rtp4me

You want prison sentences for execs if you were charged $1.50 for a can of corn instead of $1.45? Surely you can't be serious.

Thanks, I appreciate your perspective.

One note about asking for a refund/price adjustment. Occasionally the store workers forget to pull the sale prices off the shelf when the sale is over. In these situations, the manager/workers are appreciative since they can pull the sticker that was left on by accident. Just my experience...

I have been to the Dollar Store (and similar) many times and have never witnessed anyone getting yelled at for saying, "Hey, I think this was a mistake. Can you correct it, please?" (or any other place I shop - especially the grocery stores). We tend to have very positive experiences when pointing out pricing errors. My mother-in-law made it a point to review the receipts ever time we went to the grocery store. No big deal. As other have said, sometimes you get +10% of your money back and other times you get it for free.

Yes, mistakes happen; yes, people get over charged. But to imply people are shamed for asking to correct the error just seems...odd.

Resources to read the receipt? Are you saying poor people can't do math? Honestly, how much effort does it take to look at your receipt and look for errors? If you are really on a tight budget, I guarantee you will be looking over your receipt.

I have watched countless people shop with a calculator or pen/pad to make sure they stay on budget. It is not hard.

"The people that would have the ability to push back"...

And they can. Just bring it up to the cashier or managers attention, and voila, they adjust the price. Please let me know if you have had a different experience.

Yeah, queue the HN fake outrage about big companies and their C-Suite who are billionaires on the backs of the little people. So predictable.

Fact is, Dollar General and similar stores provide a real value to people who live in rural areas. Yes, their prices may be higher for some goods, but that is the price you pay for the convenience they provide. People are free to drive another 20mins to a WalMart or another store to save $0.50 for the same can of corn or loaf of bred. And, people who are really on a budget actually scrutinize the register receipts to make sure they are paying the price listed on the shelf. They can immediately bring up the discrepancy to the staff.

Sorry, real people who are on a real (strict) budget pay attention to the price of goods when they shop. If you are really hurting from a $3 overcharge, chances are you pay very close attention to the register receipt and bring it to the store's attention. Regardless of income, my wife and I routinely scrutinize the register receipt. Force of habit.

Yes, I have used iVentoy very much in the past as well. However, running a dozen (+12) simultaneous installs of Linux seems a stretch for 1G NICs. Using a small PC with a 2.5G NIC could probably do just as well as the 10G one - just slightly less expensive. The 2.5G NIC hardware has really come down in price; you can get an 8-port 2.5G switch for $45, and many mini-PCs have 2.5G built-in.

I have never been to one of these "fests" but wouldn't be easier to just bring a small PXE server with an SSD and 10G NIC with an 8-port switch for net booting/install? Are the machines so old they can't boot off the network? The PXE server could easily handle 5-6 install clients via the 10G NIC.

Painful? What's painful when someone has a different opinion? I think that is healthy.

Sorry, carefully read the comments on this thread and you will quickly realize "real" coders are very much threatened by this technology - especially junior coders. They are frightened their job is at stake by a new tool and take a very anti-AI view to the entire domain - probably more-so for those who live in areas where the wages are not high to begin with. People who come from a different perspective truly see the value of what these tools can help you do. To say all AI output is slop or garbage is just wrong.

The flip of this is to understand and appreciate what the new tooling can help you do and adopt. Sure, junior coders will face significant headwinds, but I guarantee you there are opportunities waiting to get uncovered. Just give it a couple of years...

My suspicion is because they (HN) are very concerned this technology is pushing hard into their domain expertise and feel threatened (and, rightfully so).

Humbling indeed. I am utterly amazed at Claude's breadth of knowledge and ability to understand the context of our conversations. Even if I misspell words, don't use the exact phrase, or call something a function instead of a thread, Claude understands what I want and helps make it happen. Not to mention the ability to read hundreds of lines of debug output and point out a tiny error that caused the bug.

You and I must be using very different versions of Claude. As an infra/systems guy (non-coder), the ability for me to develop some powerful tools simply by leveraging Claude has been nothing short of amazing. I started using Claude about 8 months ago and have since created about 20 tools ranging from simple USB detection scripts (for secure erasing SSDs) to complex tools like an Azure File Manager and a production-ready data migration tool (Azure to Snowflake). Yes, I know bash and some Python, but Claude has really helped me create tools that would have taken many weeks/months to build using the right technology stack. I am happy to pay for the Claude Max plan; it has returned huge dividends to my productivity.

And, maybe that is the difference. Non coders can use AI to help build MVPs and tooling they could otherwise not do (or take a long time to get done). On the other hand, professional coders see this as an intrusion to their domain, become very skeptical because it does not write code "their way" or introduces some bugs, and push back hard.

For 4) - consider PGHero[1] and PGTuner[2] instead of a full-time DBA. We use both in production and they work very well to help track down performance issues with Postgres.

[1] https://github.com/ankane/pghero

[2] https://pgtune.leopard.in.ua/

Edit: For the record, I have worked at a few small companies as the "SysAdmin" guy who did the whole compliment of servers, OS, storage, networking, VMs, DB, perf tuning, etc.

Thank you very much! So much to learn...

In my naïve of opinion, AI is not necessarily about coding or making things better, it's more about creating a system to control the message to the masses. Just like Facebook controlled the message during the Clinton/Trump campaigns, AI is going to control the message for the vast majority of easily swayed people. Especially now since it is very hard to detect between real and AI generated persons/data (see Tilly Norwood).

This relates directly from your post about nation states. Those who control the message control the people.

Sure, but realistically, how often does this really happen? I have probably replaced 3 or 4 DIMMs over the past few years. Hardware is very reliable these days.

Thanks for this. I agree, there seems to be some sort of resistance to building and maintaining a CoLo infrastructure. In reality, it is not too difficult. As I mentioned above, spare parts on the shelve with the CoLo "remote hands" support and a good monitoring system can lessen the impact of almost any catastrophic issue.

For the record, I have built (and currently maintain) a number of CoLo deployments. Our systems have been running for +10 years with very little failure of either drives or PSUs. In fact, our PSU failure rate is probably 1 every 3-4 years, and we probably loose a couple of drives per year. All in all, the systems are very reliable.

Not really. Have spare drives on the shelf and use the "remote-hands" feature from the CoLo provider. Just open a ticket to have the drive swapped. Pretty easy. For remote server connections just use IPMI/iKVM and iPXE. Again, not too difficult.

The biggest hurdle is getting a mgmt system in place to alert you when something goes wrong - especially at this size. Grafana, Loki, monit, etc are all good tools to leverage that provide quick fault identification.

For drive issues, this is easy. Have a stack of replacements on hand and just open a "remote-hands" ticket with the CoLo provider to swap out the drive. This can usually be done in 1-2hrs from opening the ticket.

For server issues; again, pretty easy. Just use iKVM/IPMI and iPXE to diagnose a faulty server. Again, using "remote-hands" from the CoLo provider can help fix problems if your staff does not have the skills.

I have done a ton of iPXE boot setups in the past. We use iPXE at our DC location for imaging, system recovery, etc. In fact, I just finished up a new boot image that creates a 100MB virtual floppy drive used for BIOS updates. Reach out and I can provide the entire setup if you like (pxe config files, boot loaders, scripts, etc).

Just updated to Sonnet 4.5 and Claude Code 2.0 this afternoon. I worked on a quick project (creating PXE bootable files) using the updates and have to say, this new version seems much faster and more accurate than before. I did not go round-and-round trying to get good output and Claude did not go down rabbit holes like before. So far, so good.

After lots of trial and error, we have everything running pretty well. We mainly use ZFS for the cost savings on virtual drives (compression=zstd). Previously, we were using XFS and the DB sizes were >5TB or more, and now we can use much smaller disk sizes (1TB or so) and still get usable performance.

That said, ZFS presents some challenges for a few reasons:

- As you probably already know, PGSQL relies heavily on system RAM for caching (effective_cache_size). That said, ZFS and OS cache are NOT the same thing, thus you need to take this into consideration when configuring PGSQL. We normally set PGSQL effective_cache_size=512MB and use `zfs_arc_min` and `zfs_arc_max` options to adjust ZFS ARC cache size. We typically get a +95% hit rate on ZFS (ARC) caching.

- ZFS is definitely slower than XFS or EXT4 and it took a while to understand how options like `zfs_compressed_arc_enabled`, `zfs_abd_scatter_enabled`, and `zfs_prefetch_disable` affect performance. In particular, the `zfs_compressed_arc_enabled` option determines if the ZFS cache data is compressed in RAM as well on disk. When enabled, this option can seriously affect latency since the data has to be uncompressed each time it is read/written. That said, a very nice side affect of `zfs_compressed_arc_enabled=on` is the amount of data in the cache. From my understanding, if you get 5:1 data compression on disk, you get the same for ARC cache. Thus, if you give ZFS 12GB of cache, you get about 60GB of data in ZFS memory cache.

- Getting ZFS installed requires additional kernel modules + the kernel header files, and these files have to match the version of ZFS you want to run. This is especially important if you update your kernel very often (thus requiring new ZFS modules to be built and installed).

Lots of blog posts are on the 'net describing some of these challenges. It's worth checking them out...

Based on our testing, we get much better compression using ZFS than PGSQL. As a side benefit, we also get snapshots and the ability to easily find out how much compression our DBs are getting.

According to a quick google search (to refresh my memory), PGSQL compression (eg: TOAST) targets specific large data values within tables, while ZFS compresses all data written to the ZFS pool.

I am looking forward to testing this feature on our DBs running in Azure (on our own VMs - not hosted by Azure). We heavily use ZFS for compression (5:1 to 8:1) and tend to do lots of sequential scans. ZFS can hit about 150MB/sec on large scans, but with the new async-io feature and worker queues, I am hoping we can double or triple our seq scan performance. Time for testing!

Speaking as someone from the US, how is this a meaningful comparison in anyway? Honest question. Sure, wage growth sounds good in an upward trending market, but let's say the market has gone down 30% over the past five years. Would you expect everybody to take a 30% pay cut? If Walmart had a blockbuster year because their suppliers charged less (more efficient means of production), how are Walmart employee wages interconnected to the supplier charges?

I suppose what you are saying is the profits of the company should be poured back into worker salaries. I agree to an extent. But, what if the company undergoes very hard times (3-5 years of negative growth)? Should the company take back wages? I think this is a double-edge sword.

Honestly, I would love for the keyboard input style to go away completely. It is such an unnatural way to interact with a computing device compared to other things we operate in the world. Misspellings, backspacing, cramped keys, different layout styles depending on your origin, etc make it a very poor input device - not to mention people with motor function difficulties. Sadly, I think it is here to stay around for a while until we get to a different computing paradigm.

Because the person serving a beer at a bar simply poured me a beer. I walked up to the bar where I ordered from the menu. The level of interaction with staff = 1. Effort from staff = 1.

The the waiter/waitress had to come to my table, discuss the menu, provide feedback on questions, submitted order to kitchen, delivered order, checked back on us to see if we need anything else, etc. Level of interaction with staff > 1, level of effort from staff > 1. Tip appropriately if level of effort > 1 for helpfulness, politeness, attentiveness, etc. Stop making this so hard.

>The OP above you is guaranteed to have had their food spat in or otherwise tortured as punishment for not tipping.

Wait, what??? Do you honestly believe the worker pours a cup of coffee in a to-go cup, hands it to me, checks the receipt for a tip, then grabs it back to spit in it? What kind of delusional thinking is this? How does the food delivery person even know the tip amount before the receipt? This kind of thinking is exactly why the system is so out of hand.