Preferences

aforwardslash
Joined 359 karma

  1. > he mentions Vance as a way to call for US administration help at a time when the US is entering an open economic conflict with Europe

    This is a great way of bombing its business in the EU. Just sayin' :)

  2. Regardless of whether the law is absurd or not (I honestly have no idea, but we've seen some crazy stuff lately in the EU), its kinda precious that a CEO only complains about it when his company is fined.

    I'm certain it is also quite reassuring for any paying Cloudflare customer that the company strategy is driven by the CEO Twitter rants; That if by some reason doesn't want to play ball with local laws (as draconian as they may be) and the company is fined, his public reaction is threatening to leave the country. Its not the first time he does this, and certainly it won't be the last. This communication style gets old fast, and IMO this actually hurts the company - I'm a free tier user and would never subscribe any paid products. I think their tech is amazing, they surely have great engineers, but I don't feel comfortable financing a company that thinks it is above the law.

    The icing on the cake is the plea for a free internet; You know what a free internet looks like? A network that doesn't make half its content inaccessible because someone in a major company did a mistake on a SQL query. Or a network that isn't controlled by a company that basically just said "we're tight with the US government, so f** your laws".

  3. Humm very interesting approach, are there any publicly available documentation links?
  4. It depends on the specifics of the tasks; I routinely work on 3-5 projects at once (sometimes completely different stuff), and having a tool like cloud code fits great in my workflow.

    Also, the feedback doesnt have to be immediate: sometimes I have sessions that run over a week, because of casual iterations; In my case its quite common to do this to test concepts, micro-benchmarking and library design.

  5. If I understood correctly, you'te talking about using descriptors to map segments; the issue with this approach is two-fold: it is slow (as each descriptor needs to be created for each segment - and sometimes more than one, if you need write-execute permissions), and there is a practical limit on the number of descriptors you can have - 8192 total, including call gates and whatnot. To extend this, you need to use LDTs, that - again - also require a descriptor in the GDT and are limited to 8192 entries. In a modern desktop system, 67 million segments would be both quite slow and at the same time quite limited.
  6. > It’s a commercial launch company

    Its a private startup. It may operate on a loss, leveraged by private equity and government contracts.

    Everything else you mention becomes irrelevant. Until we know the costs and operational margins, there is no certainty if they are delivering what they promised.

  7. > None of this is correct. You don’t get fidelity as an investor repeatedly publishing fraudulent documents.

    Did I say they were fraudulent? I'm merely stating that tag price means nothing, as they probably are "selling" it at a loss (btw the initial projected falcon price was 10 mil per launch, and the current tag price is ~60 mil, with no strong stats nor costs on reusability). The only way to know for sure is to have access to privileged info behind an NDA. Do you even know what you're talking about? Have you ever reviewed this kind of documents?

    > They are a joke. Completely different leagues of access. Coverage of the South Pole (not McMurdo) got effective continuous bandwidth around the throughput of dialup and periodic passes from a polar sat to upload scientific data.

    South pole coverage is relevant for like, 3 people. None of the data collected from/to there requires urgency; there is zero scientific advantage other than quality-of-life. Consider this, we receive scientific data from mars.

    > GEO is absolutely terrible in terms of latency and cost. Starlink is currently the only good option for the entire ocean and any remote place on earth not reachable by fiber infra.

    Remote places tend to have no coverage, because they have no subscribers. Not sure what you think a profitable business is, but you come off as really asinine. There is nothing inherently unique to starlink - except the fact that they're polluting LEO with their garbage. If its sustainable or not, time will tell.

  8. Spacex is a private company; this means "we" know nothing about actual costs. Fundraising documents dont show this either, as they are a washed-down version for, well, fundraising purposes. As an investor, it is common practice to sign an NDA just to get access to actual somewhat relevant numbers, so any actual relevant info isnt public.

    Also it seems you conflate "making money" with being profitable - its not the same thing. A private company can easily "massage" the PNL sheet to present itself as at a break-even point, and some back-of-the-napkin calculation seems to point to it. Granted, I may be wrong, but the fact is we don't know for sure.

    You also seem to not be aware that there are multiple internet satellite providers with south pole coverage, as well as other regions in the globe.

  9. > There’s only upside for shareholders

    On the other side of the coin, they really don't have a choice; either they attempt to provide leverage (and using non-realistic goals is excellent to avoid actually having to pay it), or any major misshap with any of the other businesses that may have as collateral tesla stock (either directly or indirectly) would basically bankrupt the company. And the scenario where Elon would attempt to do a sort of firesale on purpose just to take revenge isnt far-fetched either;

    IMO The only way forward for them is to keep him happy for now, while attempting to either do damage control or graceful exits.

  10. Reusable rockets are a rehash of old tech that was considered - at the time - not economically feasible; Given how subject to interpretation spacex commercial numbers are, there is nothing indicating a clear cost or efficiency advantage compared with traditional launch systems so far. What we clearly know is that using software development methodologies to building critical hardware is as a bad idea as it sounds.
  11. > works of a living, working artist to mimic their style

    Got it. You're picking up one specific example and making it your whole position. I'd suggest you have a look at animation from the 60's to early 80's to understand that ghibli is also an incremental style.

    Also, I'd suggest you look at advanced (non ai) tools that mimick both the media and techniques usined in more conventional art.

    > engage with the topic at hand

    Your point was plagiarism and that I looked like an uninformed teenager. I addressed them both. We don't have to agree on the same thing, but moving goalposts is not a healthy discussion strategy.

  12. That is a somewhat broad claim that needs decomposing. I would agree that Chinese EV industry is quite more advanced in terms of manufacturing processes and cost optimization, but that is not "technically" more advanced per se, its just a reflection of a culture. Maybe the salt batteries will be a breakthrough, but at least for me it has been difficult finding reliable data on it; Other than that, afaik (and from a layman perspective) there isn't anything inherently superior in chinese EV vehicles from a technological perspective, when compared to western counterparts. Cheaper, yes. But thats about it.
  13. "dude", I could counter-argue that many modern art is "ripping off" Turner's work, but since you know so much about the art world, I'm assuming you know what I'm saying.

    Filters for "Van Gogh" or "Impressionist" or "watercolor" have existed for decades now; are they ripping of previous work without paying for it?

    When does a specific trace becomes "intellectual property" to be ripped off? Does Mondrian holds the rights on colored squares?

    If you don't understand that every living or read artist was "inspired" (modified) by what he saw and experienced, I don't know what to tell you; you come off as one of those people that seem to think that "art" is inspiration; There's a somewhat well known composer in my country that used to say "inspiration is for amateurs".

    Having that posture is, in itself, a position of utter and complete ignorance. If you don't understand how you need to absorb something before you transcend it, and how the things you absorbed will define your own transcendence, you know nothing about the creative process and their inner workings; Sure, if a machine does it, and if it uses well-known iteration processes, one can argue if it is art, an artistic manifestation or - better yet - if it has intellectual rights that can be "ripped off"; But beating on the chest and claiming stealing, like somehow a musician never played any melodies composed by someone else or a painter never used the technique or subject decomposition as their peers or their ancestors is, frankly, naive.

  14. There will always be a market for niche, high quality electron tweaking. Thing is, it will be a highly competitive market, way outside of reach for >90% of today's professionals, thats why people are worried.

    People that don't know that "computer" used to be a profession back in the day.

  15. I struggle to find this argument compelling, as it sounds more of a straw man argument than a legitimate complain.

    If I write a hash table implementation in C, am I plagiarizing? I did not come up with the algortithm nor the language used for implementation; I "borrowed" ideas from existing knowledge.

    Lets say I implemented it after learning the algorithm from GPL code; is ky implementation a new one, or is it derivative?

    What if it is from a book?

    What about the asm upcodes generated? In some architectures, they are copyrighted, or at least the documentation is considered " intellectual property"; is my C compiler stealing?

    Is a hammer or a mallot an obvious creation, or is it stealing from someone else? What about a wheel?

  16. Every car is a flying car if you use it wrong enough
  17. Sure, and google "invented" android.
  18. Were those 249 years produced in a vacuum? Or did they stand on 1500 years of mathematics and trial-and- error? As a quick example, think of a high-end digital photographic camera; you can certainly highlight the major tech advancements that make it high end, but do you know how the screws were produced? Where the grease used on the gears cone from? How long did it take to get to the state-of-the-art optics? How can you even get composite materials to perform heavy-duty cycles?

    Those 249 years of tech were based on the previous 249 years of tech, and so on and so on. That is how it works. Nothing you have "today" comes from a vacuum.

  19. Copying and innovating are two very different things; most of China' s innovation has been incremental, to be kind. To keep up, the machine still needs to copy. Just like Japan did for decades until it became an industrial behemoth, so give them 10 more years and soon enough the western world will be doing the copying
  20. Nice work! I have something similar, but its a bit more generic and extensive - https://github.com/oddbit-project/blueprint
  21. Traditional marketplaces provide a range of services, from unified delivery to complete logistics management. They also provide all the kyc filtering and fraud screening that quite lowers the merchant risk.

    On top of that, many of them provide additional assurances, like vendor screening and easy dispute resolution on fraudulent operations.

    The catalog and the checkout are the easy part.

  22. rolls eyes

    No, their error was that they shouldn't be querying system tables to perform field discovery; the same method in postgresql (pg_class or whatever its called) would have had the same result. The simple alternative is to use "describe table <table_name>".

    On top of that, they shouldn't be writing ad-hoc code to query system tables, but having a separate library instead to perform those kind of task mixed with business logic (crappy application design).

    Also, this should never have passed code review in the first place, but lets assume it did because errors happen, and this kind of atrocious code and flaky design is not uncommon.

    As an example, they could be reading this data from CSV files *and* have made the same mistake. Conflating this with "database design errors" is just stupid - this is not a schema design error, this is a programmer error.

  23. > but the '80s, '90s, and early '00s had an explosion of tiny hardware and software startups

    Most of them used intel, motorola or zilog tech at some capacity. Most of them with a clock used dallas semiconductor tech; Many of them with serial ports also used either intel or maxim/analog devices chips.

    Many of those implementations are patented, and their inner designs were generically, "trade secrets". Most of the clones and rebrands were actually licensed (most of 80x51 microcontrollers and z80 chips are licensed tech, not original). As a tinkerer, you'd receive a black box (sometimes literally) with a series of pins and a datasheet.

    If anything, i'd say you have much more choice today than in the 80s/90's.

  24. I suggest you have a look at Bell Labs, Xerox and Berkeley, as a simple introduction to the topic - if you thing OSS came from "the goodness of their hearts" instead of a practical business necessity, I have a bridge to sell you.

    I would also recommend you to peruse the last 50 years for completely reproductible, homegrown or open computing hardware systems you can build yourself from scratch without requiring overly expensive or exotic hardware. Yes, homegrown CPUs exist, but they "barely work" and often still rely on logic gates. Can you produce 74xx series ICs reliably in a homelab setting? Maybe, but for most of us, probably not. And certainly not for the guys ranting about "companies taking over".

    If can't build your computing devices from scratch, store bought is fine. If you can, you're the exception and not the rule.

  25. Everytime I read one of these "I don't use AI" posts, the content is either "my code is handcrafted in a mountain spring and blessed by the universe itself, so no AI can match it", or "everything different from what I do is technofascism or <insert politics rant here>". Maybe Im missing something, but tech is controlled by a handful of companies - always have been; and sometimes code is just code, and AI is just a tool. What am I missing?
  26. I know its easy to criticize what happened after the fact and having a clear(er) picture of all the moving parts and the timeline of events, but I think that while most of the people in the thread are pointing out either Rust-related or lack of configuration validation, what really grinds my gears is something that - in my opinion - is bad engineering.

    Having an unprivileged application querying system.columns to infer the table layout is just bad; Not having a proper, well-defined table structure indicates sloppiness in the overall schema design, specially if it changes quickly. Considering specifically clickhouse, and even if this approach would be a good idea, the unprivileged way of doing it would be "DESCRIBE TABLE <name>", NOT iterating system.columns. The gist of it - sloppy design not even well implemented.

    Having a critical application issuing ad-hoc commands to system.* tablespace instead of using a well-tested library is just amateurism, and again - bad engineering; IMO it is good practice to consider all system.* privileged applications and ensure their querying is completely separate from your application logic; Sometimes some system tables change, and fields are added and/or removed - not planning for this will basically make future compatibility a nightmare.

    Not only the problematic query itself, but the whole context of this screams "lack of proper application design" and devs not knowing how to use the product and/or read the documentation. Granted, this is a bit "close to home" for me, because I use ClickHouse extensively (at a scale - I'm assuming - several orders of magnitude smaller than CloudFlare) and I have spent a lot of time designing specifically to avoid at least some of these kind of mistakes. But, if I can do it at my scale, why aren't they doing it?

  27. You dont even need to look into advanced features; sqlite does not support ILIKE.
  28. Oh the memories :) I still have somewhere a dot-matrix printed copy of the list I used religiously in the 90's
  29. > If one person writes code only in react and another only in vue, in the same product, you have a mess.

    Huh? quick example - a customer-facing platform with a provisioning dashboard, and a user dashboard; they can (and should, for several reasons) be developed as separate applications, and will depend on different APIs. Are you saying having 2 distinct technologies on 2 distinct components of a product is a mess? Without any other details on the product?

    A good example on the type of products with these separations are e-commerce systems; payment gateways; cloud-native SaaS solutions, etc etc etc.

    I'm sorry to tell you this, but your comment just shows how deep your lack of experience is; any reasonable complex product using frontend technology will have different interfaces with different requirements, different levels of polishing and - frequently - maintained by completely different teams.

This user hasn’t submitted anything.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Story Lists

j
Next story
k
Previous story
Shift+j
Last story
Shift+k
First story
o Enter
Go to story URL
c
Go to comments
u
Go to author

Navigation

Shift+t
Go to top stories
Shift+n
Go to new stories
Shift+b
Go to best stories
Shift+a
Go to Ask HN
Shift+s
Go to Show HN

Miscellaneous

?
Show this modal