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ctur commented on Show HN: A local secrets manager with easy backup   github.com/raiyanyahya/ya... · Posted by u/RaiyanYahya
ctur · 2 months ago
It’s fun to build things like this but if you want to nourish a user base you need to fully understand the landscape of similar tools and then explain your differentiating value. This is /particularly/ important for security related tools.

Specifically you should compare and contrast to tools like SOPS, Ansible Vault, pass, etc.

ctur commented on Save your disk, write files directly into RAM with /dev/shm   hiandrewquinn.github.io/t... · Posted by u/hiAndrewQuinn
ctur · 2 months ago
This is an unnecessary optimization, particularly for the article's use case (small files that are read immediately after being written). Just use /tmp. The linux buffer cache is more than performant enough for casual usage and, indeed, most heavy usage too. It's far too easy to clog up memory with forgotten files by defaulting to /dev/shm, for instance, and you potentially also take memory away from the rest of the system until the next reboot.

For the author's purposes, any benefit is just placebo.

There absolutely are times where /dev/shm is what you want, but it requires understanding nuances and tradeoffs (e.g. you are already thinking a lot about the memory management going on, including potentially swap).

Don't use -funroll-loops either.

ctur commented on Advent of Code 2024   adventofcode.com/2024/abo... · Posted by u/thinkingemote
ctur · 9 months ago
Woohoo, one of the highlights of this time of year. I had to do mine from an eastbound flight over the pacific. This has become a fun tradition not just for me personally but for many friends, colleagues, and fellow HNers. Big props once again to wastl and his helper elves for making this!

I encourage anyone who gets value from this to donate to support it if they can. It is a passion project but nonetheless comes with real costs.

ctur commented on Were RNNs all we needed?   arxiv.org/abs/2410.01201... · Posted by u/beefman
xnx · a year ago
It's curse and a blessing that discussion of topics happens in so many different places. I found this comment on Twitter/X interesting: https://x.com/fchollet/status/1841902521717293273

"Interesting work on reviving RNNs. https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.01201 -- in general the fact that there are many recent architectures coming from different directions that roughly match Transformers is proof that architectures aren't fundamentally important in the curve-fitting paradigm (aka deep learning)

Curve-fitting is about embedding a dataset on a curve. The critical factor is the dataset, not the specific hard-coded bells and whistles that constrain the curve's shape. As long as your curve is sufficiently expressive all architectures will converge to the same performance in the large-data regime."

ctur · a year ago
Architecture matters because while deep learning can conceivably fit a curve with a single, huge layer (in theory... Universal approximation theorem), the amount of compute and data needed to get there is prohibitive. Having a good architecture means the theoretical possibility of deep learning finding the right N dimensional curve becomes a practical reality.

Another thing about the architecture is we inherently bias it with the way we structure the data. For instance, take a dataset of (car) traffic patterns. If you only track the date as a feature, you miss that some events follow not just the day-of-year pattern but also holiday patterns. You could learn this with deep learning with enough data, but if we bake it into the dataset, you can build a model on it _much_ simpler and faster.

So, architecture matters. Data/feature representation matters.

ctur commented on Better Dotfiles   iamdan.me/better-dotfiles... · Posted by u/dansalias
ctur · a year ago
But not all things you might do with a dotfile (or, more generally, per-user customization) are just replacing files. Things like cronjobs, brew installs, `defaults` in MacOS, etc. Viewing dotfile-based customization as strictly files to obliterate with pre-existing files is needlessly myopic.

For this broader problem, there are other more complete solutions that are more robust and flexible. Personally I like dotbot (https://github.com/anishathalye/dotbot) as a balance between power and simplicity, particularly when managing files across multiple OS homedirs (e.g. linux server, macos laptop).

ctur commented on Arizona toddler rescued after getting trapped in a Tesla with a dead battery   theverge.com/2024/6/21/24... · Posted by u/belter
ctur · a year ago
Reread the story. The child wasn’t left in the car for an extended period (by a grandparent, not parent). The child had just been buckled into a car seat and the driver closed the door, walked around to the drivers side, and couldn’t get in.

Absolutely no indication of improper adult behavior.

ctur commented on Lessons learned from bringing promotional sweets to a conference   shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/01/... · Posted by u/ColinWright
AlbertCory · 2 years ago
Here's one you wouldn't think of: Penn Jillette (of Penn & Teller) wrote about his radical diet that took off 100 pounds, and kept it off. It ends in a regular vegan-type diet, except he's allowed to take days off now and then.

Anyway: for the first two weeks it starts with eating only potatoes. No butter, no sour cream, no fat. Then other foods get added in.

Here's the giveaway part: he would go to show business parties and say to people, "Would you like a potato?" He claims a lot of people would say, "A potato? Sure!"

https://www.amazon.com/Presto-Pounds-Disappear-Other-Magical...

ctur · 2 years ago
We give away potatoes to trick or treaters on Halloween. They are immensely popular and we’ve become known as the potato house in our city’s Facebook groups. The weird delight on the faces of kids of all ages was hugely unexpected but surprisingly consistent.
ctur commented on The M2 is more advanced than it seemed   eclecticlight.co/2024/01/... · Posted by u/ingve
charrondev · 2 years ago
This 100%.

My personal MacBook Pro (m1 pro) feels (and benchmarks) far faster than my work M1 Max which has cylance and Jamf on it.

Recently it has had a cpu core dedicated to `find / -iname log4j-core*` which has a very unreasonable impact on everything else on the machine.

ctur · 2 years ago
Careful, your homedir has a CloudStorage folder and if you are using, say, Dropbox or Google Drive then that find will be incredibly slow (in addition to security software possibly slowing it down).
ctur commented on Fly through your shell history   github.com/cantino/mcfly... · Posted by u/lovestaco
gumby · 2 years ago
I wonder if having the search use context like cwd is a win in practice or not. I’ll have to try this out to see.

I’ve been using `history | grep` since forever (usually `history | grep foo | tail -n 5` which has been a single-character alias for more than 30 years). Hard to beat. Since history gives you the line number you can just `!12345` — no need to copy/paste, and works through an ssh connection!

ctur · 2 years ago
I find it very useful. I made a tool similar to mcfly (before knowing it existed) and use this workflow (`--here`) constantly. Also hostname context and shell session can be useful at times, too, to reconstruct something in the past.

https://github.com/chipturner/pxhist

u/ctur

KarmaCake day1354August 13, 2011
About
Opinionated Troublemaker. I work at Meta on PyTorch specifically and generally on scaling, reliability, distributed systems, etc.
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