skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Presumably a lot of the unavoidable latency (in any particular Internet path) compared to a dedicated switched circuit comes in when the routers examine packets, decode addresses, perform routing table lookups, execute routing algorithms, and then copy the packet into another interface.

If you had a physically switched circuit you could imagine that the data would travel over it at the speed of electricity in wires, while for packet switching there's some kind of software step and "hesitation" as the router "thinks" about the routing problem posed by each packet.

There are some Internet connections where the speed of light limitation dominates the routing issues, but I don't think this is the case most of the time when dealing with short-to-medium-distance connections involving multiple commercial ISPs. (Especially for peer-to-peer connections on residential broadband, you also don't have the latency benefit of a possible CDN node colocated with or direct CDN peering with your own ISP.)

So I think the best answer to most of your questions is "not really", although it would be really interesting to see a detailed breakdown in a traceroute of speed-of-physical-medium vs. various router tasks for each hop. (Then you could imagine improving some of these by changing the physical medium, reducing the number of hops via better or different peering arrangements, and getting fancier routers in some places that contribute less latency per hop.)

Periodically on HN we see pieces about the extreme lengths that people engaged in high-frequency trading will go to in order to get really low latency. Those folks know all the details of exactly where the latency comes in and exactly what could be done about it. But the huge expense and trouble that they have to go to in order to get some of these improvements suggests to me that we're probably not going to see the same improvements easily on the typical consumer broadband connection.
To wit; 400% of the poverty line (spoken as another grad student who was on Medicaid for most of the year)
To estimate how much each of these companies are worth on Jan. 1st 2020, you'd need to wait until each of them raise their next round after that date or have a liquidity event and then do some kind of regression. I'd say he's on track to win based on this, or at the least even if he loses on a technicality he'll have come incredibly close.
I'm just working with your argument here. On your own terms, your claimed desire to allocate funds toward big risks and human improvement, Musk falls woefully short.

I'm not particularly anti-Musk. I'd like somebody to succeed in the some of the fields he's hyping. I'm just not convinced he's doing it, and I'm concerned his taste for self-aggrandizement will be the cause of landmark failures in some areas where I think we need progress.
This article is interesting, but it makes the fundamental error of assuming that the primary product of an R1 research university is education for undergraduates, which it is not. The primary product of an R1 research university is research, largely performed by Graduate Students, Postdoctoral Researchers and Professional Researchers. All of these are paid a salary of some form, some market-rate, others less-so. That's where the cost is, along with actual costs of instruments, libraries, consumables and buildings necessary for cutting edge research. Most of the funding for that comes from research grants and you can see how it represents a huge fraction of the budget in his charts. Unfortunately, all of the expenditure data that the Education department puts out combines both R1 and non-R1 institutions, so it's hard to see just how different the top 120 schools are from most of the rest. If you have expenditure data segmented by research intensity, I would love to see it.

The undergraduate education is part of the university, but not the primary part. (At UChicago, grad students still outnumber undergrads!) If you want to see what the finances of an institution that primarily educates undergraduates looks like, go to one of the Liberal Arts colleges, or non R-1 state schools, like any of the Cal States in California, or non-flagship schools in other states.
Yeah, I made and listened to a crystal radio as a kid in Britain. With a big antenna hung outside between trees I could listen in bed to Radio Luxemburg! (this was in the days when the BBC was the only broadcaster in Britain; Radio Luxemburg let me listen to the pop music the Beeb didn't play).

And yes, later I went to an EE course at uni!
I knew an individual that lived in a neighborhood frequently used for film shoots. “Coincidentally”, these shoots were always on days when he was planning on doing yard work. Inevitibly, some PA would come offer him some cash to convince him to postpone his yard work.
So basically the story is: wealthy idiots waste their money on spaceship vaporware. Am I meant to feel sympathy for them?

Well, fuck the rich, fuck these parasites on society. And yes, that includes you.
Sure. The department of education publishes this data:
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d95/dtab336.asp
Will AI Drive Scaling Forward
I was, thank you for the correction
Well, I stand corrected. Coverage in the January 9, 1969 New York Times (page 94), and the July 21, 1969 issue (page 52), does indicate that nobody paid to get on the waiting list at Pan Am and TWA, but the estimated one-way(!) fare would be $14,000 in 1969 dollars (based on a then-current 6-cents-per-mile cost for airline travel). Interesting that both these airlines failed, and both were particularly oriented toward international travel.
If by "modern internet", you mean TCP/IP, then no. You'd need a circuit-switched network to do that, and those are all obscure/niche networks except for the Public Switched Telephone Network.

Real landlines work even if the power is out.
Non-fiction writing will often repeat the same thing in different ways. Different phrasings resonate with different readers. The goal of the nonfiction writer is communication, not entertainment, and he will try to illuminate his subject from different angles to reach the widest audience.
BIRD BATH.LIKE BIRD BOX
Im hoping that a future world will see the memorization of the bones of the body as equivalent to learning geography today.
Excel is an interesting case.

I think it sits between both worlds.
The interface and main interaction is visual, yet the actual logic is textual.

This seems to hit the sweet spot, making it useful for the non-programmer yet providing significant depth and complexity.

Note that personally I hate using plain Excel because the formulas seem so restrictive and the functions I want are never there, but again this seems to be ideal for the target audience.
Someone else said it's an addiction if it interferes with your life.

But for me, it's all my life is really.

I don't have friends, relationships, etc. and haven't since I was a teenager (I'm in my thirties now). As such I don't have hobbies or whatever.

I just go to work (programmer) and come home and browse reddit, hn, youtube, etc. until the next day.
The college board publishes a nice charge of net cost of college: https://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-tabl...

Room and Board is a major driver of the increased cost of colleges.
not sure what this means?
So women do have fewer teeth?!
https://endmyopia.org/

If you are curious about the idea, EndMyopia is a pretty great resource. A lot of people are fixed in their ideas in how this all works, so they will dismiss it outright. But if you have nagging doubts about vision science, there are some really interesting alternative ideas out there.

Anecdotally, my wife and I have been following the concepts for about a year and a half. We've both reduced our prescriptions by ~1.00 diopter. If nothing else, it helps you to become much more aware of what you are actually seeing and how variable your vision is from moment to moment.
He will win
Sunny Cove extends virtual addresses to 57 meaningful bits...The new limits enable 128PB of virtual address space and 4PB of physical memory.

This is interesting to me. At first glance I couldn’t really figure out “why now”. But
I guess with Optane there really will be a need for addressing petabytes of ram, as it will span DRAM and Optane. It seems Intel thinks it will be a competitive advantage.
> go to one of the Liberal Arts colleges, or non R-1 state schools, like any of the Cal States in California, or non-flagship schools in other states.

...and look at the instructor's salaries. PhD's from top universities who could easily make 300k+ in the private sector but instead take positions that pay 60k-70k. Even with tenure, that's a labor of love.

Blaming highly paid admins would be great, except that university presidents at teaching colleges are the highest paid (reminder: branch campuses and liberal arts colleges never have Div 1 sports programs) and still make $50k-100K less than a green phd out of a top 10 CS program (200k is good money for a president of a branch campus or liberal arts college -- and remember, that's typically a person with 30+ years experience and a uniquely positive track record).

I worry about what will happen to the American teaching college (public or private) over the next 50 years if the current war on college -- which this article typifies -- wins out in the public mind.

If you doubt a single word of this feel free to reply to this comment. I'm extremely familiar with both markets. When I say that (even tenure-track) CS teaching requires a 200k paycut, I really do know what I'm taking about.
They do: https://www.robotshop.com/en/elenco-mx-907-200-in-1-electron...
Do you have a source of data on the costs for the different degrees? I'm skeptical for a couple of reasons. First, there may be disparities in the cost of hiring teachers in different disciplines.

Second, to exaggerate just a wee bit, engineers need big expensive labs and modern computers, whereas French literature majors only need a supply of French literature.
You weren’t aware of it because it’s not true.
A button would be great to have for cars that run red lights and try to muscle in on pedestrians crossing while the walk sign is on. It would need a camera to catch the license plate, to be effective, though. Probably would be simpler as a phone app, just with a fast (or instant) camera. There's been a rash of pedestrian fatalities where I live recently and seemingly little by way of enforcement; it would be good to have some way to push back.
Considering that I spend at least 30% of my work time in the command line I really have some doubts about these "text is obsolete" ideas.
In particular, this prescription calculator is sort of uncanny in how accurate it is https://endmyopia.org/focal-calculator/calc.html
> 911 is a creaky old system put in place by a Chicago mayor looking to score some points with the electorate.

I'm always interested in Chicago history, so I went looking, but couldn't find anything at, for example, https://www.nena.org/page/911overviewfacts . Do you know anywhere this history is written up?
I know a few people with strabismus (and in the last 3 or 4 years started to develop mild strabismus myself, due unequal far-sightedness and a strong astigmatism in my left eye, without wearing glasses at all). Even before I was developing strabismus, I occasionally entertained the idea of using a head's up display, or a tablemount contraption to slowly realign the supressed eye over multiple sessions. I am really amazed to hear now that the realigning can happen in a single session and lasts a (longer than I expected) short while until the brain relapses into the Plan B suppression.

One of the reasons I did not actually try to build this was that I had a hard time imagining participants would be willing to spend large amounts of time over a long period of time to slowly re-align the lazy eye, especially if it's a boring focusing task etc...

I am positively amazed that the re-aligning can happen on such short notice (even if it doesn't last very long) and is relatively robust (I would have guessed blinking the eye after re-alignment would immediately revert to the unaligned state)

The relative brightness trick is brilliant!

Consider daily life glasses with which to attenuate in a controlled fashion the light for the dominant eye. This could be glasses with a fixed polarizer for the supressed eye, and both a fixed and rotatable polarizer for the dominant eye such that relative intensity can be set in the interval [0,1] this is batteryless but may look less appealing. Alternatively hack one of those LCD shutter glasses, and dim the dominant eye (battery powered circuit).
Then every day or hour first measure the minimum and maximum relative transparency for fusion, and then set the device at say 4/5 the way between this minimum and maximum, until eventually someday approaching 1.

With such glasses you wouldn't need a game, and the user can use it in part of her daily life (taking a walk, shopping, ...) if the assymetrically transparent eye-patch glasses still look to disturbing for work or whatever...
Two thoughts: Funds are explicitly mentioned as acceptable entities in 501(c)(3). For what non-educational purpose are endowments used? While some uses may seem tenuously connected to a given observer, all are determined to further the university’s mission in some way.
But why does the "degree" require paying for college football or fancy dorms or student entertainment? College has lost its focus on education and, nationally, colleges are competing on providing amenities and costs of college are skyrocketing.

Wouldn't it make sense to bring college education back to its original purpose?
In my current job, I write production machine learning code often in Scala. I had never written a line of Scala before that, had no idea what the idioms were nor even what some of the inheritance and object privacy syntax meant.

I read through mountains of legacy Scala code while working on my first several projects, and have assisted dozens of other new developers (most of whom also have never once read or thought about Scala previously).

The assumptions people made in that codebase still give me nightmares, mostly over how foolish and lazy they are in little ways, little unexplained “self documented” things that create multi-hour stumbling blocks but which could have been written in a more “elementary” style in the first place (without sacrificing any necessary language features).

When I see things like, “any C programmer should know ...” I just slap my head in stupor. It just misses the point entirely. It’s of zero importance whatsoever to write code in language X in a style that benefits mostly only “people who know language X.”

Pretend you’re writing the code for a freshman intern who will look at it in 5 or 10 years with no prior knowledge of the language it’s written in, and now you’re in the correct ballpark for how to write professional software.
Here is a random major news article about how plea bargaining is broken, to introduce you to the topic (it cites lots of references for you to follow up with if you don't feel like it is a complete introduction)

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/innocen...

And another one, from 2012
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2012/04/misdemeanors-can...

Here is a bail payment fund, which finds that 55% of their clients, who were in jail and would stay there because they couldn't afford bail, are not found guilty (which may mean the charges are just dropped) after their bail is paid. (I've seen similar numbers from the local bail fund I volunteer with, but don't have actual figures available to share). However, the vast majority of people do not have access to any such assistance, and 92% of people held in jail and unable to afford their bail plead guilty. Because the clients who have access to a bail fund are selected almost randomly (basically by having a court appointed lawyer who knows about the bail fund application and submits their case while the fund has available cash) we can take that as very simple evidence that many of those pleading guilty were innocent. There's definitely more detailed work available, probably cited in the articles above.

http://www.thebronxfreedomfund.org/our-work/

> You can't hold someone for years without trial unless they explicitly agree to it. The way you structured you sentence "hold without trial" and "plea bargains" implies there is some other way to forgo a trial.

This is disappointingly uninformed. The way to forgo a trial is to not hold a trial. What do you think happens, they say "excuse me sir, you can't afford bail and you say you are innocent, would you like to go home til we get around to doing something or stay here in jail?" Here are just a few cases:

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2017/06/12/the-man-who-sp...

https://www.adn.com/alaska-news/2018/12/28/an-anchorage-fami... (father was in jail for three years before charges were dismissed)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalief_Browder

https://pix11.com/2018/10/09/judge-dismisses-all-charges-aga...

tl:dr; the US criminal justice system today is largely administered through the process of setting bail and then expecting plea agreements, and many convicted criminals have not received what most Americans think of as 'due process'.
I doubt analyzing university would do much since its already a common knowledge at this point still nothing is happening. Government and legal institutions are ineffective in solving problem where solution results in loss in profit.

Building alternatives to universities that are driven by grass-roots movements are the perfect way forward here. Home schooling, MOOCs and startup businesses are some of the developments that have started diminishing the need of expensive degrees.
Yes, and the improvements in financial aid at elite schools makes them as affordable as a state school so applying to them is a low cost gamble.
Try 15 years. https://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/3023669/happy-new-year-heres...
I've been building consumer apps professionally since 2013 on iOS, Android, Windows Phone and the web. I also spent a few years designing and implementing UI frameworks. I've had to deal with all of the problems listed in Dan's article (with and without frameworks).

Over the years, I have grown convinced that designing and implementing UI by hand simply doesn't scale. There are too many things to consider, too many different users, too many preferences, too many possible states. Responsive design isn't just about screen sizes anymore, it's also about the user's language, culture, disabilities, input, context, preferences, connectivity, knowledge, focus, etc.

We can't expect every restaurant, bank, festival and airlines to implement their own apps, and consider all of the above. You won't find a dark theme in the Domino's app. Why do we tolerate these compromises in the name of branding? Why should UIs be tightly coupled with the services and data? Why don't we have general purpose clients?

I think the job of service providers should be to semantically annotate their data, so that a general purpose client can dynamically render it. All of these UI concerns would only have to be dealt with once, and we all would be able to sleep at night. Just let business people do business, and let UI/UX people do design.
Any construction loan will include completion insurance. If you're putting cash down without that, you are assuming that risk yourself.
The government has decided that it's unethical for a bank to market a credit card to a college student (maybe a $5,000 credit limit and dischargeable in bankruptcy) yet we permit 18-22 year olds to take out $50,000+ in loans without regard for the return on the investment and make it almost impossible for them to get a fresh start if it turns out to be a bad investment.
If you're crap at interviewing, you're just not going to do well at interviews.

That's unfortunate, but logically inescapable.
We don't, and apparently they didn't either. But it was their job to do so.

I think it's very reasonable to suspect underinvestment and technical debt here. Not only did they have a problem, they had a very hard time a) finding the cause of the problem, and b) mitigating the problem while they were looking for the cause.

We can't know, of course. But I think it would be hard to argue that this is optimal, and that nobody at CenturyLink ever suggested it could be better if they spent a bit more money.
https://1.1.1.1/

> We will never sell your data or use it to target ads. Period.

> We’ve retained KPMG to audit our systems annually
Article used incorrect title, the original blog posts describes the interview Microsoft has for technical PM and not software developers. I bet that developer interview hasn't changed much.
It's not investments that need to get paid back - it's contracts, or rather the value of the contract.

In this case, Xcor would need to pay back the fees they said would go to escrow. Not any investor who took equity on the gamble it would be worth something.
What makes you think it's a bubble? Just because something is unpleasant, or even outright evil doesn't make it a bubble.

Perhaps at some point an equilibrium is reached where these institutions extract exactly as much as the degree is worth, minus the little bit left that will incentivize people to take the deal. After all, the 'value' of these degrees has only gone up. Overproduced malthusian elitehood[0] has to be better than starving with the unnecessariat[1], maybe[2].

We are after all already at the near-apocalyptic scenario. Economically disenfranchised liberal arts graduates are roaming the earth and using the only skills they have to extract resources from the environment. In practice this amounts to a sort of Trust Me I'm Lying dystopia of manufacturing outrage with one hand and selling solutions on the other.

For calibration, many students in the UK have turned to literal prostitution[3].

[0]: https://nationalpost.com/news/world/jonathan-kay-on-the-tyra...

[1]: https://morecrows.wordpress.com/2016/05/10/unnecessariat/

[2]: https://berthamasonsattic.wordpress.com/2018/10/12/i-applied...

[3]: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/...
Its good for people to get freaked out when foreign governments do sketchy things.

I know it seems like everyone is picking on China, but if the world got really freaked out by what was happening there then people might have a better chance of preventing, or undoing, it here. If they accept it, its easier to normalize it at home too. Its way too normalized already.

For example, it seems like there has been a lot more news about western surveillance lately now that China is bringing the topic to people's attention. Facebook helped too. Sure, the media is picking on Facebook and China lately, but its bringing some important topics to the public attention as a warning.
What is amazing here is not that a single network card caused this mess, but that most folks here actually believe this story.
> like checklists, crew resource management and no-blame, swiss-cheese accident investigations. I am hopeful that the software industry will take similar lessons over the next decade or so.

The software industry that programs space craft?

The software industry is vast and not every system involves copious amounts of human decision making. Often the idea of the root system cause, and the root process cause(software construction, operations, etc) cause is separable.

I would say that aviation is almost inverted in the that regard compared to booking systems, banking systems, and most of what software engineers are exposed to. A person can not fly from Dallas to Chicago without many, many human decisions being involved. However, a packet traveling from Dallas to Chicago involves nearly zero new human interactions.
Are you not in the US? I've never ever come across such a thing - probably because US companies can theoretically fire you on the spot for almost any reason except specifically disallowed discrimination, and most definitely for being unable to do the work.