Borrowed time and borrowed world, and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.
“to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
Heaven is in the feet of my mother, everything else is a feeling, a feeling which can change as I grow. Something which can be passion can feel like stressful job workaholism.
Member of the LiteLLM Security Working Group.
My mail: [email protected] (Feel free to say hi to me, also I am currently looking for colleges so if someone has any reference/referral, I would love it if someone can send me mail about that too!)
At some point, I just want to make something nice that my mother can be proud of, (that doesn't have to be something that she necessarily understands because she can understand my passion about a project even if it might be techie.)
I just want to be happy :-)
Previous profile of my account: https://web.archive.org/web/20260406153911/https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Imustaskforhelp (This archive also contains the previous to previous profile of my account too if someone is interested.)
Hackernews Chess Club: https://lichess.org/team/hackernews-chess-club (Password is dang)
i can be wrong, I usually am and so I would like to know more but my rationale behind 9fs being better than NFS was that 9fs is a much simpler protocol in general and its philosophy also maps very neatly to what you are trying to achieve. The simplicity and overlapping ideas felt to me as something which could create an prototype much easier than on NFS which has its complexity issues.
> NFS is really a great protocol with a lot of tricks to reduce round trips
Oh, I didn't know that actually but makes sense given how NFS is used but are there any issues/limitations that you face when building things on top of NFS. I would love to know more :-D
> I work on an AI agent (tasklet) and we give every agent a linux machine. Having durable storage that is cheap, fast and multi-tenant is really important for our product. NFS is a great protocol (if complicated), and object storage is just the cheapest. But making it fast and reliable is key.
Wouldn't 9fs/plan9fs be more suitable for this use case from my limited understanding though?
> Any use case for SlateDB that you are willing to pay more for less latency but keep disaggregated storage without another system.
I feel like IMO one of its benefits could be something like Figma/Google Docs alternative (Ironic considering that it would be running on google specific product but as you've mentioned in next point a potential support for AWS/Azure could also happen). I also found some use case within a live-streaming alternative in terms of how a live stream could add support for viewing things say a few seconds back. The current way seems to be much more messier than a simple s3. Though I feel like in any of these cases, pricing might be a factor.
I also find the use case that you shared really interesting as well. I wish you luck to see how that pans out and am looking forward for reading more technical pieces by you so keep publishing more and I am curious for more details as well.
There are so many interesting ideas when we combine s3 and databases. TigrisFS is taking an opposite approach to this by running filesystem on top of s3 on top of technically foundationDB whereas your approach/SlateDB essentially runs a DB on S3. It's fun to imagine both of these being used together and how both of these are approaching at somewhat of the same problem from completely different/opposite ways.
This was a really amazing post to read through. I can imagine so much cool stuff
> I have plans to build a Network File System (an NFS server) using SlateDB and Chorus, and I’m excited to see what other people build as well.
Can you please elaborate more about what the benefits of combining SlateDB and chorus for NFS could be. I would love to know more in details
Also I would love to know what are some other use cases that you can think about it.
And from my understanding this is currently focused on GCP sides of it, do you think that it can be GCP agnostic as well if some other provider wishes to support for it, if so what are the things that would be needed by them to do so.
Also I really loved the writing, I feel as if these are the articles that I come for hackernews to read through. So creative!
A lot of it did go through my head though as I am not the most well-versed within this field but I really liked reading it and learning more about it to get more knowledge. (I also might like to know how does the pricing of the GCP rapid storage buckets compare to other things in general as well and which use-cases of chorus could justify its pricing/API costs as well.)
Interesting things. What is your opinion on Helcim (though it seems to be US/Canadian?) but your comment made me do a bit of digging because I think that I know fairly well about the server side of things but I still somewhat believed that stripe was the cheapest options in general. Thanks for making me get into this rabbit hole I suppose, I do like these rabbit holes though :-D
So do you have more information about normal payment processors in general which are more competitive than Stripe. The comment below by @khurs for example shows that Stripe is actually a bit cheaper than Mollie for Amex cards (which you respond with the point that most European demographic doesn't use Amex cards etc.)
but I am non-european, non-US so I have no skin in the game and I wish to support those which are mutually beneficial to me in terms of providing me a very decent deal and hopefully good support as well. So what do you suggest me some more resources about and would there be anything better than Stripe.
I absolutely know that AWS and others are so overpriced that I sometimes even used to wonder why people might buy it if OVH and Hetzner exists (before price increase, perhaps it can still be price competitive sometimes though)
But interestingly, I didn't believe the same for Stripe, so I am re-thinking my belief about Stripe and payment processing in general too (which to be fair, tangentially might also perhaps be the same way some people might feel about AWS). So I'd be curious to learn more! :-D
Edit: just did some more digging and as an Indian, we have UPI payments which there are some providers of but there is an option iirc for us to directly have a bank account and do a lot of payment processing so much more easier with UPI ourselves and basically pay 0% for Indian specific traffic as India heavily uses UPI (its really good to be honest!) and there are some providers like carefree/razorpay as well which can accept UPI on their side at 1.6-2% if you want API and are just starting out
But I am curious about accepting European/American/Canadian cards though. It seems that carefree/razorpay are recommended if targetting Indian markets and Helcim for American/canadian and Adyen/Mollie are recommended for European centric markets. So I'd be curious to hear your opinions about it.
Although there is a difference in accrual earnings and cash flows. I was wrong with the number provided which although not as big as 1.5B of AI spend, is still a comparatively large number itself.
I have written an more in-depth comment if that interests ya (in a good faith discussion and please be kind to everybody)
also please don't call @kentonv an idiot and please read the HN guidelines[0]: Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
I had mistakenly written 500 million when it was around 5 million dollars so I messed up its 5 million per month[See Source], not 500 million. I wish to have a genuine discussion while you are here though because i can be wrong, I usually am and I would love to have a good faith discussion, thanks in advance!
I will try to back up a lot of it with hackernews comments from the thread when cloudflare layoffs were suggested so that I don't accidentally mis-represent anything and My suggestion wasn't a critique of cloudflare and please don't take it as such. The question was simply of the AI token costs associated.
and this was the comment that I was referencing to[0] which states the following:
> There was an recent article on X with an interesting take - it could be that companies are doing layoffs not because AI is making them more productive but because it hasn't. Their costs have gone up paying for expensive AI but haven't seen any revenue benefits to offset it.
An child comment of it talks about the coinbase layoffs which had happened around the same time[1]:
> (..) In 2023, their "Technology and Development" line item shows $1.32bn going out, and by 2025 it'd ballooned to $1.67bn. This is despite headcount actually contracting by almost a thousand people between those two statements.
Regarding this: > Let's imagine that this isn't absurd on its face. If true, then you'd expect Cloudflare's Q1 earnings to show a massive, massive net loss. In fact Cloudflare was cash flow positive in Q1.
We might be forgetting that (from my understanding, Cloudflare has never had profits) (positive annual net income) with an astronomically large P/E ratio.
> > The fact so many orgs opt for immediate greed over long-term growth really is its own canary that leadership and governance both has failed the marshmallow test.
> Why do you think it's greed? The company's stock is down and they just missed expectations on their last earnings report (unheard of in big tech in the last 2 years).
> It seems more like a traditional layoff scenario
Another comment [from the Layoff thread][2] which might summarize some things:
"Their AI costs have increased 600% but this hasn't translated into actual revenue. Also they are probably projecting AI costs to keep growing. They've done the math and at some point it is going to affect their bottom line. Reducing or limiting AI usage would be inconceivable given Cloudflare itself has invested on AI and is selling AI services. Instead they've opted for reducing about 20% of their head count."
I genuinely wish if we can have a good faith discussion about it. I appreciate cloudflare as a product myself and actively use cf tunnels, which is why I care about it as well and I wish to have a good faith discussion about it hopefully as well :-D
> The rest of your post is more qualitative, so harder to disprove, but from what I can tell, it seems equally made up.
I can be wrong, I usually am and if I am wrong, I wish to learn from it and I wish to improve as a person too!
I have learnt from this discussion (up until now) that I should mostly try to provide sources whenever talking on a public place/ on the internet so that I can be more accurate and I sincerely wish to have a good faith discussion once again, thanks and have a good day @kentonv :-D
you might have to think the way through though and these companies are already being caught up with the huge token costs at the same time.
There was an interesting comment during the cloudflare layoffs (partially driven by the fact that the company was bleeding money also because of its token costs from one estimate being 5* million$ per month (I feel so silly that I accidentally had written/meant 500 and had kentonv do the stats on that part :-( Sorry kentonv!), don't quote me on that though)
The part was that there is only an enough marketshare in the first place. Cloudflare was doing some crazy experiments like operating matrix on cf workers and wordpress alternative and fediverse and so much stuff.
So they basically spent 10x the amount of token (and the token costs) and I imagine as such the reading code of that part was getting sidelined as the attractive principle you are talking about.
Yet the market can't bring an actual demand 10x times though. These are things which nudge a user slightly but the actual impact on user growth isn't 10x or even justifiable within some cases given the costs.
Yet at the same time driving up the people who actually know their stuff and firing them because of the token costs. The people who have actually mitigated some of the largest DDOS attacks and are the backbone behind cf cash-cow (enterprise payments) is the fact that they have had the experience and entreprise knowledge about these things, yet they are literally removing that by firing workers and oh replacing them with interns. (They got 1111 interns and fired 1100 employees or something iirc)
It's weird and I have talked to some people about it but there is a disconnect between what management is hearing about AI and the ground reality of things. Reviewing code is becoming the bottleneck but if you don't review code and are shipping things to production, then you can get fired as I have talked about in some of my other comments sharing a story about how a guy shipped code to prod and the response was "but claude generated it" and got fired because the company basically said, look we basically don't care if it was generated by claude but the responsibility was on you to check it (review) and because the commit was done by you, you are gonna be treated responsible and he got fired from his job.
Yet this was the same company which was asking its employee to play around with claude at their free time, the manager of the employee I talked to being the most automatable person, the company employees working till 1 AM because they were saying to management that things were fine but they were being burried under the technical debt,that employee that I talked to got honest with the management and told reality and the management treated them as a person who didn't know AI or were the odd one out.
Sooo I don't know actually to be honest.
TLDR: reviewing code is being treated as the bottleneck but it is also the only thing stopping your company from imploding under technical debt, actual debt because of token costs etc. I remain skeptical if we should treat it as a bottleneck or as a safeguard mechanism. After all, if nobody's in the loop then whose responsible?
Reviewing code isn't a bottleneck so much so its a safeguard mechanism in my opinion. Also things differ in corporate land and hobby land and I would prefer corporate to not be using the practices that I do with how I do things for fun in my hobby time.
Side note: Even more so, I think I am a LiteLLM security working group maintainer and I have seen first hand on how much damage it can do in supply chain even when things were done right from LiteLLM side and the fault was within the side of ironically a security product that they used called Trivy.
There are things which you can do to be better prone to supply chain attacks in general but there is no full bullet proof way of doing so and in such.
Caution (should) be taken when dealing with corporate systems and as such I sweat a little when anyone suggests code review to be completely eliminated. Things (are/can be) different in hobby/prototyping world though.
Popularity is a bit subjective though as popularity also determines on all the projects built in that said language. Zig got a lot more popular because of the projects that have/had been built on it (Tigerbeetle/Bun) which signaled production-esque use of Zig.
I do understand what you are saying though and I don't think that I have a meaningful thing to add in that and Odin is relatively popular within some circles but the question seems to be if its popular (enough*)
> Nowadays I wouldn't recommend anyone to get a tech degree in a university unless it's a world class one. And even then, I would focus on networking and finding like-minded people rather than necessarily getting good grades.
I am a teenager and I am currently going to college. I am not going into a world class one college but its a decent college.
I think that you might be right in terms of pretty much everything in tech is on-the-job learning, but the rationale behind going to a bachelor's college is that as someone else has said here: you all are treated equally and companies come to select you. So you are competing in a much smaller pool and are able to stand out much more.
Also, I get 4 years to do what I do best so much so that I did it these 2 years as well, I just can't resist myself because I have tried to do so I just love tinkering with computers and this also puts me up to an comparatively decent advantage.
Sure, there might be some rote-learning and some things which are a bit theoretical but they might also be practical. I was learning on my own a month ago IIRC about what the 7 layers are and I am probably going to read some on my own time before going to college the book of "networking a top down approach"
This has given me 4 years to do the things that I like, the job market right now is a bit not too good but reading books about history of the dot com bubble etc. I feel decently confident that its very cyclical. Just reading the book of "how the internet happened" made me realize all the similarities with things happening right now. Every 20 years, a new generation happens and we forget the old things which have happened (IMO).
That being said, I am unsure about 11 years of the free time at the same time but honestly, it really just depends upon your subjective nature and personal preference and for someone genuinely interested within research... it could be an interesting path. I am open to every opportunity that comes in front of me and wish to try my best :-D
> Nowadays I wouldn't recommend anyone to get a tech degree in a university unless it's a world class one. And even then, I would focus on networking and finding like-minded people rather than necessarily getting good grades.
Networking is a multiplier. You realize the ability of multiplier because you have the base-line. Were you able to form the base-line because of the time spent within those 11 years, partially yes, and other comes from your natural interests and curiosity judging from the fact that you are on Hackernews for the sake of it itself.
Would a person with the strongest of networks but failing to have the baselines of (technical & managerial?) tastes/intellect and just this feeling of learning be able to do something with networking. Absolutely, people are using these top grade colleges as just a way to network and so there is a lot of froth/hype in the market. Theo Baker (a 22 year old journalist who lived in stanford) has written a book about it ("How to rule the world")
I still think that its interesting that they get to become the startup owner at such an young age and there are benefits but also tradeoffs and realizing both of these is important and making the decision wisely is important. I do envy them in some sense as well but also not so, its nuanced! and I wish them all success hopefully :-D (and I think one should keep the options open), If an opportunity comes for me to open an startup say even within college and upon proper careful thinking I get the answer to be a serious yes, I will try to follow that as well :-D
but my main point is that after a particular point in life: the multiplier feels much more important than baseline but before that, the baseline is just as important if not more, so I will try to get good grades hopefully if interests align with the subjects which I think they do.
From my understanding of the world, the world is nuanced and complicated so there isn't one size fits all so its best to keep your options around and do what you feel rationally so but rationality can also only go so far so it also depends a bit on the emotions involved and many other factors but we can't also think infinitely in recursion for everything so we need to have good instincts and ability to think deeply when needed and basically being adaptable to the situation thus me suggesting that there might not be one size fits all.
These are the talks that I have had with myself over the conflict that I myself had over going to college or not and some reasons behind going to do so, so I do realize my bias in that and I am not entirely an unbiased source but perhaps a truthful source. It so much depends on the situation of the person to decide if they should go to college or not and all factors involved imo.
Have a nice day if someone has read it till here and take care! :-D
> I thought for sure you were going to mention USPS “media” rates which allowed Amazon to ship books very cheaply.
Can you share any articles talking about that? Looks like Amazon had so many tricks up its sleeves/loopholes in its arsenal. I'd be curious to read more about it!
I have come 11 days after your comment and I was looking for this exact thread within algolia until I suddenly remembered that it had sourceforge link and then remembered vim as well and I searched on algolia "vim" "sourceforge" to find it.
So its so elegant and modern that I came back to the website by searching for it so deeply xD
I do wish as voidUpdate has said that I wish for it to be a bit more centered but its overall great!
can only speak from my personal experience, I have made a scratchpad app within Odin and it was the first language that I picked for because I wanted C-esque speed and gui libraries being built in and I even used LLM's to write the whole thing to see LLM's capabilities.
After a lot back and forth though, it was able to make it. I might link it but my point is that calling Odin niche might be same as calling every C alternative niche including Nim,D etc. You might be surprised by Vala as well!
I wanted to test Odin language and I think that its a decent language. My hiccups were in writing the glue code for taking file dialogs and another being on how to have more flexibility but it was able to connect with objC as well, but the fact that I was able to make it still impresses me to this day and I still use this tool. And after thinking of all programming languages, I ended up deciding Odin because of the things that its good at and I just wanted things to work with more simpler choices.
I just wanted to give a personal anecdote and I think that Odin could be considered a valid C competitor especially for GUI projects. I can't talk about the popularity aspect of it that much though as what feels popular to me depends on which communities I am part of and from my part using Odin and even joining their discord, it had already felt like a popular language to me (personally) at least
I think it was WebVan and you are right (but I am not entirely sure) but thanks for writing the comment, appreciate it :-D
> (which bought out the former and then went bankrupt too)
ironic, does make you think if the clock has reached full circle in terms of bubbles but there are just so many similarities within the dot com bubble and AI bubble(TM) which are just so hard to ignore.
> A clever person solves a problem; a wise person avoids it.
Wow, what a great quote!I think that this combined with "there is no free lunch" explains a lot of thing (IMO)
(I like to write and once I write, I like to send it free on the internet in the spirit of how older internet must've originally intended but if you wish to read the TLDR it is: Be wise in selecting the problems to be clever at!)
I think that this holds a lot within career-making as well, in terms of deciding what career that you want. For example, I think that sometimes I get hyper-focused on a topic and basically dig the weeds and every information about a particular topic. My recent obsession was with the dot com bubble and supply chains.
but at the same time I think that although its just good thinking about it and gives me more breath of knowledge which helps me form a more nuanced person, but that doesn't mean that for every interest that I have, I have to become the expert or a genuine professional career at it.
Some problems are worth the risk/tradeoff when thought from short term but they quickly become really painful over the long term whereas other problems are more fulfilling long term but really hurt short term and there is a balance within the middle which I have selected which is what's know as CS :-D
I am a somewhat frugal guy and my philosophy has always been of do it yourself but reading about supply chains makes me realize just how interconnected we are. A toilet making company in Japan is an irreplacable component within the AI industry (They make the ceramics sheets on which the wafers are built and they are the only company that have the genuine expertise, patent and skills for doing so and they aren't alone and there are many many companies within such thing)
and even a single aluminim screw-esque component could take like 4-5 turns from australia (mining) -> iceland (cheaper energy) -> China (making proper aluminum bars) -> Vietnam (cheaper labour than China so China itself is offshoring it) -> Back to China.
All while a software engineer from say India/America/Europe is making the website and handling the customer service and taking ad decisions/marketing while another MNC (Amazon) ships it to your doorsteps, a company can be formed anywhere nationwide, and the product could be gone to LATAM.
Basically, although I have gotten on a tangent, my main point is that not every problem has to be solved by you. the world has lots of money in every fields as its just soo interconnected and as such you should decide on the problems which are best worth your time, your expertise and your interests hopefully and tackling that problem and maybe even being clever at that! and being wise in avoiding many of other problems.
Be wise in selecting the problems to be clever at! but to be wise on selecting the problems you want to be clever at, you should be aware of other problems in the first place so its good to analyze more problems, though it could very well be a justification that I might provide myself when I am studying supply chains and the humble container, I also find it interesting how the concepts of containers become so intuitive once you know it in modern shipping and then we applied that same concept AGAIN in Docker/podman but before that time, we were none the "wiser" :-D
Borrowed time and borrowed world, and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.
“to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
Heaven is in the feet of my mother, everything else is a feeling, a feeling which can change as I grow. Something which can be passion can feel like stressful job workaholism.
Member of the LiteLLM Security Working Group. My mail: [email protected] (Feel free to say hi to me, also I am currently looking for colleges so if someone has any reference/referral, I would love it if someone can send me mail about that too!)
At some point, I just want to make something nice that my mother can be proud of, (that doesn't have to be something that she necessarily understands because she can understand my passion about a project even if it might be techie.)
I just want to be happy :-)
Previous profile of my account: https://web.archive.org/web/20260406153911/https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Imustaskforhelp (This archive also contains the previous to previous profile of my account too if someone is interested.)
Hackernews Chess Club: https://lichess.org/team/hackernews-chess-club (Password is dang)
Rest in peace, Daniel Naroditsky.