Hacker News Reader

narismon CERN swaps out databases to feed its petabyte-a-day habit

There are a number of circuit breakers in VictoriaMetrics that limit the number of time series/datapoints in queries to limit CPU/RAM usage. These can be tweaked with the -search.max* command line flags. I think the default query limits for data points per series are 30M and number of series is 300K.

What do you consider reasonable cardinalities or a true TSDB?

narismon Teen’s death after eating a single chip highlights risks of ultra-spicy foods

The source/other articles [1][2][3] mention this particular chip has sent multiple other students to the hospital before. I mean, it’s _possible_ they all had some unrelated medical condition trigger/were secretly mainlining heroin/etc at the same time they ate the chip, but is it probable? [1] https://archive.md/2CEum

[2] https://www.ketk.com/news/local-news/tyler-isd-one-chip-chal...

[3] https://amp.sacbee.com/news/nation-world/national/article257...

narismon Japan to release Fukushima water into ocean

> The amount of whining, specifically Chinese whining, is absurd. Especially as their shitty air pollution blankets the entire Pacific.

There are also multiple Chinese/Korean NPPs that have each released in one year multiple times the amount of radiation contained in the Fukushima annual release plan (22 trillion Bq). This isn’t because of any incident they had, these are just normal operations for these plants. These moves have very little to do with science and are just East Asian political posturing as usual.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/25/fukushim...

https://japannews.yomiuri.co.jp/world/asia-pacific/20230623-...

https://japan-forward.com/china-and-south-korea-too-release-...

narismon The antitrust trial against Google is starting in September

> Monopolization of the ad market is not the issue here, because the specific claim is that google has monopolized the search market.

Incorrect. The Stoller article says “government argues that Google has a monopoly of general search and *search advertising*”.

The case in question (1:20-cv-03010) alleges anticompetitive behaviors in multiple interrelated markets: general search services, *search advertising, general search advertising, and general search text advertising*. The other major case (1:23-cv-00108) is about their monopolization of the digital ad market via Doubleclick/Ad Exchange/Google Ads.

narismon The antitrust trial against Google is starting in September

>we (google) give our product away for free and so do our competitors.

Search is not Google’s product, it’s a way to get their product. Their product is eyeballs which they sell to advertisers.

>the cost of switching search engines is literally zero: just type Bing instead of Google.

If this is true, why does Google pay Apple billions/year and Mozilla millions/year to make Google the default search? You could be saving that money!

narismon The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?

The bikini swimsuit was named after the Bikini Atoll. A bit of a mixup from OP though: it wasn’t named after fusion bombs. The bikini swimsuit was announced a few days after the first public fission bomb test there (Crossroads Able) in 1946. The first fusion bomb test there (Castle Bravo) wasn’t until 1954.

narismon Why Nvidia Keeps Winning

Mythic is supposedly back, they raised more money in March 2023.

narismon How the great firewall of China detects and blocks fully encrypted traffic [pdf]

MS and other vendors recommend doing something similar (connecting via Hong Kong): https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-wan/intercon...

narismon Reddit CEO Says Mods Too Powerful, Plans to Weaken After Blackout

> infra which can serve significant traffic over petabytes of content with search

Search? Reddit search is so bad it’s practically a meme. They only added the ability to search within comments (y’know, like 90% of the site) _this year_.

https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/11dgwzy/whats_up_wi...

> they have bootstrapped content volume and communities

Do you mean when the founders (including current CEO) posted as a bunch of fake users to create the illusion that it was popular?

https://venturebeat.com/social/reddit-fake-users/

> they have monetization in place which pays for all infra and salaries

How is possible if Reddit has never been profitable/reached breakeven?

https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...

https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/15/23762868/reddit-ceo-steve...

narismon As the West surges toward EVs, here’s where the unwanted gas guzzlers go

True, although effectiveness may vary wildly depending on the local implementation.

Exhibit A: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_inspection_in_the_Unit...

narismon Reddit subs with millions of followers plan to extend the blackout indefinitely

Defamation for starters. See Neibich v. Reddit and Berger v. Reddit. So far section 230 has shielded them from much of these but the law has been targeted over the last couple years. So far the Supreme Court hasn’t addressed questions on the scope of section 230. I’m guessing the thinking goes if section 230 scope is narrowed and moderators are on the company payroll that could move them from a content provider (not liable) to more of a newspaper publishing articles (liable).

narismon As the West surges toward EVs, here’s where the unwanted gas guzzlers go

> incentivize utilizing them longer

This is the problem. More people will use them when they are in an unsafe state (low tread depth/bald/cords showing)

narismon In Lebanon, solar power is booming

> i think insulin is way cheaper in mexico but I dont hear stories about it being smuggled to the states

Plenty of cases like this:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2020/03/06/this-cou...

narismon A software change allowed FTX to use client money

Interpretation is exactly where the boundaries become fuzzy.

narismon Johnny Mnemonic in Black-and-White

I think quite a few people would say otherwise: https://www.arrowfilms.com/blog/features/is-robocop-the-ulti...

narismon Developer creates bot to mimic stock trading by US politicians: portfolio up 25%

> congresspeople making a few million on the side

> billions and trillions spent blowing things up

These two things are not unrelated. Congresspeople having financial stakes in defense companies (Raytheon/Honeywell/Lockheed Martin/etc) while also making policy decisions that directly impact their bottom line (go to war/manufacture this equipment/send military aid) introduces a clear conflict of interest.

narismon The Influence of Neuromancer on Cyberpunk

I think that’s mostly because he didn’t know anything about computers when he wrote it :)

“I was actually able to write Neuromancer because I didn’t know anything about computers,” he says. “I knew literally nothing. What I did was deconstruct the poetics of the language of people who were already working in the field. I’d stand in the hotel bar at the Seattle science fiction convention listening to these guys who were the first computer programmers I ever saw talk about their work. I had no idea what they were talking about, but that was the first time that I ever heard the word ‘interface’ used as a verb. And I swooned. Wow, that’s a verb. Seriously, poetically that was wonderful. “So I was listening to it as an English honours student. I would take it back out, deconstruct it poetically, and build a world from those bricks. Consequently there are other things in Neuromancer that make no sense. When the going gets really tough in cyberspace, what does Case do? He sends out for a modem. He does! He says: ‘Get me a modem! I’m in deep shit!’ I didn’t know what one was, but I had just heard the word. And I thought: man, it’s sexy.”

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/11/william-gibson...

His other inspiration for cyberspace is presciently metaverse-like:

The idea came to him from watching kids playing arcade games – "it seemed to me that what they wanted was to be inside the games, within the notional space of the machine" – and an advertisement at a bus stop for Apple computers. "Everyone is going to have one of these, I thought, and everyone is going to want to live inside them. And somehow I knew that the notional space behind all of the computer screens would be one single universe."

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/sep/22/william-gibson...

narismon How South Korean TV took over the world

> In Japan, a country considered by many as quasi-Western and on par or ahead of the EU and US, organised crime is a legal pillar of society simply for the fact that it has always been that way.

Yakuza membership is down 10x from their peak in the 1960s and decreasing. A series of laws/regulations and changing cultural norms since the 1990s have increasingly constrained their ability to operate.

narismon Japan to implement bank-deposit-backed digital currency in 2022

https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3116521/c...

> winners have until January 17 to spend their e-yuan before it expires

The caveat there is that expiration in this case is probably to encourage winners to spend the money/provide an end date to the experiment. Most likely regular e-money would not have that condition but special payments (ex: stimulus) could.

narismon Japan to implement bank-deposit-backed digital currency in 2022

>It'll also give the government the ability to add conditions to your money

Some of China’s experiments with digital RMB have already done this where the money they handed out had an expiration date. Japan as well with the GoToTravel/GoToEat stimulus campaigns where the money equivalent could only be used at certain hotels/restaurants.

narismon Macron says France will build new nuclear energy reactors

> I don't think there are even any widely available on the market today which will automatically increase the temperature at mid day in anticipation of an electricity shortage later.

Our house built 7 years ago has an Enefarm fuel cell/hot water heater. Every house in our neighborhood and every house I’ve seen by the same builder has one. It approaches things a little bit differently but to the same effect. It learns your energy use patterns and turns on the fuel cell (using LP gas) when you usually use electricity, generating hot water as a side effect. The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.

https://www.j-lpgas.gr.jp/en/appliances/index.html#ENE-FARM

> it's a safety hazard in homes with small children; hot water temperature should never be hot enough to cause burns when someone turns on the faucet.

Internally it stores water at 65 degrees C but mixes it with cold water to to supply all water to the house at a certain temp. We have ours set to 40C but you can change it on a control panel. Of course, there are mixing taps at the sinks/showers. It’s very common for shower temp controls here to have a extra stop at 40C that requires pressing a button to exceed.

> Most homes don't have enough free space for a big pile of rocks to increase thermal mass

I don’t know about cooling but the ones that take advantage of cheap electricity at night to store up heat and release slowly over the day are not massive.

https://catforehead.com/2014/02/17/getting-warm/ https://www.sanica.co.jp/aldy/products/rdf40.html

narismon Nomad vs. Kubernetes

If your complaint about Kubernetes is that it doesn’t provide you enough choice/extensibility, you’re probably not looking hard enough.

Runtimes (CRI) - Docker shim (deprecated), containerd, CRI-O, kata

Networking (CNI) - Flannel, Calico, Cilium, cloud specific ones, many more

Storage (CSI) - way too many device plugins - GPU, TPU, RDMA/SRIOV NICs

Data store - etcd, dqlite in microk8s, SQLite/postgresql/mysql in k3s

DNS - kube-dns (somewhat deprecated), CoreDNS

Ingress - NGINX (multiple), HAProxy, Envoy (many), etc

Kubelet -https://github.com/virtual-kubelet/virtual-kubelet

Kube-proxy - Cilium can act as a replacement

Cloud-controller-manager for each cloud provider

kube-scheduler - https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/extend-kubernetes/configure...

kube-apiserver and kube-controller-manager are two parts where I’m not aware of any other implementations but a) they are kind of the heart of k8s and b) can be easily extended with CRDs/operators.

narismon MacBook Pro 14-inch and MacBook Pro 16-inch

> Why have static ports when you can have dynamic ports?

Because dynamic ports (basically internal dongles) reduces the amount of internal volume they have to work with. This would cause compromises in other areas like a thicker laptop, less battery life, noisier fan, etc.

narismon Oculess – Removes account requirements and telemetry from Oculus Quest devices

They are probably talking about ZeniMax v. Oculus. ZeniMax owned the company where John Carmack worked. While the original Oculus Rift was being prototyped and later crowdfunded, Carmack was interested in VR and worked on the code/headset to get Doom 3 running on it. He later left to become the Oculus CTO.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZeniMax_v._Oculus

narismon Terraform vs. AWS CloudFormation

The Pulumi providers for major clouds (AWS/GCP/Azure) have native versions instead of using the TF providers under the hood. Caveat: some are still in preview.

https://www.pulumi.com/blog/pulumiup-native-providers/

narismon China prepares to test thorium-fuelled nuclear reactor

There are absolutely voters in China. True, the candidates for elections are vetted by the party but the cynical might say there is little difference between that and the primary/convention process in US politics.

The CCP central leadership often responds to public opinion when local leaders are shown to be corrupt/incompetent (or scapegoated for other reasons).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_China

narismon OpenSearch 1.0

Elastic requires a CLA for contributions: https://www.elastic.co/contributor-agreement

narismon The Next Backblaze Storage Pod

Dell's densest server is the PowerEdge XE7100 [1] (100 3.5" drives in 5U) but the bezel cover picture looks like more like a standard 2U, maybe a R740xd2 (26 3.5" in 2U).

[1] https://www.delltechnologies.com/asset/en-ae/products/server...

https://www.servethehome.com/dell-emc-poweredge-xe7100-100-d...

narismon Hacker deleted all of NewsBlur’s Mongo data and is now holding the data hostage

Assuming paying ransoms were illegal[0], arranging for another party to pay it (commit an illegal act) would be an act of conspiracy.

[0] already being signaled: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-treasury-cyber-idUSKBN26M...

narismon One Fastly customer triggered internet meltdown

Around 40% of the population of Nigeria (a country of 200+ million) does not have access to electricity. The per capita electricity consumption of Nigeria is _two orders of magnitude lower_ than the US.