skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The original answer to "why does FastMail use their own hardware" is that when I started the company in 1999 there weren't many options. I actually originally used a single bare metal server at Rackspace, which at that time was a small scrappy startup. IIRC it cost $70/month. There weren't really practical VPS or SaaS alternatives back then for what I needed.

Rob (the author of the linked article) joined a few months later, and when we got too big for our Rackspace server, we looked at the cost of buying something and doing colo instead. The biggest challenge was trying to convince a vendor to let me use my Australian credit card but ship the server to a US address (we decided to use NYI for colo, based in NY). It turned out that IBM were able to do that, so they got our business. Both IBM and NYI were great for handling remote hands and hardware issues, which obviously we couldn't do from Australia.

A little bit later Bron joined us, and he automated absolutely everything, so that we were able to just have NYI plug in a new machine and it would set itself up from scratch. This all just used regular Linux capabilities and simple open source tools, plus of course a whole lot of Perl.

As the fortunes of AWS et al rose and rose and rose, I kept looking at their pricing at features and kept wondering what I was missing. They seemed orders of magnitude more expensive for something that was more complex to manage and would have locked us into a specific vendor's tooling. But everyone seemed to be flocking to them.

To this day I still use bare metal servers for pretty much everything, and still love having the ability to use simple universally-applicable tools like plain Linux, Bash, Perl, Python, and SSH, to handle everything cheaply and reliably.

I've been doing some planning over the last couple of years on teaching a course on how to do all this, although I was worried that folks are too locked in to SaaS stuff -- but perhaps things are changing and there might be interest in that after all?...
may be for some sub-domains like math and code it can do that since the verification process can be done / relatively tractable
Sorry, I don't see the irony. Anyway, having ''The'' as an honourific for band names was commonplace in the UK prior to the '70s, even if the band's name had not been stylized with "The".
The article seems quite level-headed and thoughtful.

That said, this jumps the gun:

> The idea that trauma is passed down epigenetically is not only unscientific, it’s also un-agentic; if you believe your trauma is hardwired into your DNA, you’re prone to passively accept it rather than actively trying to overcome it.

Recent research is pretty convincing that the "folk wisdom" of trauma being passed down to later generations is a real thing.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fearful-memories-...

https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.3594

Edit: and I'll add that the mice were able to overcome the inherited trauma, too, so you could argue that it's actually an empowering concept. Even though we can't control what we inherit, this shows you can overcome it.
Feeling exactly the same way. And TBH this comes from a feeling that we never respected our profession and our fellow engineers. I mean I know no other engineering discipline where best practices and tools were changing every 3 years. I also know no other engineering discipline where getting older is anathema instead of a badge of expertise. We behave like we were in fashion business rather than engineering.

So. Yes. On one hand I'm shiting my pants because that's the only way I know of making some money. On the other hand I'm saying to myself, to hell with it all.

PS: There should be a sister thread to this with alternative careers for former SW engs.
You keep using this term "science". I don't think it means what you think it means.

If you think the DSM is science the way Physics and Chemistry are sciences, I have a bridge to sell you...

Perhaps in the 50s you'd be onboard with lobotomy too, because 'yay, science' (and after all "they corrected it, didn't they?").
Alternate perspective:

https://reason.com/video/2024/12/19/no-californias-20-minimu...

Is this an opinion piece or news? It's categorized as "ideas" at the top of the page. I do not know what that means. But the advocacy at the end makes it seem not like straight news.
This doesn't even talk about the West Bank or the mass killing in Lebanon. While it was definitely not the most horrific event of the past year, the pager incident and how Zionists reacted to it (pride) vs. the rest of the world (horror) was really eye opening for me. I feel I've lost some of my own humanity seeing so many dead children. I had seen zero before Israel started producing them daily.
> scope remains for negotiation and compromise and peaceful resolution

I feel like the murderer wouldn't be so widely commended if that were true. Justice is what is supposed to prevent vigilantism, and apparently lots of people here felt that the murder was just.
No paywall: https://archive.is/gmKgP
> If tomorrow, they say "growth mindset" is also a non-replicable phenomenon, will HN be full of smug people saying "I knew it all along, lol!"

I will be one of them! Many people I've met in the industry—disturbingly, especially among founders and VCs—are extremely susceptible to reductive theories about the human experience that have little relation to reality. Just in the last year we went through "founder mode" hell even though any person that this "founder mode" describes should probably be in prison for wildly abusive behavior.

Of course the flip-side of this is that there are concepts that are situationally useful even if they aren't broadly applicable. Both "stereotype threat" and "founder mode" may fall into this category. (I've never heard of "growth mindset" before and looking it up I'm not sure what the point of it is—I guess to contradict the idea that people and personalities are static?)
Indian Boarding Schools Data
I'm curious, what do you see as "gatekeeping layers" in math? Books? Material? Pedagogy? Nomenclature? Something else?
Before others ask you why they should use your project and not X or Y, I wanted to say that it looks pretty good!

One potentially useful feature would be to allow users to add their own system prompts via the UI (and not prompts.js).

Thanks for sharing!
I have the same issue. When I turn music on, I can't stop focusing on it and losing track of whatever intellectual task I'm on. The only thing I can listen to while writing/reading is white noise or nature sounds type of thing.

Also, having a show play in the background while I do something else like many people love to do? I can't do it.
Btw, followup question, and don't take this the wrong way at all, but what is impressive is someone with a mathematical background worked on something that seems to be one of the pinnacles of software engineering: a translator working at the binary level that creates executables interacting directly with the OS. Did you also double in CS back in school? Or did you pick up the knowledge afterwards? Yeah, it seems like a long list: operating systems, compilers, computer architecture, UNIX/MacOS systems-calls and internals...

... not to mention all the performance considerations and optimizations, also requiring a strong sense of algorithms and computational complexity. Wow!

Yeah, seems like most mathematicians (and physicists) I know who go into tech don't get past learning a couple of programming languages and don't have an interest in learning the depths of a how a computer works. Very impressive!
I'm surprised this isn't flagged: normally, anything by zhengiszen is aggressively targeted and I've seen a Tel Aviv resident on here call him an antisemite for highlighting Israel's actions in Palestine.

Edit: flagged and unflagged within the past 5 minutes.
Thanks for posting this. I was also trying to find some more recent articles that also contrasted the Atlantic author’s cherry-picked points, and who also appears to lean a bit to the left.
> The idea that humans are natural-born predators was not just a scientific claim; it also found expression in the broader culture. In the 1954 novel “Lord of the Flies,” a group of school-age boys stranded on an island descend into savage violence, revealing their true nature. The 1968 movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” begins with a tribe of prehistoric apes — our ancestors — discovering how to use a leg bone as a weapon to assault one another. Today, self-help gurus argue that we should reconnect with our “ancestral lifestyle” of eating raw meat and organs.

However, more cognitively advanced organisms, like primates and others mammals, exhibit pro-social behaviors. It doesn’t make sense for humans to indulge primal behaviors given a human’s relatively advanced cognition.
Once It Has Been Trained, Who Will Own My Digital Twin?
The more relevant question is whether my efforts to do something lead to a better and faster result than my cloud providers efforts to do something. I get it - it feels powerless to do nothing, but for a lot of organizations I’ve seen the average downtime would still be higher.
I suppose 20x a low number is still pretty low, especially given that number includes the squid factor.
I don't understand why the effects would look worse at higher resolution, or why how they add contrast. The tacky part I do understand, as well as the point about screen fonts like Verdana.

To choose a relevant counter example: the Macintosh System Software prior to version 7 was also very flat. System 7 to 7.5.5 introduced depth in a subtle way and a limited manner. It was only around System 7.6 when they started being heavy handed, something that I always attributed to following the trends in other operating systems.
I’m still advocating for peace, but over time the argument isn’t getting any fucking easier to make, that’s for fucking sure.

The Kleptocracy has a year, two at the outside to make some concessions near as I can tell, before they can’t walk the streets of NYC safely full stop. Or Chicago, or …
I get the feeling that the years I spent in Boston with a car including during the winter and driving to Ithaca somehow aren't enough, but whether or not I have is irrelevant. Still, I'll repeat the advice I was given before you have to drive in snow, go practice driving in the snow (in eg a parking lot) before needing to do so, esp during a storm. Waymo's been spotted driving in Buffalo doing testing, so it seems someone gave them similar advice. https://www.wgrz.com/article/tech/waymo-self-driving-car-pro...

There's always an inherent risk to driving, even in sunny Phoenix, Az. Winter dangers like black ice further multiply that risk but humans still manage to drive in winter. Taking a picture/video of a snowed over road and judging the width and inventing lanes based on the width taking into account snowbanks doesn't take an ML algorithm. Lidar can see black ice while human eyes can not, giving cars equipped with lidar (wether driven by a human or a computer) an advantage over those without it, and Waymo cars currently have lidar.

I'm sure there are new challenges for Waymo to solve before deploying the service in Buffalo, but it's not this unforeseen gotcha parent comment implies.

As far as the possible PR nightmare, you'd never do self driving cars in the first place if you let that fear control you because, you you pointed out, driving on the roads is inherently dangerous with too many unforeseen complications.
PayPal has deep pockets, making it an ideal civil suit target. There are also 50 state AGs who might be interested in pursuing due to this potentially fraudulent activity.
> We have shipped hyper support in curl labeled EXPERIMENTAL for several years by now, hoping to attract attention and trigger the experimental spirit in users out there. Seeing so many people seem to want more memory-safety, surely the users would come?

This analysis seems off. Memory safety isn't a feature users will explicitly ask for or opt-in to. What users want is software that isn't buggy, and they just sort of ambiently expect it. A "Rust backend" is pretty meaningless to users, a bit like expecting users to pass a --dont-be-buggy flag to every invocation of the CLI tool.

As a user, I'd have questions like: if this backend is better then why isn't it the default? Why do I have to make a decision at all? I just want an HTTP library/tool that doesn't let me get hacked, how it achieves that is none of my concern really. Whether that's done using Rust or not isn't something that should appear in the user interface.
Many (all?) Japanese schools don't have janitors. Instead students clean on rotation. Never been much into Japanese stuff but I absolutely admire this about their culture, and imagine it's part of the reason that Japan is such a clean and at least superficially respectful society.

Living in other Asian nations where there are often defacto invisible caste systems can be nauseating at times - you have parents that won't allow their children to participate in clean up efforts because their child is 'above handling trash.' That's gonna be one well adjusted adult...
Trademark law encourages companies to defend their marks. If they don’t, they may lose the trademark. So Amazon has to write these guys a letter if it wants to defend the s3 trademark.
So this guy had a few twitter exchanges with Luigi and he thinks the US healthcare system isn't that bad? Doesn't really seem like an article for HN. But as long as we're here I think, sort of like Luigi, I'll let other people argue about whether the US healthcare system functions well or efficiently. But as for this:

>While it’s true that UnitedHealthcare has the highest denial rate for medical claims, the CEO doesn’t set the approval rate of a health insurance company’s payouts — that’s done by the actuaries, who themselves are constrained by various considerations, such as the need to keep costs low, including for policyholders.

By this logic, what can Brian Thompson be said to be responsible for? It's very strange to me to assign more responsibility for a companies denial rates to its actuaries than the actuaries' bosses bosses boss. So why exactly does UHC have higher denial rates than other companies? It just happens to be that it's actuaries are more frugal? This explanation doesn't hold water and I think it's a strange response to the shooting of a CEO to say, well actually CEOs aren't responsible for the things their corporations do. Of course they are, now they aren't solely responsible, but they probably have more responsibility than any other single individual. It can be completely true that killing Brian Thompson was wrong AND that he was no saint, being responsible for (and getting rich off of) large amounts of human misery inflicted on UHC policy holders by the organization he headed.
Alternatively, treating the “random telephone operator” as a prop and forcing them to be part of your project without consent is troubling.
> when I asked him if he was voting in the presidential election, he scrunched his nose and said he wasn’t crazy about Trump or Biden, but liked some of the things RFK Jr. was saying. I regard RFK Jr. as a crank who regularly pushes harmful pseudoscience, but I didn’t mention it so as not to derail the conversation.

Interesting! I agrees he's a crank, but RFK jr seems to appeal to a specific personality type that's common among high-powered individuals. People that like to appear scientific, but hate going along with certain things despite a strong scientific consensus. I recently had a very surprising conversation with a company director where they sang RFK's praises, and came down firmly in the alt-right camp's position on classic trigger topics like Ivermectin, fluoride and COVID. This is someone who outwardly advocates being data-driven and loves phrases like "data doesn't care about your beliefs". And yet their entire view on these topics coincides with the cherry-picked data and misleading interpretations in RFK's book.
It takes exactly the same amount of time to say as “Pink”
Serving humanity is compatible wealth redistribution isnt.thats the great thing about free markets, build a better mousetrap and the world bets a path to your door. Do that a few times and you are a billionaire and the world is far better off.
I know what you mean. I recently did the same thing for the little bit from Gunsmoke at the beginning of “Is There Anybody Out There?”, e.g. “Is it unsafe to travel at night?” - incidentally spoken by actress Diana Muldaur, who later played Dr. Pulaski in Star Trek TNG.
Text layout doesn't need to be done when the source is a PDF. Make printers do the PDF and let Adobe control trademark access via conformity tests and life is good.
Fast? Not at all I'm afraid. Frequently, I can barely talk. I gave up on talking to people except as necessary over 70 years ago. I much prefer email.

Writing well is a slow process for everyone. It's a process of seeking out exactly what it is that I want to communicate (that is often not obvious) and refining my own understanding (which is often insufficient). It is a learning process as much as a communication one. It's worth the time.

Good luck!
An attacker gaining temporary capability to encrypt/decrypt data through a compromised instance is painful. An attacker gaining a copy of a private key is still an entirely different world of pain.
You can improve your writing by respecting your readers time. Wasting your readers time by showing them a picture of a cat isn't respecting their time.

Be concise, be upfront about what you want to say, don't make your readers work hard to understand what you're trying to say.

Your readers will also tell you about your content's quality and relevance through their visits. Check your site visits, understand if they're one time visitors or returning and figure out why that's happening.

You might also want to get a domain for your blog, it projects more of a commitment than a subdomain.
This is correct, my friends from Scraping Fish are hosting https://compareproxy.com to help people find proxy for web scraping. I'm happy to "push" for Scraping Fish as I'm also a satisfied user who received a lot of help from the founders for my web scraping projects.
There shouldn't be a kleptocracy.
Yeah, it really is getting ridiculous now. The pendulum has swung too far towards the elites, and we know what happens then...
The US political system is at all time low of responsiveness to the needs of its citizens. Congress has been dysfunctional longer than Mangione has been alive.

It makes sense that a young man would lash out this way. Violence should indeed be the last resort, and for many folks the alternatives are dwindling.
Hey HN!

With the release of OpenAI o1, I am back with a fully working and interactive update to my AI Software Engineer app i've been working on most of this year.

My long term goal of allowing users to manage multiple projects, deployed autonomously, both from scratch and by making continual updates all prompted with natural language has been reached!

The cost of each project is now $20/mo per project to make unlimited changes and live deployments with a URL you can share anywhere on the web. Infrastructure is managed completely by the platform so you can focus on the product.

Subscriptions settings are built in and use Stripe Connect to manage payouts.

I'd love to get some feedback on the new version and am excited to see if people enjoy creating apps this way!
Fwiw I don't think he's talking to you. My feed is filled with ai influencers getting all kinds of likes and comments, ready to declare AGI is here!
You seem to be working from some kind of principles like justice? Or fairness? We do not live in that world. I was just reading today another story in the Washington Post about how the US stole Native American children and many died.

The US isn’t a society governed by justice, fairness, or even the truth. The rich should be scared because so many support this “execution”.

Of course, they are way ahead, and Robin Hood’s merry supporters will find out that prince john has an army of mercenaries happy to take his coin.
I sound like a maniac whenever I express my desire for Autolayout over HTML/CSS.

I will in no way deny the sheer power the latter/reach/etc has and I can see why people like it. Autolayout, while tricky to get at first, pretty much "just works" when I write it nowadays... and the older I get, the more annoying I find the cascade in CSS.
Unfortunate choice of name. If you search for you'll get a crap ton of Myers-Briggs pseudoscience (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indi...).
Let’s try everything we can before resorting to violence?

Once that starts, that’s a forest fire that burns in ways no one can control.
MongoDB Stock History
Physical access is pretty relevant if you could bribe an engineer to locate some valuable data's physical location, then go service the particular machine, copy the disk (during servicing "degraded hardware"), and thus exflitrate the data without any traces of a breach.
Agreed, indeed: when the people feel that justice fails them, vigantilism takes its place.

We'd all do well to, in our rush to decry the murder itself, be mindful of the mistake of losing sight of the reason behind the massive support for Mangione's actions.
Google reveals the CEO who died and other United Healthcare executive's are being investigated for insider trading, enriching themselves by many millions. (And conversely, others must have lost millions. ) Also being investigated for fraud.( I thought this may be possible cause for murder, but it appears not. )
Bogotá is generally a fairly dismal city, but taking the card off some streets turns into a joyful festival...
Why I'm Bearish on MongoDB After Its CFO's Departure
I would say attempts to make the web an "app platform" have been around a really long time. IE used to have VBScript as a coding option: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VBScript
Wouldn't a WoW/Blizzard-programming-specific forum be a more relevant community to get help?

Looking at the docs for the MPQ file format, it looks like recreating exact copies of every MPQ file may be more work than its worth - space-savings-wise.

As you suggest, carving out the game-specific art assets (probably the cut-scene/cinematics take up much of the space), replace with zeros or some other easily compressible data, and compressing the remaining MPQ husk for archiving will save you much with relatively little work/time.

Uncompress the archived MPQ husk and fill in with the assets to get back to square one.

Then you'd just dedupe the art assets.

So, some tool/script which can tell you the byte range within the MPQ file for each of those assets will get you much of the way.
The Speculative Bitcoin Frenzy
Telomeres are anti-cancer. Cells can only divide a limited number of times before the telomeres run out. The cost is a loss of vitality (senescence) as the individual cells end up being older since they aren't able to divide and renew.
Stock prices dont go up in a vaccuum. Most first gen billionaires got there by owning founders shares that were worth near nothing when they got them and billions eventually as their business made more revenue as a result of their stewardship. Said company iant drawing from every(ne in a vaccuum either. Thry make the money as the best option in a sea of options usually. There are market power issues in some instances but tjat isnt solved by rediatribution, its solved by breaking up the market power holders like weused to pre rhenquist supreme court
Are you surprised that programs can live for 10 or 20 years?

Most people who want to rewrite things in a language that's more fashionable don't have the experience maintaining working systems over 20+ years, like Debian does
Let’s also remember that outright war is a bridge that can be crossed by not uncrossed.

Measure twice and cut once on such things.
It's remarkable we even need to say it out loud: increasing the price of labor reduces the quantity demanded of labor. Believing otherwise requires magical thinking.