skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
this is in a class of problems i've been thinking about recently

- usury

- patents

- copyrights

- land

- software as a service

the first 3 all have some slowly changing socially acceptable period of profit. and they are all enshrined in law. but this means there are also frameworks in place for adjusting this period of profit (lobbying, etc.)

the 4th is only capped by property taxes and sometimes with unintended consequences (cf. prop 13)

the 5th is unregulated and seems socially acceptable to have no definite end date due to a combination of (sometimes artificial) technical difficulty (need for support, e.g. RedHat, any other company based on FOSS) and slow addition of pithy features.

i'm not sure i have any conclusions, but I think this framework is useful because it allows us to examine it with an older moral framework rather than a more (post) modern marxist.
This is literally true but also overly reductive; we do make certain kinds of guarantees, even if there isn't a full specification of the entire language yet.

The reason that a spec is taking so long is that we're interested in making an ironclad, really good spec. Formal methods take time. C and C++ did not have specs for much, much longer than the three years that Rust has existed. We'll get there.
To be devil's advocate:

The worst possible outcome of using more air conditioning is more pollution. Pollution (on a global scale) and the associated potential climate change are considered pretty first-world (rich white dude) problems. Pollution on a local scale is definitely more legitimate, but that's overwhelmingly due to combustion engines (cars) and not power generation, which doesn't typically happen in city centers.
Spent alot of time working with low to medium power lasers in the entertainment industry, and I'm happy to say that was also a joke in that industry as well.
Hierarchical Risk Parity – Implementation and Experiments
Did you mean to reply to me? I think I was clear that what I said was without judgement. I genuinely don't understand the perspective of the people who grimace all the time while riding. If you get off on passing people, ok. And it really is ok, there's nothing wrong with feeling competitive. That's not what it is about for me, and I both bike and lift, and push myself hard. I just enjoy the process and the camaraderie.
My point was that C programmers aren't experts at their craft, just experts at C, and all the habits that were possibly good in C carry over, making them less than good at Python.

Also, I think your comment is a great example of the mentality that C programmers I've worked with brought to the table (partially because it's true for C but untrue for other language, particularly python); that if you can write code that runs, you are "good", that "runnable code that solves the problem" is the end goal.

Finally, there are most certainly not a glut of python developers. Certainly many people who write python scripts, but far fewer people who are python developers. There's a difference, and I get the sense that's lost on some C programmers.
> So many painful memories or is that nostalgia.

The Greek roots of “nostalgia” translate as “the pain of returning home,” so it’s a false dichotomy. :)

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/nostalgia
It doesn't 'scare' me as such. It just upgrades the task from 'can I quickly evaluate this, determine possible fit, and forward the recommendation to higher ups' to assembling a small task force.

EDIT: I understand that this is a common practice and a legitimate business model, so it's not aimed at Gravitational specifically. It just causes people to sometimes dismiss offerings that they would be legitimately interested in, otherwise.

For instance, Slack offers paid versions that are not yet at the Enterprise level(so less features), but you can at least get an idea, and also what is the pricing model (is it per seat? per server? per gb of storage? etc).
If companies were run in a logical manner, then your thought process would be reasonable.

Sadly, while there may be some logical people in a company, many companies (most?) wind up not being run in a logical manner due to a wide variety of internal politics and societal issues.

What you hope (and pray for) is that the logical people in a company are not also sociopaths, in which case you are really well and truly screwed.
>Poor is where you must work to maintain your lifestyle.

Said no one ever. That's almost insulting to people who have actual financial problems.
11 Takeaways from the Times’s Investigation into Trump’s Wealth
From Hero to Zero: Closing My 3rd Startup
Wikipedia: Breitbart 'Should Not Be Used, Ever' as a Reference for Facts
Such as...?
I don't think it's a "knee-jerk" suspicion. It's from experience and knowledge that companies don't generally behave altruistically. Amazon historically has not acted altruistically. There is a considered business reason for this and I was trying to understand it. Suggesting that they likely have a strategic reason is in no way "knee-jerk".
The link is to an interview with the author. The paper itself is behind a paywall:

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/700070

Does someone know where it can be found?
In addition to Zed’s comment, ECS is remarkably mature and for many cases has feature parity with K8s. It’s much more mature and better supported than EKS right now.

Migrating between the two isn’t even all that difficult if you change your mind later.
Don't know that book but will read it. "The Fall of Japan" by William Craig is also excellent, and it confirms everything you wrote above.

One of the strangest episodes was that the generals didn't want to surrender even after the atomic bombs fell. Only the Emperor's personal intervention caused the surrender to happen.
It is not just rewarding your employees. Your employees have more money, they spend more, it goes into the community who also has more money.

If the greedy people at the top take too much money for themselves, then the machine stops, no one buys cars, and there company sinks.
That has been a standard model of kingship for all of recorded history.

I'll quote at length from the excellent https://www.amazon.com/dp/1780747411/ :

> As mentioned before, the king was widely regarded as a link between the divine and the human worlds. He might be a god himself, or descended from one, or simply appointed by the deity, but at all events he was expected to use his 'divine effulgence' (as the Persians called it) or his Heil (as the Germanic barbarians called it) for the benefit of the community: this was the crucial manner in which he promoted welfare. He was expected to maintain and embody the law in the sense of cosmic, natural and human order, partly by acting as the symbolic head of the community and partly by observing the right ways and setting a good example. If he did so, happiness and prosperity would ensue.

> Such ideas are widely attested for primitive societies, but they displayed an amazing tenacity under civilized conditions, being attested for ancient Egypt, China, Japan, South-East Asia (where some kings had no other functions), India, Iran, the Islamic world (in both the concept of the caliphate and that of kingship), as well as the Hellenistic world and Europe. If the king was just, rain would fall; if he was not, famine, flood and other natural disasters would ensue. Natural disasters were thus blamed on the king: they proved that he had misbehaved. Under a good king, 'vices decrease and virtues increase... the world becomes prosperous and joyous', as the Zoroastrians explained; but 'when kings are unjust, even sugar and salt lose their flavour', as the Indians put it. If no king existed, both the natural and the human order would dissolve and chaos would prevail: a country without a king enjoyed 'neither rain nor seed, neither wealth nor wife, neither sacrifices nor festivals', according to the Ramayana; people suffered illness, customs ceased to exist and all was nothingness according to Malay literature. It is for this reason that the sixteenth-century Burmese king laughed at the idea of a kingless Venice; and it is for the same reason that the British abolition of the Burmese monarchy in 1886 was a catastrophic shock to the Burmese which the British had not anticipated.

> Ritual kingship (as this role is commonly called) might require no action at all: the Japanese emperors performed it for over a thousand years by simply existing, being kept in such ceremonious inactivity that when one of them made a bid for real power he could scarcely even walk. Most rulers, however, combined their ritual role with co-ordinating and warlike functions which tended to transform or eclipse it, while at the same time the development of specialized religious institutions changed their standing vis-à-vis the divine.

(Posted as three quotes to mirror the two paragraph breaks within the section I wanted to quote. I have not omitted or altered any text within the quoted section.)

Note also that this is the current function of the Queen of England.
Agree. Most, like 99.9% startups are not going to make ANY money. Even if there is a positive outcome for the startup, how much money you could make out of it, is still questionable.

If you want money, go to big companies, your reward is likely to be much more bigger and stable.
I'm 44. Oddly enough, it was only after the spectre of long-term health issues raised its head that I was able to let go of some of the stress and just enjoy exercising for what it is, even beyond the health benefits. I'm almost (almost) thankful, in a way.
And no mention of Marx or Socialism? If there's ever an appropriate time to bring up worker-owned means of production, it's this right here. As I've heard it (I have not read the Communist Manifesto myself), Marx viewed automation as one of the ways in which workers can liberate themselves.

The merit of welfare economics is predicated on the "winners" being able to compensate the "losers", and thereby obtain a Pareto-optimal wealth distribution. The fact that this compensation does not happen is the reason that aggregate consumer welfare has grown tremendously, but people still have to work 40 hours a week for their food, housing, and healthcare.

It's tempting to say that employees ought to be compensated proportional to the value they generate. Let's say every employee is allowed to license their work output in such a way that, if they automate a process, they are entitled to royalties stemming from the automation of that process. Should that license be perpetual? How do you decide how big the royalty should be? How do you determine the actual value generated by a given automation?

Edit: wew, instant downvote. Care to clarify?
What's it like to code while drunk?
SpaceX’s Starlink satellites may use unique solar array deployment mechanism
(author here)

Yep -- note the title is "Startups I Want to Fund", not "Charities I Want to Donate To".

Note that I also try to tackle some of these non-product-solvable problems through philanthropy, but that's a subject for another blog post...
In my opinion as an onlooker of Rust, it seems more interested in shiny features and breaking the language every month than in becoming stable and writing a spec. It's far from replacing C in this regard.
Strawman? I defined a union for you.

And we don't know if the "threat" worked. Let's wait to see the full benefits package before we judge ;)
That's a grey area. It may still be considered to be a work made for hire and so the employer would own the copyright.

https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ09.pdf
What's your motherboard?

Mines an Asus Gene VIII and using a 1080Ti and I don't even get anything appearing at all until the Windows logon.
I wonder if it's possible to turn things around for some people: Sitting around relaxing, and then doing their work in bursts of cleverness, may be a coping mechanism for someone who has a hard time staying continuously busy all day long. Or maybe there's a sliding scale between those extremes.

I fall somewhere towards the side that you might guess, since I'm defending it here. ;-)

I don't necessarily automate my job, but I depend on things like math and theory, to solve problems that the other engineers tend to solve laboriously through brute force and trial-and-error. I suppose a math equation is a sort of automation. And of course programming is how one does math these days.

Maybe I avoid resentment, because I'm doing work in a way that most people hate even more than doing hard work. It's also hard for them to pin down how much I work because they don't know how to estimate it.

Hypothetically, if someone wanted to debate with me about the value of work, I'd ask them how work is measured: What are the units of measure? Joules? Hours? Indulgences? How about... dollars?

The only time that we don't measure work in dollars is in a social setting, including within the workplace. For instance, we don't give motivational speeches and other kinds of attention such as meetings in proportion to your wages, but tend to treat all workers relatively equally in those things.
Truth. Left ops for infosec and wouldn’t ever look back.
It sorta makes sense that the New York Times is advocating mediocrity.
That's crazy, I don't understand how people are so negative about this. Sociopaths will NOT fire that person, they'd put that person to work automating other jobs. This is just how you run a business.
> Prior to the Nobel award, Donna Strickland was an associate professor.

So obviously the thing about her being an associate professor says more about her contributions than getting a Nobel Prize.

If you're going to try to explain away a Nobel Prize, you need to look for a new hobby. But I guess fundamentalist beliefs are resistant to evidence...
I specifically search out the kernel option to pass in grub2 to see the dmesg scroll past in text during boot, so I think I am the opposite of people who care about flickers and visual disturbances during boot.

More than once having the kernel boot visible has helped diagnose hardware failure or other OSI layer 1 issues with the system.
My 2 cents:

Yes, but...

It should very very local (like, no network activity at all), and very very approved from the medical community AND my doctor.

Else, no!
Sounds like Anahata could do with Includio! And so could Sillicon Valley if there is a lot of truth behind the book. Looking forward to reading it!
> For a profitable company where wages are a major expense, it seems like lower prices with higher wages can only be achieved with higher productivity. I think an economist would attribute this more to Ford's assembly line?

FWIW productivity has literally exploded in the last few decades.
I’ve fantasized about the delivery to a person idea for a while. The next frontier after last mile - last foot. I figure drones will do it one day. Also sounds like something Amazon would do.
Why do you keep putting a - in front of your percents? Is it a -25% PR hit?
Pretty much exactly right.

What I found interesting initially was how the 32 bit CPU was disrupting the 8 bit CPU market. People using Cortex M0 chips where they used to use ATMega chips. Identical package size, faster, more resources, not too much more memory. And some unreal bargains[1].

And now as FPGAs get cheaper and cheaper, RISC-V was becoming the default 'soft' processor because everything else cost money and didn't have any sort of ecosystem. Amazing times.

[1] Not sure how these folks make money -- https://satoshinm.github.io/blog/171212_stm32_blue_pill_arm_...
"The best bike is the one you ride."
As a counterpoint, most US Presidents and also most billionaires have children. I don't see much historical evidence for children being a damper on ambition.
Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish
But actual consultants exist, some of them are working as well (unlike a body shop).

This sort of thing is how I now pay the bills.
Yeah this can be an episode of “Forgotten Weapons” in a couple decades.
I like haskell. It reads like a math proof more than a cooking recipe. very elegant. I'm a math guy and i'd love to get back to it in my free time.

But i don't think i could recommend it for the enterprise. not honestly. I tried to do a professional project in Haskell once. it was a good fit, since it was about parsing and generating configuration. However I was still new to it. the bottom line: it's just not that great for newbies. since most people are going to be newbies at it, i could not recommend it at all. sometimes i think the language even goes over my head, and I'm supposed to be a pretty smart cookie.

OP makes 'they are not going to be productive for months' sound like an obstacle to overcome. But if I tell management the honest story in advance and they will obviously not give me the greenlight.

But i suppose it is a language that's a reasonably easy sell to management if you hype up the reliability stemming from the type system and skip over the downsides. managers dont know much about programming, but they hate incidents even more than developers. if you are honest, you have to tell them that in practise operational problems become more likely. I mean: ever tried to install ghc on a centos server behind a firewall?

If i have to recommend something now it would be python. because it's easy and because i started using it for my personal stuff. i know lots of languages and that's what i end up coming back to if i need to do stuff quickly.

OP doesn't even mention the real advantage to introducing Haskell. Few colleagues will end up being good at this, so if a piece of critical software is written in Haskell and you are the only one who is a great Haskell engineer, it increases your negotiating power in the company. people won't be able to get around you and it will be hard to deny a request for increased compensation.
It's worth learning as the prima facie example of a high-level language on top of the register memory model.

http://canonical.org/~kragen/memory-models/

Its perceived close relationship to the machine is precisely due to the fact that it exposes pointers & does not handle its own memory allocation with a garbage collector, both of which are direct consequences of the register model.

Why not Assembly? Because it's not a language that encodes propositions first class, and that's the grounding for structured/procedural programming. The majority of software requires some structured element and so regressing towards the assembly model, where abstractions are implicit, doesn't get new programmers on the path to understanding how to write nearly all software.
Chu's prize was for laser cooling, which uses a magneto-optical trap. Magneto-optical traps confine atoms by exploiting the Zeeman effect, a spatially-varying magnetic field, and a laser with a precisely-controlled wavelength tuned to be slightly red of an electronic transition. Optical traps, on the other hand, rely on the refraction of a much larger, but still microscopic, object.

Some of Chu's work uses an optical trap, but that work did not earn his prize.
It can! :)

Even more - it can interact with these pages!
Here is an example of use of Google Search page:
https://github.com/MontFerret/ferret/blob/master/docs/exampl...
Came to the comments section for this. Cheers!
IT or warehouse? Two very different experiences.

Warehouse has always paid well for the educational requirements. Many people don’t love walking a few miles a shift, nor not having time to use the restrooms. Others obviously thrive in it, they have a lot of workers and can’t all be turned over every month.
They don’t. They are a non-profit 501c3 charity that relies on donations.
How to Teach “Modern C++” to Someone Who Already Knows Programming? [pdf]
Not many amazon warehouses are in high COL cities. I know the big ones for Chicago were the far burbs and Wisconsin.
This reminds me of Russ Cox's toy Webscript language: https://research.swtch.com/webscript
Yes! This is one of the reasons why I wanted to be able making these changes without redeploying the whole thing!
>Why didn't this employee share this system with the others?

Because the consequences of him doing that are unclear. And since one potential (if not likely) consequence is management would simply retain 1/4 of staff doing this work and fire the rest, why would he share that?

Was there a huge sign at his workplace outlining the consequences of automating anything? An explicit policy that would alleviate such (reasonable - read the article!) fears? I don't think so either.

What was clear, presumably, is that as long as he processed X catalogs a day, he was getting his salary paid. That was what he was hired to do. And so that was exactly what he was doing.

>Why did he think it was OK to slack off for 6 hours a day instead of doing 4 times as many catalogs?

Because this is how work works. You pay someone to do something, and the expectations on the amount and kind of work - and the amount and kind of compensation - are discussed in advance.

>If this employee worked for me, I'd be putting him to work finding other things to automate!

Yes, and that's exactly the problem.

What if there aren't any? What if there are, but he doesn't find them? What if he finds them, but doesn't know how to automate the task? He was hired to go trough books and compare specs, automating his employer's business was literally not his job.

You see, your "reward" is not paying the employee 4X salary for being 4X efficient (you left that little part out!). Your reward is making the employee perform a more difficult job that they didn't sign up to do, presumably for the same salary (since you didn't mention paying them more).

Do you still wonder why they kept their silence?
I used to brew beer...
Man, I sucked... A lot...
Mainly due to high expectations set by my family, my friends, my co-workers, and so on.
I ended up selling everything and going for bike riding - no one expects nothing from me now...
The killer your missing is 'architecture license' versus 'IP' license. The former gives you the right to modify the architecture in your designs (add instructions, non-standard peripherals, alternate memory buses, Etc.) a standard 'IP' license just lets you essentially plop down a standard chip and innovate in the peripherals without touching the system controller at all.

Folks like WD want a processor that is cheap, and specialized like running an error correcting algorithm across spectrum. Generic CPU is too slow, custom CPU is fine. Custom CPU where there is already a lot of other support because other people are using it, is super fine.

Unlimited right to use / modify is a really valuable thing for these companies.
MIT Sloan Management Review suspends paywall for two days
I’m not a distance athlete and can’t comment on their gear or thought process.

However, for strength training, I’ve made two small purchases (a belt and deadlift straps). They’ve been both fun and a way to help me in the process. I spent a total of around 40 dollars, so it isn’t quite comparable, but my point is that I can provide one anecdatum that exercise equipment for a hobby can be fun.
> Not since agriculture have we directly competed with foxes for our dinner.

There are many, many, many, many, many post-agricultural fables of foxes stealing food from humans.

Ever heard the expression "fox in the henhouse"?
The worst is it's inconsistently applied. Some trivial topics are covered to the point of absurdity:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bert_(Sesame_Street)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernie_(Sesame_Street)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bert_and_Ernie
Yes, we have these problems in Africa.
You're right. I searched the C99 for "recurs" and found the relevant section that briefly mentions recursive function calls.

That means static allocation is insufficient for an implementation of automatic variables in a conformant C compiler. Nevertheless I still like to think of it as a valid implementation sometimes. In contemporary practice many stack variables are basically global variables, in the sense that they are valid during most of the program. And they are degraded to stack variables only as a by-product of a (technically, unnessary) splitting of the program into very fine-grained function calls.