Monday, 28 February 2022

New top story on Hacker News: Launch HN: Drifting in Space (YC W22) – A server process for every user
Launch HN: Drifting in Space (YC W22) – A server process for every user
27 by paulgb | 1 comments on Hacker News.
Hi HN, we’re Paul and Taylor, and we’re launching Drifting in Space ( https://ift.tt/82AJLYS ). We build server software for performance-intensive browser-based applications. We make it easy to give every user of your app a dedicated server-side process, which starts when they open your application and stops when they close the tab. Many high-end web apps give every user a dedicated connection to a server-side process. That is how they get the low latency that you need for ambitious products like full-fledged video editing tools and IDEs. This is hard for smaller teams to recreate, because it takes a significant ongoing engineering investment. That’s where we come in—we make this architecture available to everyone, so you can focus on your app instead of its infrastructure. You can think of it like Heroku, except that each of your users gets their own server instance. I realized that something like this was needed while working on data-intensive tools at a hedge fund. I noticed that almost all new application software, whether it was built in-house or third-party SaaS, was delivered as a browser application rather than native. Although browsers are more powerful than ever, I knew from experience that industrial-scale data-heavy apps posed problems, because neither the browser or a traditional stateless server architecture could provide the compute resources needed for low-latency interaction with large datasets. I began talking about this with my friend Taylor, who had encountered similar limitations while working on data analysis and visualization tools at Datadog and Uber. We decided to team up and build a company around solving it. We have two products, an open source package and a managed platform. Spawner, the open source part, provides an API for web apps to spawn a session-lived process. It manages the process’s lifecycle, exposing it over HTTPS, tracking inbound connections, and shutting it down when it becomes idle (i.e. when the user closes their tab). It’s open source (MIT) and available at https://ift.tt/P3ovKHk . Jamsocket is our managed platform, which uses Spawner internally. It provides the same API, but frees you from having to deal with any cluster or network configuration to ship code. From an app developer’s point of view, using it is similar to using platforms like Netlify or Render. You stay in the web stack and never have to touch Kubernetes. Here's an example. Imagine you make an application for investigating fraud in a large transaction database. Users want to interactively filter, aggregate, and visualize gigabytes of transactions as a graph. Instead of sending all of the data down to the browser and doing the work there, you would put your code in a container and upload it to our platform. Then, whenever a fraud analyst opens your application, you hit an API we provide to spin up a dedicated backend for that analyst. Your browser code then opens a WebSocket connection directly to that backend, which it uses to stream data as the analyst applies filters or zooms/pans the visualization. We're different from most managed platforms because we give each user a dedicated process. That said, there are a few other services that do run long-lived processes for each user. Architecturally, we're most similar to Agones. Agones is targeted at games where the client can speak UDP to an arbitrary IP; we target applications that want to connect directly from browsers to a hostname over HTTPS. In the Erlang world, the OTP stack provides similar functionality, but you have to embrace Erlang/Elixir to get the benefits of it; we are entirely language-agnostic. Cloudflare Durable Objects support a form of long-lived processes, but are focused on use cases around program state synchronization rather than arbitrary high-compute/memory use cases. We have a usage-based billing model, similar to Heroku. We charge you for the compute you use and take a cut. Usage billing scales to zero, so it’s approachable for weekend experiments. We have not solidified a price plan yet, but we’re aiming to provide an instance capable of running VS Code (as an example) for about 10 cents an hour, fractionally metered. High-memory and high-CPU backends will cost more, and heavy users will get volume discounts. Our target customers are desktop-like SaaS apps and internal data tools. As mentioned, our core API is open source and available at https://ift.tt/P3ovKHk . The managed platform is in beta and we’re currently onboarding users from a waitlist, to make sure that we have the server capacity to scale. If you’re interested, you’re welcome to sign up for it here: https://ift.tt/82AJLYS . Have you built a similar infrastructure for your application? We’re interested in hearing the approaches people have already taken to this problem and what the pain points are.

Sunday, 27 February 2022

Saturday, 26 February 2022

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Esolang Park, a visual debugger for esolangs
Show HN: Esolang Park, a visual debugger for esolangs
14 by nilaymaj | 2 comments on Hacker News.
Hey HN! Esolang Park is an online visual debugger interface for esoteric programming languages, that I've been working on for the past few months. For every supported language, Esolang Park provides the powerful Monaco code editor, syntax checking, debugging functionality and a visualisation of the runtime state. The core is language-agnostic - a "language provider" only needs to implement the esolang's parser, interpreter and visualisation UI (and some other little stuff). Apart from trying to boost DX for esolangs, the idea is for this to grow into a platform where people can discover and play around with a variety of esolangs without leaving the browser. That's quite far away though - the project is quite early in development and currently only has 5 languages (Befunge-93, Brainf*ck, Chef, Deadfish and Shakespeare). Some features like non-debugging execution mode (0ms interval) are missing too. Currently the entire source code[0] (core + language providers) is written in TypeScript and React. Esolang code execution happens in a web worker. I'm planning to add support for WASM-based language providers for better performance, particularly for non-debugging execution. There's also a wiki[1] containing a description of the core design and a guide for implementing and contributing new language providers. Looking to hear some feedback on the idea and current implementation - bug reports are welcome too! [0] https://ift.tt/RKPLgbA [1] https://ift.tt/Q0kvIuW

Friday, 25 February 2022

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Cloning a musical instrument from 16 seconds of audio
Show HN: Cloning a musical instrument from 16 seconds of audio
21 by abdljasser2 | 2 comments on Hacker News.
In 2020, Magenta released DDSP [1], a machine learning algorithm / python library which made it possible to generate good sounding instrument synthesizers from about 6-10 minutes of data. While working with DDSP for a project, we realised how it was actually quite hard to find 6-10 minute of clean recordings of monophonic instruments. In this project, we have combined the DDSP architecture with a domain adaptation technique from speech synthesis [2]. This domain adaptation technique works by pre-training our model on many different recordings from the Solos dataset [3] first and then fine-tuning parts of the model to the new recording. This allows us to produce decent sounding instrument synthesisers from as little as 16 seconds of target audio instead of 6-10 minutes. [1] https://ift.tt/cdPY8O9 [2] https://ift.tt/xUdJoz8 [3] https://ift.tt/aFO0Pvo We hope to publish a paper on the topic soon.

Thursday, 24 February 2022

Wednesday, 23 February 2022

Tuesday, 22 February 2022

Monday, 21 February 2022

Sunday, 20 February 2022

Saturday, 19 February 2022

New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: Quit caffeine? Before and after anecdotes
Ask HN: Quit caffeine? Before and after anecdotes
40 by rubicon33 | 44 comments on Hacker News.
Have you completely cut caffeine out of your life? How did that affect your creativity, problem solving, programming skills, general mood, etc? Asking because I’ve noticed a trend over my years of software that the best developers don’t drink coffee and don’t appear to consume caffeine in any other forms (at least not at work). Just looking for anecdotes!

Friday, 18 February 2022

Thursday, 17 February 2022

Wednesday, 16 February 2022

New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: Has Amazon been hounding you?
Ask HN: Has Amazon been hounding you?
18 by matthewfcarlson | 14 comments on Hacker News.
I was talking to a friend about how Amazon recruiters have sent me an email almost every weekday since Decemberish (sometimes two or three) and they mentioned that they had experienced something similar. It is different recruiters, so it's not just one particularly persistent individual. Is anyone else seeing similar? Is Amazon desperate?

Tuesday, 15 February 2022

Monday, 14 February 2022

Sunday, 13 February 2022

New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: Tools to visualize data in SQL databases?
Ask HN: Tools to visualize data in SQL databases?
10 by dyml | 5 comments on Hacker News.
I’d like to hear what tools you use to easily visualize the data in a sql table? Preferably I’d just like to click on a MariaDB table and receive some plots and statistics on the columns. Whats your experience on this? Edit: to clarify, I don’t want to visualize the database itself (Schema’s, keys etc). Just the data within it.

Saturday, 12 February 2022

Friday, 11 February 2022

Thursday, 10 February 2022

Wednesday, 9 February 2022

Tuesday, 8 February 2022

Monday, 7 February 2022

Sunday, 6 February 2022

New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: How can I help you?
Ask HN: How can I help you?
30 by shepik | 10 comments on Hacker News.
I always prioritized having broad skillset rather than focusing on a single thing, but i'm now having doubts about it. I'd like to discover if my skills are useful by applying them to solve someone's challenges. If talking to me might help you - please drop me an email or schedule a call (the address is in the profile). Free & no strings attached. About me: - co-founder/ex-CTO/ex-CPO of a russian company with $15M arr - people usually describe me as a "smart guy" - had to solve a problem that required using nlp, so i organized data labelling team, finetuned BERT, and integrated it into a larger system - know some finance. unit economy, operating costs, that sort of thing - did a lot of a/b tests and conversion experiments - bitmap indexes, fractal trees, k-d trees - i like indexes and trees - developed software using python, golang, php, c++ - clickhouse user for 3 or 4 years. also, mongodb, vertica, presto - did some custdev and qualitative interviews - have some experience managing outbound sales reps; but still, i'm a builder/hacker, not a hustler (I realize this post looks a bit like a sneaky "hire me" post - but i assure you, that is not my intention)

Saturday, 5 February 2022

New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: Best hosted alternative to Google Workspace for email?
Ask HN: Best hosted alternative to Google Workspace for email?
48 by CharlesW | 47 comments on Hacker News.
So with Google starting to charge previously-free users, I've decided that I'd rather give my money to someone else. I'd like a provider who is likely to be around in a decade or two. Tips on moving many years of Google email to a new provider are appreciated as well!

Friday, 4 February 2022

New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: Is there any tool for benchmarking responsiveness for Linux?
Ask HN: Is there any tool for benchmarking responsiveness for Linux?
25 by c0deR3D | 13 comments on Hacker News.
System76 recently announced their responsiveness optimizer, System76 Scheduler [0], which basically works as a daemon, adjusting the nice value and the CFS knobs for processes in the box for increased responsiveness. They've claimed that the responsiveness is therefore increased, which I'm also believed so. However, this got me wondering, is there exists any tool that can report the "numbers" (e.g., scheduling latency) regarding to the responsivenss? Maybe Google has such tool for testing regression for Android or Chrome OS, sadly, I didn't managed to find one. Thanks! [0] https://ift.tt/hPaDI3s

Thursday, 3 February 2022

Wednesday, 2 February 2022

New top story on Hacker News: Launch HN: Sieve (YC W22) – Pluggable APIs for Video Search
Launch HN: Sieve (YC W22) – Pluggable APIs for Video Search
24 by mvoodarla | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Hi HN, we’re Mokshith and Abhi from Sieve ( https://sievedata.com ). We’re building an API that lets you add video search to internal tools or customer applications, instantly. Sieve can process 24 hours of video in less than 10 minutes, and makes it easy to search video by detected objects / characteristics, motion data, and visual similarity. You can use our models out of the box, or plug-in your own model endpoints into our infrastructure. ('Model' here means any software that produces output given an image.) Every industry from security, to media, supply chain, construction, retail, sports, and agriculture is being transformed by video analytics—but setting up the infrastructure to process video data quickly is difficult. Having to deal with video ingestion pipelines, computer-vision model training, and search functionality is not pretty. We’re building a platform that takes care of all of this so teams can focus on their domain-expertise, building industry-specific software. We met in high school, and were on the robotics team together. It was our first exposure to computer vision, and something we both deeply enjoyed. We ended up going to UC Berkeley together and worked on computer vision at places like Scale AI, Niantic, Ford, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Second Spectrum. We were initially trying to solve problems for ourselves as computer vision developers but quickly realized the unique problems in video having to do with cost, efficiency, and scale. We also realized how important video would be in lots of verticals, and saw an opportunity to build infrastructure which wouldn’t have to be rebuilt by a fullstack dev at any company again. Let’s take the example of cloud software for construction which might include tons of features from asset trackers to rental management and compliance checks. It doesn’t make sense for a construction software company to build their own video processing for telematics—the density and scale of video make this a difficult task. A single 30 FPS camera generates over 2.5M frames within a day of recording. Imagine this across thousands of cameras and many weeks of footage—not to mention the actual vertical-specific software they’re building for end users. Sieve takes care of everything hard about processing and searching video. Our API allows you to process and search video with just two API calls. We use filtering, parallelization, and interpolation techniques to keep costs low, while being able to process 24 hours of video in under 10 minutes. Users can choose from our pre-existing set of models, or use their own models with our video processing engine. Our pricing can range anywhere from $0.08-$0.45 per minute of video processed based on the models clients are interested in and usage volume. Our FAQ page ( https://ift.tt/KIxVDR9vO ) explains these factors in more detail. Our backend is built on serverless functions. We split each video into individual chunks which are processed in parallel and passed through multiple layers of filters to determine which chunks are “important”. We’re able to algorithmically ignore parts of video which are static, or change minimally, and focus on the parts that contain real action. We then run more expensive models on the most “important” parts of video, and interpolate results across frames to return information to customers at 30 FPS granularity. Our customers simply push signed video URLs to our platform, and this happens automatically. You can then use our API to query for intervals of interest. We haven’t built an automated sign up flow yet because we're focused on building out the core product for now. But we wanted to give all of you the chance to try Sieve on your own videos for free, so we've set up a special process for HN users. Try it out here: https://ift.tt/ZmRvPa6cK... . We'll email you a personal, limited-access API key. Here's a video demo of using our dashboard to do video search: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uyjp_HGZl4 We’d love to hear what you think about the product and vision, and ideas on how we can improve it. Thanks for taking the time to read this, we’re grateful to be posting here :)

Tuesday, 1 February 2022

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Atlas – A deployment pipeline platform built on Argo CD
Show HN: Atlas – A deployment pipeline platform built on Argo CD
17 by mihirpandya | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Atlas is an open-source deployment pipeline platform built for cloud-native applications. Atlas allows users to: - Create continuous pipelines across all their environments and clusters - Add custom tasks/tests plugins (Python scripts, K8S manifests, Argo Workflows, environment setup, etc.) - Automatically rollback applications in case of failure or degradation (Atlas watches the application past the scope of a pipeline run to ensure and enforce stability) - Use all existing Argo features Would love to hear all of your feedback and thoughts on this!

New top story on Hacker News: Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (February 2022)
Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (February 2022)
50 by whoishiring | 86 comments on Hacker News.
Share your information if you are looking for work. Please use this format: Location: Remote: Willing to relocate: Technologies: Résumé/CV: Email: Readers: please only email these addresses to discuss work opportunities. Searchers: try https://ift.tt/ycdjkFYON or https://ift.tt/HbAK3Pkc9 .