on what indexes should be beneficial and created. (Yes followup monitoring of actual index usage and possible missing indexes is still needed.) Too many times I've seen dozens of indexes on tables in the cloud where one could cover all of them. Yes, there still might be worthwhile reasons to keep some narrower/smaller indexes but again DBA and critical query analysis seems to be a forgotten and neglected skill. No one owns monitoring and analysing db queries and it only comes up after a fire has already broken out.
But if you can manually identify an invariant inside an abstraction it can greatly improve performance for callers/users, additionally, tools like Kani use comprehensible macros to facilitate automatically proving safety of `unsafe` code. Not to mention built in linting, package management, docs, and FP that rust/std provides. Lots has been said about unsafe rust, but the most basic libc tools require the whole cascade of upstream callers to check safety, it's basically backwards from the ground up from a resources and an outcomes perspective.
OTOH, when your company's web site is down you can do something about it.
When the CEO asks about it, you can explain why its offline and more importantly what is being done to bring it back.

The equivalent situation for those who took a cloud based approach is often... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Why the Rarest Blue Took 10 Years to Recreate [video]
>the enclosure of the commons and that all land and productive equipment on Earth is private or state property and that it's virtually impossible to just go farm or hunt for yourself without being fucked with anymore, let alone do anything more advanced without being shut down violently.

How would land allocation work without "enclosure of the commons"? Does it just become a free-for-all? What happens if you want to use the land for grazing but someone else wants it for growing crops? "enclosure of the commons" conveniently solves all these issues by giving exclusive control to one person.
How about just an updated gpt 4o with all newer data? It would go a long way. Currently it doesn't know anything since Oct 2023 (without having to do a web search).
How about the other other S4 https://adv-r.hadley.nz/s4.html
Yes, that is it. But sometimes I can get clues to differentiate. Another example. The water coming out of my bathtub looked really really blue. So blue that I called the water company. The woman came out and had that look on her face and just said, your water looks fine. I have learned that the look is a clue for me to not trust myself and let go and trust other people. It is sort of like being blind having to trust people to tell you the right way to go.
And to get a simple https request you end up with about 200 crates in your tree
96 was still a few years before all the printers natively supported postscript - HPs had their own vector graphics library for example.

Many printers in common use were still “one font wonders” and that resulted in lots of fun.
They take a 20% cut. It really can't get any more ridiculous than this.
> If you made boxing judged by AI, the rules would quickly be gamed.

I though boxers were already gaming rules and this is effectively what gave rise to stuff like MMA.

Fans got tired of seeing a victor based upon technicality and skill and rules. Fans wanted a victor based upon being beaten down.

It's kind of interesting in that I'm not that interested in this for boxing but would rather see these kinds of systems in stuff like gymnastics or ice skating. Gymnastics and ice skating get absolutely skewered for the fact that you have to be "politically connected" in order to score well over time. I suspect that having an AI scoring system that winds up scoring performances correctly regardless of political connection would be godsend to those kinds of sports.
Vertical Farming (Wikipedia)
Kotlin 2.1 has added "Guard conditions in when with a subject" as an opt-in feature https://kotlinlang.org/docs/whatsnew21.html#guard-conditions...
My reason for smacking stuff down is that I don't want to see it in my logs. That simple.
The unity of consciousness and the split-brain syndrome (2008) [pdf]
SSD's are also a bit of an achilles heel for AWS -- they have their own Nitro firmware for wear levelling and key rotations, due to the hazards of multitenant. It's possible for one EC2 tenant to use up all the write cycles and then pass it to another, and encryption with key rotation is required to keep data from leaking across tenant changes. It's also slower.

We had one outage where key rotation had been enabled on reboot, so data partitions were lost after what should have been a routine crash. Overall, for data warehousing, our failure rate on on-prem (DC-hosted) hardware was lower IME.
Here's a case when a $660k tunnel didn't work out because it spooked the animals, then the Marines blocked it: https://jesseshunting.com/threads/660-000-wildlife-tunnel-un...
See eg, David Ball - Theater Tips and Strategies for Jury Trials

Theme and narrative are at the core of trying a case. HOWEVER, having tried jury trials, my experience is that jurors focus on the star witness for Plaintiff, the star witness for Defendant, and then decide which one they believe. Narrative definitely helps shape the approach, but all the psychodrama in the world won’t make an unbelievable witness believable.
Book Clubs, Book Bars, and BookTok
That's always a possibility, but let's say you're running a cluster of 100+ machines. One dies and it'll be 24 hours to get a replacement. That's not such a big deal - your capacity is only down 1% and you aren't running stuff at 95%+ utilization.

If you're running 1 box, you might have a point. If you have 100 boxes, you could pay for a couple spare boxes and still save a ton of money. If you're paying $700/mo/server for AWS and bare metal would cost you $100/mo/server, you could have a few spare metal servers and still pay a ton less. 100 servers * $700/mo = $70,000. 103 servers * $100/mo = $10,300 - the "extra" $300 is kind of a rounding error.

Even if you're running 5 servers, $700 * 5 servers = $3,500; $100 * 10 servers = $1,000. You literally have a spare server for every box in your cluster. Heck, even if you're running 1 server, $700 * 1 server = $700; $100 * 3 servers = $300. You have double the number of backup servers already online for less than half the price. Instead of running PostgreSQL, having a server go down, and then restoring from a backup to a brand new cloud box, you could literally have 2 hot standby servers and still save money.

Yes, bare metal isn't instant like the cloud - but if they're charging you 7x more than bare metal, you could literally have 2 backup servers for every 1 server and still save a ton of money. You're not paying an extra 10% or 20% for the cloud's flexibility or ease of replacement. You're many several times more for every server - to the point where you could just purchase 3x or 5x with bare metal and just have some of it laying around idle.
Parameterized tests in Junit are basically the same as decorators:

@ParameterizedTest
@ValueSource(strings = {"first", "second"})
void fooGoesBar(String param) {
...
}

Also, once you get used to assertj, you'll never want single-assert again. It's fantastically useful to know (for example) not just that two lists aren't equal, but specifically what elements differ.
> If you are an rss-reader dev then you can set up a caching layer of your own.

But are RSS reader devs willing to jump through such hoops?

I would claim that writing a (simple) RSS reader (using a programming language that provides suitable libraries) is something that would be rather easy for me, but setting up a caching layer would (because I have less knowledge about the latter topic) take a lot more research from my side concerning how to do it.
NetVentory – Modern single binary console NMAP replacement with GUI
Tell me you don't understand science without saying you don't understand science
This should be seen as destruction of evidence, a felony under German law.
By a factor of 10,000,000,000? (that's the ten orders of magnitude needed, since the physical side is out). Algorithmic improvements will make this 10 billion times cheaper?
I could see rust catching on as a shell scripting language too, honestly. Well documented, typed abstractions over shell utilities is really quite nice.
The audio on this is about the worst I’ve ever heard on YouTube. I fast forwarded and at least he stops playing that loud music over his quiet voice, but damn.

He gets off topic a lot (bullies, amphetamine salts??) and spends the entire time talking to the commenters not the video recording.

Surely, there’s a better video out there than this.
> you never hear about security probems (incidents or exposure) in the platforms

Except that one time...

https://www.seattlemet.com/news-and-city-life/2023/04/how-a-...
And if anyone is curious, I actually live on their https://betaapp.fastmail.com release and find it just as stable as the "mainline" one but with the advantage of getting to play with all the cool toys earlier. Bonus points (for me) in that they will periodically conduct surveys to see how you like things
Any place to see a complete collection of Computer Language magazine? I have most of them but are missing the first few, and I can't find an online collection beyond the 10 issues they have here.
The fact that you don't seem to realize how this is even worse is scary.
My brother, an Eastern-European part-time farmer and full-time lorry driver, just texted me a couple of hours ago (I had told him I would call him in the next hour) that he might be with his hands full of meat by that time as “we’ve just butchered our pig Ghitza” (those sausages and piftii aren’t going to get made by themselves).

Now, ask a laptop worker to butcher an animal whom used to have a name and to literally turn its meat into sausages and see what said worker’s reaction would be.
Mac OS X Server (Rhapsody) was using the classic Mac OS look over a NextStep base. You can find x86 versions online which work in VM, for nostalgia and research.
> Do people who enjoy fine cuisine

IMHO that would be the analogy for 'great sex' rather than for 'sex'; that is, it would be for people who are motivated to have especially 'good' sexual experiences.

I think the analogy for sex generally is basic hunger - food rather than starvation. Our sex drive, generally speaking, is that fundamental.
I find these retro blog posts from people building LLM solutions super useful for helping me try out new prompting, eval, etc. techniques. Which blog posts have you all found most useful? Would love a link.
The article might have been updated since you read it, but this is in there:

> We try to vectorize the following C++ procedure. The procedure cannot assume anything about dividends, especially if they are all equal. Thus, it is not possible to employ division by a constant.
The defense version ships with a canon mounted on the back and sides and it can separate and be recombined with a another functional half in the field if it takes damage.
My take on this whole cloud fatigue is that system maintenance got overly complex over the last couple years/decades. So much that management people now think that it's too expensive in terms of hiring people that can do it compared to the higher managed hosting costs.

DevOps and kubernetes come to mind. A lot of people using kubernetes don't know what they're getting into, and k0s or another single machine solution would have been enough for 99% of SMEs.

In terms of cyber security (my field) everything got so ridiculously complex that even the folks that use 3 different dashboards in parallel will guess the answers as to whether or not they're affected by a bug/RCE/security flaw/weakness because all of the data sources (even the expensively paid for ones) are human-edited text databases. They're so buggy that they even have Chinese idiom symbols instead of a dot character in the version fields without anyone ever fixing it upstream in the NVD/CVE process.

I started to build my EDR agent for POSIX systems specifically, because I hope that at some point this can help companies to ditch the cloud and allows them to selfhost again - which in return would indirectly prevent 13 year old kids like from LAPSUS to pwn major infrastructure via simple tech support hotline calls.

When I think of it in terms of hosting, the vertical scalability of EPYC machines is so high that most of the time when you need its resources you are either doing something completely wrong and you should refactor your code or you are a video streaming service.
> so it is credible as an explanation of much of ancient Jewish law that seems strange to us now (e.g. what to eat, not plucking fruit from young trees etc) that often seems off from a modern perspective.

One example theory I remember reading at some point was the prohibition against eating shellfish: In the area the religion arose, it would have most likely gone bad by the time it was brought that far inland.
Sorry - I'm specifically referring to EMTs and Paramedics, who usually make somewhere in the realm of $18-25 an hour.
Ask HN: Best job boards, particularly for remote?
I’m in the job market again and most of my bookmarks for remote job boards are 404. The quality of boards that appear on Google’s top results are also not great. What are you using to look for jobs? Ideally remote
Split brain: divided perception but undivided consciousness (2017)
You'd think so, but no. With a patch to remove the runtime check, Rosetta works on Asahi Linux, with no macOS kernel present at all.
Lombok supports `@With` on records, which adds wither methods. And there are ongoing JEP discussions on how to support this natively in Java.

Lombok is so ubiquitous today that I effectively consider it part of the language. And even with Lombok, the Java toolchain is so much faster, easier to use, and more stable than Kotlin.

Kotlin is a great language, marginally better than Java, but I'm not sure it's worth enduring the toolchain. And Java keeps improving.
The deficiencies I'd like to address are:

1. Money will communicate demand to continue, but not demand to stop. Until a profitable but harmful behavior is made illegal there's aren't many ways to stop it even if there's widespread consensus that it should be stopped.

2. It carries no metadata about its history. This means that when I accept a dollar from my employer I don't know what kind of behavior I'm acting in support of. If it's benign, the scarcity dynamics work ok and I should just take it because now I have a scarce thing to trade. But if it was issued to a mining company as part of a loan in support of some operation that's poisoning my drinking water, I'm better off refusing it and telling my employer to find me some cleaner money, otherwise I'm participating in my own demise.

Or maybe that's the same deficiency stated twice, I'm not sure.

I don't think blockchains are the right data structure so there's not much prior art to build on--but yes I do think money's successor will be modulated by software in some way--money being an information technology in the first place.

Lately when I take a crack at it it looks like a CRDT that stores debts and helps people find loops such that those debts can be nullified. If Alice owes Bob one and Bob owes Charlie one and Charlie owes Alice one, then the records of these debts can be purged without needing to settle in some far off clearing house or blockchain (supposing Alice, Bob, and Charlie are all on the same network partition). This buys you partition tolerance, which I think lends itself to something a little more difficult to use for exploiting people who don't know you.

There would be this lattice of trust relationships so you couldn't just waltz in to a poor village where nobody trusted you and expect to wield your foreign wallet to make the locals treat you like a god. If want something to "spend" with a remote population it would be based on some kind of proof you've done something that benefits them.

Mostly I'm just working on the software primitives you'd need, I'm not especially good at the degree of community-mindedness you'd need to do a good job with such a design. But when the time comes I hope to have helped provide the right person with the tools they need.

The only point I wish to make here is that for millennia we had to deal with whatever system the laws of physics handed us (the scarcity of gold and other substances was sufficient to build an economy around) but now we can write our own rules. Maybe it'll take us a few decades or centuries to kick the habit of thinking in the old way, but now that we have options... Well it seems unlikely to me that we wouldn't explore them, instead favoring Caesar's original design.
what is a bot motel and how do you run one?
Yeah, that's insane. Pretty much telling me not to subscribe to your blog at that point. Like sites that have an rss feed yet put Cloudflare protection in front of it...

The correct thing to do here is put a caching layer in front so that every feed reader isn't simultaneously hitting the origin for the same content. IP banning is the wrong approach. (Even if it's only a temporary block, that's going to cause my reader to show an error and is entirely unnecessary.)
> The whole push to the cloud has always fascinated me. I get it - most people aren't interested in babysitting their own hardware.

For businesses, it's a very typical lease-or-own decision. There's really nothing too special about cloud.

> On the other hand, a business of just about any size that has any reasonable amount of hosting is better off with their own systems when it comes purely to cost.

Nope. Not if you factor-in 24/7 support, geographic redundancy, and uptime guarantees. With EC2 you can break even at about $2-5m a year of cloud spending if you want your own hardware.
4. we keep hitting hypervisor bugs and having to work around the fact that your software coexists on the same machine with 3rdparty untrusted software who might in fact be actively trying to attack you. All this silliness with encrypted memory buses and the various debilitating workarounds for silicon bugs.

So yes, the cloud is very secure, except for the very thing that makes it the cloud that is not secure at all and has just been papered over because questioning it means the business model is bust.