Hacker News Reader

dataloperson How web platforms collapse: The Facebook case study

Meta’s userbase is growing in regions which do not currently monetize well. Notably Asia-Pacific and “Rest of World” which monetize at 1/12th to 1/16th of a US/CA user.

The growth rate in US/CA is basically flat while those regions are 3-5% YoY.

dataloperson Man Stranded in Alaska Rescued After Using iPhone Emergency SOS Satelite Feature

Noorvik gets 2-3 hrs of sunlight a day. The “middle of the night” argument doesn’t really hold for the arctic this time of the year. It’s basically always dark.

dataloperson Stack Overflow questions are being flooded with answers from ChatGPT

The feedback loop begins

dataloperson The War on General Purpose Computing (2015) [video]

Where’s the AI model to watch and summarize this talk into a couple of pages of written content?

dataloperson Show HN: Chrome extension to display ChatGPT response besides Google Search

Google doesn’t do anything to validate the search results lead to accurate information

dataloperson Amazon layoffs now expected to mount to 20k, including top managers

Bezos saw ChatGPT and called up Jassy: “Fire all the middle managers, we’ve got a bonafide replacement!”

dataloperson Spotify CEO renews attack on Apple after Musk's salvo

Don’t buy Apple products. You can safely self-curate on Android.

dataloperson Ask HN: Experienced devs, what language would you learn today?

php8

dataloperson HN Who is hiring job posts over time

FAANG care about education credentials, startups care about pragmatism and getting things done.

dataloperson Tesla.com/.gitignore

They've got something a bit more fucked up than just an exposed .gitignore

    $ curl -si https://www.tesla.com/ | grep generator
    x-generator: Drupal 9 (https://www.drupal.org)

    $ curl -si https://www.tesla.com/authorize.php | grep generator
    x-generator: Drupal 7 (http://drupal.org)

So they have at least two versions running at the same time. The /authorize.php [1] uri also yields a 500 (instead of a 403 like most of the other resources), which implies Apache is most likely passing the request off to PHP and the script has a fatal or unhandled error.

The webroot appears to be a Drupal 7.x installation and Apache is serving that content directly (e.g. https://www.tesla.com/MAINTAINERS.txt same as [2]) and trying to run some of it (authorize.php), while happy-path requests are being reverse-proxied to a Drupal 9.x installation.

[1] https://github.com/drupal/drupal/blob/7.x/authorize.php

[2] https://github.com/drupal/drupal/blob/7.x/MAINTAINERS.txt

dataloperson My Overemployment Story

I disagree that an employer is paying for 40 hours of my time: They're paying for output and results. I think rational employer would concede the same.

> Until you get caught

It's not as true today, but across 2020/2021 that couldn't possibly matter less. If this person was caught, then what? They fire them and give them 4-12 weeks severance? A year ago a good dev could have another job lined up before sundown.

dataloperson My Overemployment Story

In my experience of highly paid tech jobs you're generally on salary and your work is managed by some clueless project manager with some notion of how many points you can accomplish in a week. If you find yourself in that situation, and you can do "40hrs" of work in 10 hours, getting a second or even third job of that nature seems like the quickest way to increase your earnings.

dataloperson My Overemployment Story

How is holding multiple jobs anything close to fraud?

dataloperson Tumblr to Add Support for ActivityPub

You’d be surprised at how brutally inefficient RoR code actually is. Anyway, ActivityPub is a protocol, and Mastodon isn’t relevant for this discussion.

dataloperson Takahē: An efficient ActivityPub Server for small installs with multiple domains

https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r21&tes...

Django ranks #137 out of #142 across numerous web frameworks and languages. It’s literally one of the least performant options that exist.

dataloperson Takahē: An efficient ActivityPub Server for small installs with multiple domains

Django does many things but “efficient” is not one of them.

dataloperson Stable Diffusion 2.0

Without the changes they made to Stable Diffusion, it was already able to generate CP. That's why they restricted it from doing so. It did not have child pornography in the training set, but it did have plenty of normal adult nudity, adult pornography, and plenty of fully clothed children, and was able to extrapolate.

Anyway, one obvious application: FBI could run a darknet honeypot site selling AI-generated child porn. Eliminate the actual problem without endangering children.

dataloperson Stable Diffusion 2.0

They’ve ensured the only way to create CSAM is through old-fashioned child exploitation, meanwhile all perfectly humane art and photography is at risk of AI replacement.

This is a huge missed opportunity to actually help society.

dataloperson Ruby concurrency is hard: how I became a Ruby on Rails contributor

RoR peaked in 2013.

dataloperson HTTPS Reverse Proxy: Caddy Outperforms Nginx 4x

Yeah there’s no way this is a Caddy nor nginx raw performance but ridiculously poor backend coding.

At a glance the issue the difference though is caddy reverse proxy defaults to keepalive and nginx upstream does not. Enable keepalive in nginx and you’ll see similar performance.

dataloperson Fosstodon Hub – More Upgrades

Is the ActivityPub spec just as bad, or would it be performant if written in a proper language?

dataloperson Fosstodon Hub – More Upgrades

No, I'm sorry, these are not reasonable costs. Is there a reason why the mastodon community has utterly no clue what sort of performance/cost should support an utterly basic social media platform?

dataloperson Fosstodon Hub – More Upgrades

> All in all fair value

Unless I'm missing something huge, how is $1900/mo for 96GB of database and 700GB of disk storage remotely a fair value? AWS on-demand prices are significantly more affordable than that.

And this is all to support a grand total of 50,000 users? What in the world? Is Mastodon just the most inefficiently written software ever or something?

dataloperson “Invalid Username or Password”: a useless security measure (2014)

> MD5(‘****’)

That’s cool HN censors passwords like this

dataloperson Why Twitter didn’t go down: From a real Twitter SRE

Interesting how this summer all we heard from Musk was how Twitter was overflowing with bots and spam, but now that he runs the place he sure spends a lot of time bragging about all-time high "user" counts.

dataloperson Amazon Alexa is on pace to lose $10B this year

Amazon is known for spending a lot of money on ideas that may or may not pan out. At least under Bezos, that was a very critical factor to the overall success. [1]

> “As a company grows, everything needs to scale, including the size of your failed experiments. If the size of your failures isn’t growing, you’re not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle. Amazon will be experimenting at the right scale for a company of our size if we occasionally have multibillion-dollar failures.”

[1] https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/2018-letter-to...

dataloperson Sheep flocks alternate their leader and achieve collective intelligence

So they’re an anarcho-syndicalist commune, taking turns to act as a sort of executive-officer-for-the-week.

dataloperson Twitter System Design by Elon

> No evidence of that

[1] https://www.npr.org/2022/07/13/1111341161/how-trumps-will-be...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIHhB1ZMV_o

dataloperson I quit my programmer job to become a chicken

It's a quote from the book, Fight Club, by Chuck Palahniuk.

dataloperson Ask HN: Where does everyone go after mass layoffs?

To the pub, have a nice cold pint, and wait for this all to blow over.