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dent9 commented on Ask HN: Why does the US Visa application website do a port-scan of my network?    · Posted by u/mbix77
mrtksn · 11 days ago
That would be quite clever for an incredibly horrible website. The other day my SO, who is a Turkish citizen, was filling up her visa application and after half an hour of meticulous form filling the system just kick her out. I think the session times out or something. If you haven't created an account or you haven't write down the current application ID everything is lost. In the process she was also directed to a non-.gov website for something during the process, I thought she was getting scammed but no.

It actually makes sense to have a paid service that makes this abomination less painful. Though they work with VFS Global for collecting the applications and relevant documents, the VFS Global itself is an abomination and doesn't help with the handling of the form filling anyway.

Recently EU streamlined the Schengen visa application process for Turkish citizens as those "visa agencies" that are the official agencies and the only way to apply for a visa for many countries don't actually help with anything and are scamming people by selling the "good hours" for the visa appointment on the black market. An agency was dropped for this and the scams by agencies were listed among the reasons to streamline the application process.

Both with US and EU people are losing scholarships etc. due to outrageous wait times that are sometimes are years ahead or there's an issue with the systems handling the applications.

I guess there must be an opportunity there to fix all this together with smaller stuff like handling transliteration and character encodings, I wonder if some of those scam site are not scams and actually help with it. An AI agent can be useful here.

dent9 · 10 days ago
> In the process she was also directed to a non-.gov website for something during the process, I thought she was getting scammed but no.

No clue if this specific instance if scam but such scams have indeed been done before

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdr56vl410go

> According to Ablakwa, a locally recruited staff member and "collaborators" were allegedly involved in a "fraudulent" scheme whereby they extracted money from visa and passport applicants.

> It is alleged that the scheme consisted of creating an unauthorised link on the embassy's website to redirect visa and passport applicants to a private firm where they were "charged extra for multiple services" without the knowledge of the foreign ministry.

> Ablakwa added that the staff member "kept the entire proceeds" in their private account, and that the scheme had been going on for five years.

> Applicants seeking visas were charged unapproved fees ranging from almost $30 (£22) to $60 by the private firm.

dent9 commented on Ask HN: With all the AI hype, how are software engineers feeling?    · Posted by u/cpt100
ponector · 20 days ago
How can AI search into documentation, if the documentation is a thousands of obsolete and contradicting Jira tickets, few outdated Confluence pages with mail attachments and handful of excel files on SharePoint?
dent9 · 19 days ago
Supposedly there is a way to get an AI to do exactly this, we have it slated as an "intern project". Which feels ironic in itself. Using an intern to figure out how to get an AI to rectify our Jira and train on our confluence to help us and our users
dent9 commented on An engineer's perspective on hiring   jyn.dev/an-engineers-pers... · Posted by u/pabs3
maccard · 21 days ago
I’ve interviewed enough people to staff a company and I disagree.

You really really need to go through an actual code exercise with them. It’s staggering how many people I’ve interviewed who can talk the talk but when confronted with with a 50 line class full of glaring issues for a code review exercise, they can’t find any of the actual problems. The great thing about it is that the good people will spot the super obvious ones in about 5 seconds and you can just move on from it very quickly.

We’re talking c++ programmers with a decade of experience not spotting basic RAII, missing pointer checks and straight up logic bugs for the domain that we interview for and hire in (games).

dent9 · 20 days ago
It sounds like you should just use better programming languages that don't break constantly.
dent9 commented on Ask HN: Do you struggle with flow state when using AI assisted coding tools?    · Posted by u/rasca
dent9 · 23 days ago
AI auto complete in your IDE is one of the worst gimmicks in the past decade, but not as bad as letting the AI write the code for you.

I had to turn that crap off because how are you supposed to concentrate on your code when the VS Code is incessantly throwing snippets at you?

It looks cool when you watch other people with it enabled but actually programming that way is like getting slapped in the face between each key stroke.

After fifteen minutes you realize that you spent all your time reading the opaque auto complete suggestions trying to figure out what they're doing and how they work, instead of actually getting any code committed.

I will tell ChatGPT what my context and situation is and review it's suggestions and then select the parts I want to copy paste in by hand and manually test. That's been pretty effective and it's basically a more effective drop in replacement for searching Stack Overflow for each code snippet you need. But putting the AI inside your editor is the biggest over hyped time waster I ever seen

dent9 commented on We shouldn't have needed lockfiles   tonsky.me/blog/lockfiles/... · Posted by u/tobr
dent9 · 24 days ago
This article is written by someone who has never worked outside a single ecosystem
dent9 commented on Seagate gets its long-awaited HAMR tech into $600 30TB HDDs you can buy   arstechnica.com/gadgets/2... · Posted by u/moelf
RainyDayTmrw · a month ago
Do these drives have any unusual performance characteristics, like shingled magnetic recording (SMR) has?
dent9 · a month ago
No. I have five of the 28TB drives and they're fine.
dent9 commented on Seagate gets its long-awaited HAMR tech into $600 30TB HDDs you can buy   arstechnica.com/gadgets/2... · Posted by u/moelf
jauntywundrkind · a month ago
With a 1 year warranty (as seen on Newegg's $600 drives), I might just chance it for the refurbs.

28TB for $350, with a 6 month warranty, is wildly good. https://www.ebay.com/itm/236112931239

There's so much insanely awesome tech in these drives. "12nm integrated controller" (meh ok). nanophotonic laser (fancy led?). photonic funnel. superlattice platinum-alloy media. plasmonic writer. quantum antenna. https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/hdds/new-hamr-las...

> In HAMR HDDs, the nanophotonic laser diode heats tiny portions of drive media to temperatures of 400°C ~ 450°C to reduce its magnetic coercivity before the plasmonic writer writes data to this area.

I get that it's a very very small area. I am curious though how power consumption compares!

It's crazy how far ahead Seagate has gotten. WD and Toshiba haven't been making anywhere near the progress, it feels like. Exos drives are crazy high performance and stunningly affordable.

dent9 · a month ago
Buy the 28TB models from Server Part Deals. Don't use eBay it's awful if you need to utilize the sellers warranty past 90 days.
dent9 commented on Ask HN: What's Your Useful Local LLM Stack?    · Posted by u/Olshansky
CamperBob2 · 2 months ago
NEVER recommend using "pip install" directly, always recommend "python3 -m pip install"

Just out of curiosity, what's the difference?

Seems like all the cool kids are using uv.

dent9 · a month ago
If you ever find yourself arguing about the best Python package manager then you've already lost. Just use a real language with real library management. I dropped Python for Go and haven't looked back. There's plenty other alternatives. Python is such a waste of time.
dent9 commented on Ask HN: What's Your Useful Local LLM Stack?    · Posted by u/Olshansky
clvx · 2 months ago
In a related subject, what’s the best hardware to run local LLM’s for this use case? Assuming a budget of no more of $2.5K.

And, is there an open source implementation of an agentic workflow (search tools and others) to use it with local LLM’s?

dent9 · a month ago
You can get used RTX 3090 for $750-800 each. Pro tip; look for 2.5 slot sized models line EVGA XC3 or the older blower models. Then you can get two for $1600, fit them in a full size case, 128GB DDR5 for $300, some Ryzen CPU like the 9900X and a mobo and case and PSU to fill up the rest of the budget. If you want to skimp you can drop one of the GPUs until you're sure you need 48GB VRAM and some of the RAM but you really don't save that much. Just make sure you get a case that can fit multiple full size GPU and a mobo that can support it as well. The slot configurations are pretty bad on the AM5 generation for multi GPU. You'll probably end up with a mobo such as Asus ProArt

Also none of this is worth the money because it's simply not possible to run the same kinds of models you pay for online on a standard home system. Things like ChatGPT 4o use more VRAM than you'll ever be able to scrounge up unless your budget is closer to $10,000-25,000+. Think multiple RTX A6000 cards or similar. So ultimately you're better off just paying for the online hosted services

dent9 commented on Ballista: Distributed Compute with Rust, Apache Arrow, and Kubernetes   andygrove.io/2019/07/anno... · Posted by u/andygrove
kyllo · 6 years ago
This is really cool! What do you see as ideally the primary API for something like this?

SQL is great for relational algebra expressions to transform tables but its limited support for variables and control flow constructs make it less than ideal for complex, multi-step data analysis scripts. And when it comes to running statistical tests, regressions, training ML models, it's wholly inappropriate.

Rust is a very expressive systems programming language, but it's unclear at this point how good of a fit it can be for data analysis and statistical programming tasks. It doesn't have much in the way of data science libraries yet.

Would you potentially add e.g. a Python interpreter on top of such a framework, or would you focus on building out a more fully-featured Rust API for data analysis and even go so far as to suggest that data scientists start to learn and use Rust? (There is some precedence for this with Scala and Spark)

dent9 · 6 years ago
> Would you potentially add e.g. a Python interpreter

Why would this be a desired feature? The Python ecosystem is a mess, simply having an interpreter in no ways means that you would be able to get your Python script to run, I think its much better to simply do a system call on a Python script against the Python stack in $PATH e.g. use a container based approach

u/dent9

KarmaCake day5July 22, 2019View Original