Hey guys, I built roads.fyi.

The goal is to give a transparent view on which roads need work, which are well maintained and the common issues. This will be help us allocate resources more efficiently.

Features:

1) Submit a a road report near you with details. Report can be positive, mixed or negative.

2) View recently submitted reports.

3) View a country wide or area wise leaderboard of roads. Hall of Fame shows the best roads, Hall of Shame shows the worst roads.

4) View details and frequency of specific issues (e.g., "Potholes", "Blocked footpath")

Please check it out and submit a report. Thoughts, feedback and bug reports welcome!

What does a green username indicate? New user?

Correct

Who's pg?

Paul Graham - founder of YCombinator

I agree with the risks, the overall theme being it's much easier to potentially manipulate a million internet votes than physical. In other worlds, internet vote manipulation scales significantly more than physical.

But I could make the argument with any high trust internet system.

Let's take another high trust activity we do on the internet - banking. Internet banking gives a hacker the ability to steal millions while sitting across the world. This is the same argument the authors make about changing a million votes.

So it really comes down to the pros vs cons. That's the more important discussion imo.

Do the benefits of internet voting outweigh the cons?

Unless you’re talking about crypto, your internet banking hacker will not get away with anything significant. You can’t just “hack the bank” and take a million dollars. Banks only transfer funds digitally to one another by agreement through systems like SWIFT, and these transactions are traceable and reversible. Changing some ones and zeros in your account and then attempting to withdraw it all would raise a ton of flags, and you would need to breach an unrealistic number of systems and processes to make it possible.

At best you might be able to scam someone into sending you a few hundred dollars via Zelle. Some scam centers do this 24/7, but it isn’t that easy, and apparently they rely on human trafficking to acquire free labor.

The complex systems backing internet banking (including the people and processes) are immense in scale. They evolved over decades and were honed and improved as real problems occurred. Needless to say, there is no room for iterative trial and error in elections.

If you hack the bank you get very little, at least today. If you hack an election you get everything. No thanks. No to electronic voting.

> Let's take another high trust activity we do on the internet - banking. Internet banking gives a hacker the ability to steal millions while sitting across the world. This is the same argument the authors make about changing a million votes.

Bank fraud happens all of the time and at scale. However, it is entirely insurable and reversible.

Election fraud is not reversible. Trust cannot be restored in the way that a bank account can.

Internet banking is not anonymized. Voting should be.

Flawed? Sure, although every language has its flaws, some more than others. Deeply flawed? Not really. Obsolete? Lol, what. It's top 3 most popular languages.

> Python's performance problems are unfixable

Python's performance, aka runtime, is irrelevant for this application.

Getting things done is a much better goal that being modern.

Python is very good for getting things done for a wide range of applications.

> Python's performance, aka runtime, is irrelevant for this application.

While you are doing toy schematics, maybe.

> Getting things done is a much better goal that being modern.

If you don't care when this "getting things done" creates unmaintainable mess, perhaps.

Using python as platform for language design shows that the authors of "Autopile" are uninformed.

> While you are doing toy schematics, maybe.

How many boards have more than 100k elements? (I'm reasonably certain that they can handle more, but ....)

Your assumption that Python necessarily results in an "unmaintainable mess" is "interesting," that is, wrong. More to the point, unmaintainable messes can be written in any language, no matter how "modern."

Not only that, but it's irrelevant. When I was a young engineer, I pointed out that a given system wasn't scalable. The person in charge of the project said "Yes, but by the time that scalability matters, I won't even be managing the person whose problem that is."

As to whether their choice of Python is fatal, feel free to do it better in a "modern language."

If you're right, you'll do well and good. If you're wrong...

What? You're not going to step into the ring?

> I'm reasonably certain that they can handle more

"reasonably" is out of place here.

> our assumption that Python necessarily results in an "unmaintainable mess" is "interesting," that is, wrong.

It's not assumption, it's a conclusion based on the state of Python's "ecosystem"

> As to whether their choice of Python is fatal, feel free to do it better in a "modern language."

Yeah, the only people who can judge food are cooks themselves.

My guess would be they have multiple backups. I obviously can't say for sure since I don't work there, but it's very very good guess.

Right but this doesn't necessarily have to be a drive failure. (Pun not intended.) Imagine if there was some id collision due to a db migration or something, and then one user ends up deleting the other user's data accross all backups. Unless google never deletes any data, even when the user deletes it themselves, then you can't be saved from that.

Theoretically possible, but (super super super) unlikely. I'd also think that when a user "permanently" deletes their data, it would still be on Google servers for a specified time (maybe a week?).

Again, all guesses. But if someone offered me a bet, I'd wager 1:10,000 that the data is permanently deleted. Extremely unlikely.

30 days has become the industry wide standard for keeping data explicitly deleted by a user.

There are many types of backups (e.g. replication, point-in-time replication, periodic incremental backups, periodic full backups) and not all of them project against the worst kind of issues, e.g. a software bug that accidentally deletes a whole bunch of data.

For Gmail, Google keeps backups of mail boxes and their transaction log. This way they can rewind the mailbox over a period of weeks.

It's basically a continuous backup.

What / who do mean by "Sunny"?

I think OP means they used AI to create/code the app, instead of AI being used in the app.

I use AI every day for all kinds of stuff… it might be time to tell if you handcrafted something like in the olden days

I thought it was funny. Is this is no fun zone?

The cost of power (electricity) is much lesser than the cost of time.

That's only for GPU-hungry. If you have >100k GPU then the cost of power is going to be much more relevant.

That's not abundantly clear. Some of the facilities in the article cost $100k/hr.

The cost of electricity for running a single RTX 4090 a year: $800 (calculation below). Cost to the company of the median developer: $200,000.

Assume a 20 cent cost of 1 kWh, then a RTX 4090 with a 450W power draw for a year costs: 0.45 * 24 * 365 * 0.20 = $788.4

Moreover, considering the cost of the card itself at $1,600, the electricity expenses become relatively minor. In fact, for the price of the card, you could operate it non-stop for two years. This highlights how the cost of electricity is a small factor in the overall picture.

No, this highlights that electricity is virtually all of the TCO over the life of the device. It doesn't sound like you've done a lot of TCO work before. In any case we're talking about facilities containing tens of thousands of these devices, so the TCO of one of them is irrelevant.

I don't understand your point. Yes, electricity is virtually all the TCO of the device (other than the upfront cost). Isn't that the case for any consumer electronic part - processor, memory, hdd, etc? That fact doesn't change any of what I'm trying to say.

My point is that this cost (of electricity) is negligible relative to two other costs - cost of time (in other words, cost of human capital), and the upfront cost of the device itself.

This is a response to your comment "Wait, why? Is it more important to organizations to wait a little less time, or to spend less money (on electricity)?"

Do you have unlimited money glitch?