nbouscal (u/nbouscal)

nbouscal commented on We do not think Anthropic should be designated as a supply chain risk twitter.com/OpenAI/status... · Posted by u/golfer

Birthdayboy1932 · 15 days ago

There are many claims here that Anthropic wants to enforce things with technology and OpenAI wants contract enforcement and that OpenAI's contract is weaker.

Can someone help me understand where this is coming from? Anthropic already had a contract that clearly didn't have such restrictions. Their model doesn't seem to be enforcing restrictions either as it seems like their models have been used in ways they don't like. This is not corroborated, I imagine their model was used in the recent Mexico and Venezuela attacks and that is what's triggering all the back and forth.

Also, Dario seemingly is happy about autonomous weapons and was working with the government to build such weapons, why is Anthropic considered the good side here?

https://x.com/morqon/status/2027793990834143346

nbouscal · 15 days ago

This is incorrect, their existing contract had these red lines and more until this January 9th memo: https://media.defense.gov/2026/Jan/12/2003855671/-1/-1/0/ART... which led to DoW trying to renegotiate under the new standard of “any lawful use”. Anthropic never tried to tighten standards beyond what had been in their original contract; DoW tried to loosen them.

nbouscal commented on Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible quuxplusone.github.io/blo... · Posted by u/ingve

buboard · 6 years ago

This is just a general comment on the state of tech, not personal. It seems the priorities have shifted into other things away from tech.

nbouscal · 6 years ago

There’s no such thing as general tech priorities, it’s just an amalgam of a bunch of individual priorities. In most of the cases I’ve seen those priorities are very reasonable. If you start a tech company and prioritize fiddling with internal messaging software over building your product, you’re going to fail. Prioritizing tech doesn’t mean yak shaving every random task, it means outsourcing as many non-essential tasks as you possibly can so that you have as much time and attention as possible for the one specific technical task that matters: building your product.

nbouscal commented on Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible quuxplusone.github.io/blo... · Posted by u/ingve

buboard · 6 years ago

sorry, i think if a tech company can't maintain an install for something that is crucial , then it shouldnt be a tech company.perhaps it s a marketing shop or sth.

it's as if tech is delegating so much away that in the end there will be nobody left willing to actually do the tech

nbouscal · 6 years ago

Maybe consider that we have literally hundreds of priority tasks, all of which are legitimately very important, and that while we can spend the time necessary to install and maintain non-turnkey solutions, we’d really prefer to work on one of the other priorities with that time.

nbouscal commented on Learning Haskell is no harder than learning any other programming language williamyaoh.com/posts/201... · Posted by u/nuriaion

CJefferson · 6 years ago

Well, what about this article? It claims I just have to understand 4 basic concepts to replace java, python and Ruby.

Great, so using those simple properties let's reimplement Eclipse. Let me use tensor flow. Replace my Ruby on rail website.

nbouscal · 6 years ago

I replaced Rails with PostgREST, which is written in Haskell but for me as a user is just a binary that I run in front of my database, so now I don’t have to write any backend code at all.

Good enough for you?

nbouscal commented on Ask HN: PostgreSQL or MySQL? · Posted by u/ReD_CoDE

nbouscal · 6 years ago

The following isn’t the top reason I recommend Postgres, but is the reason I think least likely to be echoed in a dozen other comments:

Postgres has some of the best documentation of any software product I’ve ever used. If someone wants to learn about SQL or databases, I always have to restrain myself from recommending that they just read the Postgres manual front to back. It’s comprehensive, it’s well written, it’s easy to navigate, and almost every explanation comes with several clear examples. It’s hard to overstate how valuable a property that is for a product as central to your architecture as your primary transactional database.

nbouscal commented on DevOps didn’t exist when I started as a developer circleci.com/blog/devops-... · Posted by u/tcsf

irrational · 7 years ago

This article was frustrating to me. When it started out in the mid-90s (which is when I started my career also), I thought our experiences would be more aligned. However, I've never worked with an operations team.

In all the places I've worked I've been expected to do everything from setting up servers (originally physical servers, later cloud servers), hardening them, installing software, optimizing the software, installing and optimizing the database, creating database schemas and related objects, writing untold number of sql queries, writing server side code, writing front end code, etc.

I was hoping that the article would explain what devops really means today and how I can jump on the devops wagon to hopefully make my job of doing all of the above easier.

nbouscal · 7 years ago

My background is more like yours. For me it’s likely a difference in size and type of companies worked for.

> I was hoping that the article would explain what devops really means today and how I can jump on the devops wagon to hopefully make my job of doing all of the above easier.

1. Use AWS Fargate for all of your backend services. Keep the architecture simple enough that complicated service discovery issues etc don’t come up. If you need coordination between services, do it through Redis or similar.

2. Use RDS unless you really need to save money or use unavailable extensions.

3. Use terraform for initially provisioning the above

4. Set up CI/CD such that merges to master automatically update your services. (I like CircleCI’s aws-ecr and aws-ecs orbs for this.)

Pretty simple recipe, but it means no setting up servers, no hardening servers, no installing or optimizing software (other than by adding it to the Dockerfile), no installing or optimizing the database.

This recommendation reflects what modern devops means to me; opinions differ. To me it means:

- Infrastructure as code (terraform rather than clicking buttons in the AWS console then later forgetting which buttons you clicked)

- Immutable infrastructure (aka cattle not pets). Never SSHing into a server again.

- Automated testing and deployment cleanly integrated with existing dev workflow

Obviously there’s a scale at which you have to do something more complex, but I’d say that’s the scale at which you previously would have had an operations team.

Getting rid of the “writing server side code” and “writing front end code” parts is beyond the scope of devops, but you can skip a lot of the “writing server side code” part by using PostgREST. In exchange you may have to write an even-more-untold number of SQL queries, depending on your current practices.

Edit: Someone helpfully pointed out that I forgot to mention anything about logging or monitoring, which is a pretty glaring omission. On that front I strongly recommend Honeycomb. To set it up with Fargate you may need to run it in a sidecar container, but it’s fairly straightforward.

nbouscal commented on How I use the good parts of AWS twitter.com/dvassallo/sta... · Posted by u/DVassallo

spondyl · 7 years ago

What happens with Fargate if you need to SSH into the underlying instance? I haven't used it myself, and I'm not sure that it truly abstracts away the EC2 instance, but the description of Fargate always made me assume that to be the case.

nbouscal · 7 years ago

I assume eatonphil is correct, but to be honest I’ve never even tried, and in my view that’s actually part of the point: full commitment to immutable infrastructure, made really easy. If something needs to change, I tweak the Dockerfile or the task definition or a config file and redeploy. No more SSH.

nbouscal commented on How I use the good parts of AWS twitter.com/dvassallo/sta... · Posted by u/DVassallo

eatonphil · 7 years ago

ECS Fargate is an option for fully managed container runtime/scheduling on AWS today. We're looking into using this for deploying applications. Anyone here had experience with it?

nbouscal · 7 years ago

I’m using Fargate for almost everything now, and am never going back. It’s extremely simple and easy, does exactly what it says it does, and saves me a ton of time and headaches. (I use Terraform to set up services, and CircleCI (with the ECS orb) to deploy updates.)

nbouscal commented on Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken? · Posted by u/csdrane

nbouscal · 8 years ago

Linear Dynamical Systems by Stephen Boyd of Stanford: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bf1264iFr-w&list=PL06960BA52...

Programming Languages by Dan Grossman of University of Washington: https://www.coursera.org/learn/programming-languages

nbouscal commented on Why Tesla Is Worth More Than GM technologyreview.com/s/60... · Posted by u/havella

kgwgk · 9 years ago

Actually adventured is right on non-operating cash being usually discounted. In general the second company will not be valued at $10bn more than the first.

Would you rather have a $1 in cash and a $9 share in the first company, or a $10 share in the second company where $1 is the cash per share? The second case is more risky so you wouldn't pay the full extra $1 for the second share.

Of course it could also be the case that the spread is larger than $1, if the first company is too short on cash and there is a liquidity risk depressing the valuation.

nbouscal · 9 years ago

> The second case is more risky

Not if they're otherwise identical companies, it isn't. There may be reasons to expect a correlation between risk and cash holdings, or something to that effect, but ultimately a share in a company is a share of ownership of that company's assets. If a company didn't become $10B more valuable when given $10B in cash, where exactly did that value disappear to? Value doesn't vanish into thin air simply because it's now owned by a company.