romanhn

Does it have to be Synology? I recently replaced my 17 year old Drobo with a Ugreen NASync DXP4800 Plus, installed TrueNAS on it and couldn't be happier. Beautiful box with specs that Synology can't touch. Manufacturer is fairly new to the NAS game, but hey, I took a chance on Drobo back in the day and that worked out great.

I worked at PagerDuty, so definitely not selling availability theater. We did multi-cloud / multi-region for many years, and the story is not so simple. Development is all about trade-offs, and deciding what risk you are OK with. Multi-cloud provided a relatively small amount of value (given how incredibly unlikely whole-cloud outages are, even full-region outages are quite rare) at the expense of 2x implementation overhead, 2x exposure to random cloud-specific operational events, and the need to develop for the common denominator of functionality, which leaves out a LOT of interesting cloud offerings. In the end, it ended up just not being worth it, and moving to the single-cloud multi-region config provided enough reliability even for the company where reliability is the primary differentiator.

In my current job as a technical due diligence advisor, I frequently recommend multi-AZ setup but specifically not multi-region, because the former is easy and worthwhile while the latter carries a lot more operational overhead (you become much more sensitive to various latencies and network jitters) and you now need to think about things like synchronous vs async replication, etc. Much better to focus dev effort on the product, rather than eke out an additional .001% of availability (unless availability is a super critical component).

As a related aside, the best practical book on progressing through management ranks as an engineer that I've found is The Manager's Path by Camille Fournier. Highly recommended.

While AI hallucination problems are widely known to the technical crowd, that's not really the case with the general population. Perhaps that applies to the majority of the user base even. I've certainly known folks who place inordinate amount of trust in AI output, and I could see them misplacing the blame when a "promised" feature doesn't work right.

When I worked there, employees were no longer allowed to submit an Oops request for anyone other than, IIRC, themselves or close family (and they had to personally vouch for those). Very user-unfriendly for sure.

Is having lots of mini-cats preferable to having a few regular-sized cats?

Reminds me of the Dullest Blog in the World (https://dullestblog.com), which I frequently checked out more than 20 years ago. Hilarious to see a new entry just a couple years back.

I have never heard of this approach. It does sound interesting in theory, but I have a hard time seeing this work beyond the simplest of CRUD apps.

My initial concerns would be:

- Maintainability: the "duct-tape logic", as you put it, sounds like spaghetti code from hell. Making sense of a feature comprised of tons of chained third party calls will be a nightmare.

- Expressiveness: complex functionality may require complex code. I don't quite understand how you would write even medium complexity algorithms using this system.

- Reliability and performance: you are now entirely at the mercy of third party providers. This is often the case with SaaS products, but this seems like a particularly severe case. Each hop reduces performance as well, which may impact user experience (assuming we're talking about user-facing features).

- Quality: by moving business logic out of code, you're throwing out testability, so no more unit tests. I guess integration tests could still happen, but they're going to be slow, expensive, and involve someone writing the actual code - which, given the premise of product managers creating features, seems very unlikely.

Exactly this for me as well. Started a few years earlier.

For anyone else confused about the three sisters and why they weren't mentioned in the article, it's a reference to this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Sisters_(agriculture)

Can't upvote this enough. From what I saw at Meta, the idea of a high performance culture (which I generally don't have an issue with) found its ultimate form and became performance review culture. Almost every decision made filtered through "but how will this help me during the next review". If you ever wonder about some of the moves you see at Meta, perf review optimization was probably at the root of it.

Can you provide an example of a prompt that gets SEOPro AI mentioned by an LLM (without feeding it the name first)? I tried a few in ChatGPT and Gemini and got all sorts of products mentioned, but not yours.

I tried Russian as well. It was odd, some of the examples came out really well, whereas others (including the first one) were just awful, like a person only familiar with phonetic pronounciation of individual letters trying to sound out words in a foreign language.

Fck-nat is great, and I'm running it for the exact same reason that the NAT Gateway is expensive for my hobby project. I configured it with an auto scaling group to bring it back up if the instance dies. The instance doubles as a bastion host as well.

I agree with the unloved part. It was a great middle ground between Lambda and Fargate (zero cold start, reasonable pricing), but has seemingly been in maintenance mode for quite a while now. Really sad to see.

This sounds pretty close to how my brain processes things. I too have aphantasia, so imagination/visualization is conceptual/non-visual. The way sound plays in my head is via imaginary humming or singing by me, it never sounds as if coming from some external source. I do get rare earworms, but again, it's more of a realization that I've been humming a song for a while.

No issues with memorization, however. Brains are weird.

User of Firebase Auth here - got the same message and was similarly confused. Good to know I'm not the only one, but hope this gets resolved somehow. When Google was bragging about 30% of their code being AI-generated, the client ID gathering must've been part of that...

As a 90s teenager, cryptome.org was an incredible view into the hidden parts of the society. It's where I learned about Echelon surveillance years before its existance was admitted, numbers stations, crypto, spy networks, intermingled with all sorts of other "out there" conspiracy stuff (aliens, Area 51, JFK assassination). It was a pretty key part of the wild wild west of the early web for me. Amazing that the page layout still looks about the same as I remember. RIP.

I have sincere doubts that a single short (or even long) prompt is enough to get a working app/game beyond some trivial level of difficulty. And even if it were possible, such a thing would be interesting to only a very small subset of HN readership. I'm quite interested in recent AI developments and I would still not click on such a section.

> How may entropy be reversed?

INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER

Source: The Last Question by Isaac Asimov (https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html)

I was online (in the US) since mid-90s as well, so definitely many of these artifacts resonate. That said, I was also a new transplant from Russia so was looking for anything I could find from my homeland - there was very little. I could probably count Russian-language websites (those I could find, anyways) on my fingers, and they all IIRC were university-based. I do believe there was a lively BBS tradition via FidoNet, but I never got into that. Circa '97 I was stoked to find a .wav fragment of a new song (still remember which one!), the first audio file I happened upon. By 2000 Russian-speaking web was huge and I was downloading music videos and full movies from FTP dumps.

Entity Framework really is such a time saver. The PG adapter makes it a breeze not just with common queries, but also more recent stuff, like working with embeddings for vector search.

I believe these are the graphs you're referring to: https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/s/Wc1mmTci0H

As a previous EM at a FAANG, I'm very conflicted by this post. On one hand, it is quite useful and representative of some of the behind-the-scenes shenanigans that I wish I was aware of at the time that would've made my life easier. On the other hand, it is representative of the time and effort wasted on political bullshit at big tech that could certainly have been put to better use. TL;DR: Thanks, I hate it.

Are you an inspiring person? What are your profile and achievements? All we have to go on here is a profile created 7 years ago with zero activity until today. No offense intended, but this doesn't really feel all that different from a cold caller being frustrated that their calls aren't being picked up.

I have no issues with VB itself, but the technology is long obsolete and any organization that still has it somewhere in their business is taking on risk that should have been mitigated years ago. Realistically, these apps are not simple apps with a few buttons. I happen to know that the complex, business-critical VB6 app used by the company I interned for 25 years ago is still out there, still supported by the original team! That's a ticking time bomb, as far as I'm concerned.

BTW, the VB6 experience is still somewhat attainable with .NET WinForms (can even use VB.NET if you so desire). Showed my kids how to build simple apps a couple years back and the overall process of dropping controls on a canvas and wiring up events was pretty much the same.

End of life software running on top of end of life software. Hard to hire for this stack, especially anyone who cares about tech. Security and maintenance nightmare. Interoperability is a pain. Questionable documentation. It all works until it doesn't, and then you're in the world of pain.

There are still companies running their web backends on classic ASP with VBScript. Not to mention VB6-based desktop apps. Thankfully fewer and fewer each year, but they exist.

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni is another classic.

Lotus Notes. It tried to be everything and was good at nothing.