Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | latchkey's comments login

I apologize for removing the word spam (and apologized to C&C directly as well). I mistook it as a mistake on their part since the word "spam" was not used anywhere else in the article. They put it in there as an assumption that people would just get it and I did not. My bad!

I'm back in Vietnam (Saigon) for the first time in 4 years and it has been like a time machine. Covid definitely left its mark on this country due to the severe lockdowns they went through. The most interesting change I've noticed is that nearly everyone speaks at least a little English now. Attributed to being locked inside and a lot of YouTube.

It used to be difficult/expensive to get drones here, but I see DJI stores all over town now. Seeing this is super cool and speaks towards how innovative and creative Vietnamese get with whatever they can get their hands on.


> I'm back in Vietnam (Saigon) for the first time in 4 years and it has been like a time machine. Covid definitely left its mark on this country due to the severe lockdowns they went through. The most interesting change I've noticed is that nearly everyone speaks at least a little English now.

Interesting - here in Japan the consensus is that the level of English went down, as we had a few years of no tourists and no language assistants.


Today, as a tourist in Japan many restaurants and bars outside of Kyoto, Tokyo, and Osaka and some in those places will not serve me food or a whiskey highball because I am not Japanese. They say "No English" as the reason. Four African students who recently graduated from the University of Kyoto were refused entry into a bar in Kyoto as I walked by. They all speak English and Japanese fluently unlike many of their Japanese classmates. This is high contrast to Vietnam where people would stop me as I walked down the street offering me a beer poured from a pitcher, a seat at their table on the sidewalk, or food and they would try to speak English with me. I also noticed that there is a lot of cooperation between people of different countries in Asia done with English. I would not be surprised if the common language of the Chinese and Vietnamese people mentioned in the article is English.

Vietnam is my favorite place in Asia. It felt like the country is trying very hard to address many of the environmental problems like moving from gas powered to electric vehicles.


I've traveled all over Asia and lived in many countries for extended periods. It's also been my experience that the Vietnamese are the most welcoming and genuinely interested in talking to foreigners.

> It felt like the country is trying very hard to address many of the environmental problems like moving from gas powered to electric vehicles.

This is my favorite IG: https://www.instagram.com/sai_gonxanh/

But also SOOO depressing at the same time. The country is actually really really bad with trash and waste. The culture is literally to just toss trash into gutters. I can't tell you how many times on this trip alone that I've seen people just toss trash out car windows. Sigh...

Here is what is happening now, due to over farming, building dams everywhere and generally poor management...

https://www.instagram.com/p/C8Bk7jgvF65/


Vietnamese are extremely capitalistic as part of the culture. Everything is for sale here.

They realized that they make more money when they speak English to foreigners, so they studied up. I'm not even making this up, one of the kids I was talking to said that.


> everyone speaks at least a little English now. Attributed to being locked inside and a lot of YouTube

There was a push for English fluency in K-12 around 10 years ago. Most people you are bumping into are products of that era. The non-Saigon/Hanoi/DaNang/DaLat kids who didn't get that opportunity attended the hundreds of ESL schools like "Wall Street English" and "California English" in town


"Hi, what is your name? Where are you from?"

It was pretty mediocre and that was the depth of it.

Unless you're in a private school, my experience is that education here is still pretty poorly handled. Kind of "blind leading the blind".

What I'm seeing now is that even the older generations are speaking some English too now, where previously I would just get the infamous jazz hands.

I'm also in a big city... it'll be interesting to see how things are when I head out into the country side again.


> that education here is still pretty poorly handled. Kind of "blind leading the blind".

It is, but the tourism boom began around sa decade ago as well, which pushed (pidgin) English fluency front and forward in Tier 1 cities (eg - https://laodong.vn/chinh-sach-giao-duc/dieu-kien-lam-giao-vi...).

Most Vietnamese born after 1980 who consume foreign content prefer Korean, Chinese, and Japanese content over Western (based on my wife and her extended family's experience)

In Saigon at least there was a push for English teaching in K-12, and ik international teachers (mostly Pinoy) were hired as contractors to teach part time in that initiative.


> Most Vietnamese born after 1980 who consume foreign content prefer Korean, Chinese, and Japanese content over Western (based on my wife and her extended family's experience)

Agreed, I've noticed this as well from when I was living here before. The difference today is that I'm noticing more english youtube content being consumed. I wish we could see youtube stats on this.

My partner is 1983... grew up in D3... near perfect english... only likes western content. A bit of an oddball in that regard, which sets them apart mentally from the rest.


In Hoi An, locals are known for their English fluency since more than 10 years ago, when I came back there last year, I was blown away by so many locals speak Korean just as fluent.

Money talks. A decade ago a good portion of people could speak Russian in Da Nang because of the large number of Russian tourists that come to vacation on the beaches.

From what I understand, it is more now that the war in Ukraine is going on...

Integrated into IDEA (and other IDE's)... so it checks as you type.

  "
  Cosmos uses go panics for error handling. Transaction runs 
  out of gas? panic. Try to spend more coins than you have? 
  panic. Invalid inputs? panic.

  ...

  For safety, later on the panic was removed entirely.
  "
Next time someone suggests using panic's as exceptions in golang... I'm going to point them at a nice $75k reason not to do that.

Everything in finance... banks have the same bug bounty.

Not really. Bank transactions are reversible (especially when banks themselves are affected). And if you try to wire money to your account, you will be found trivially.

Definitely not true. My last company had the finance department phished and they never recovered the funds. It was about $50k I believe.

See also all the people pissed at zelle.


Nothing is true in absolute terms but banks care about loss percentages and that’s much better in the real banking sector.

For example, the national bank of Bangladesh was compromised in 2016, believed to be a well-resourced attack by North Korea, and the attacker was able to attempt to transfer $1B. That’s about as severe as it gets, but the U.S. Federal Reserve blocked 85% of the transferred funds and of the remaining funds, all of the money sent to Sri Lanka was recovered, and they were able to recover some of the funds laundered through a corrupt bank in the Philippines whose manager was subsequently charged. About $64M was laundered through casinos which were not at the time required to follow KYC.

https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-57520169

So, not great, but the losses are under 10% of the amount the hackers had access to and there’s still a chance of recovering the rest - that’s survivable with insurance and it’s basically the traditional finance world at its worst in terms of corruption & poor preparation. Compare it to cryptocurrency, where losses on that scale happen multiple times a year rather than once a decade, and the attackers have a much easier time laundering funds through the infrastructure setup for exactly that purpose. North Korea is getting over a billion dollars a year from cryptocurrency, which is much better than the tens of millions at greater risk they got here.


The money was only stopped at the Federal Reserve because the address used in some of the wire transactions included the word Jupiter which was a sanctioned entity at the time and the matching was sufficiently fuzzy that this was caught. That was a complete accident. It just as easily could have gone the other way. I just read a case on the layoffs subreddit where a law firm was hacked and one of their clients was tricked into wiring millions of dollars to the wrong account, resulting in the client suing the law firm for negligence and the law firm having to fire a bunch of people. One Latvian guy tricked Google and other large tech companies into wiring him a hundred million dollars total which was only recovered because he was arrested and plead guilty. Business email compromise is a huge plague on society and in many cases the recovered amount is trivial.

The only way you are recovering the bulk of losses if you don't notice the theft very quickly is if the amount is high enough that a prosecutor is interested and it hasn't all been withdrawn as cash yet.


This discussion has really gone off the rails.

All I was saying was that banks have a bug bounty on their head, the next person responded that bank transactions are reversible, which isn't entirely true in all cases.

I wasn't trying to compare sizes or anything like that.


Sometimes they are. There's a network of seedy international banks that scammers use to take their victims money, because otherwise the scam wouldn't work.

Do you have examples? People can avoid them

The scammers wire the money out of your account into a bank account they control, and then put it in another bank, and then move it further on from there. Knowing which bank they have their account at doesn't help you avoid the problem.

Yeah I understood the mechanism, just wanted to know the companies that enable such things.

AI/GPU communication is definitely driving it forward now. It is a speed race for how quickly you can move data around.

Really? I hadn't heard of GPU or GPGPU pushing bandwidth recently. Networking certainly does. 400GbE cards exceed PCIe 4.0 x16 bandwidth, 800 is here, and 1.6 apparently in the works. Disk too though, just because a single disk (or even network phy) may not max out a PCI slot does not mean you want to dedicate more lanes than necessary to them because you likely want a bunch of them.

We are at PCIe5 in the Dell XE9680. We add in 8x400G cards and they talk directly to the Network/ 8xGPUs (via rocev2).

800G ethernet is here at the switches (Dell Z9864F-ON is beautiful... 128 ports of 400G), but not yet at the server/NIC level, that comes with PCIe6. We are also limited to 16 chassis/128 GPUs in a single cluster right now.

NVMe is getting faster all the time, but is pretty standard now. We put 122TB into each server, so that enables local caching of data, if needed.

All of this is designed for the highest speed available today that we can get on the various bus where data is transferred.


I wonder if any of this trickles down into cloud providers reducing costs again. After all if we have zounds of fast storage, surely slower storage becomes cheaper?

We do not directly compete with them as we are more of a niche based solution for businesses that want their own private cloud and do not want to undertake the many millions in capopex to build and deploy their own super computer clusters. As such, our offerings should not have an impact on their pricing. But who knows… maybe long term we will. Hard to say.

Nvlink 4.0 used to connect H100 GPUs today is almost as fast as PCIe-7.0 (12.5GBs vs 16GBs). By the time PCIe-7.0 is available I’m sure NVlink will be much faster. So, yeah, GPUs are currently the most bandwidth hungry devices on the market.

Will the lead time still be 50+ weeks though? My guess is yes.

You haven't seen my house.


We are starting at $4.50/hr [0]. The catch is that we won't have availability until mid August.

The weird thing on Runpod is the virtual CPUs, you can't run MI300x in virtual machines yet. It is a missing feature that AMD is working on.

[0] https://hotaisle.xyz/pricing/


We just got higher performance out of open source. No need for MK1.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AMD_MI300/comments/1dgimxt/benchmar...


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: