skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Will read the paper later. It's interesting and the PIC sims which are state of the art seem interesting, I really want to know how resilient the focusing effect is to laser beam imperfections because that has been the bane of every experiment pushing the high intensities over the last few years.

The idea iterates from a hot topic in intense laser plasma physics, an already niche within a niche of fields. The idea is a "Plasma Mirror." In the world of high intensity laser physics which means lasers essentially more intense than 1e14 W/cm^2 ( by comparison, sunlight at the earth's distance from the sun is ~0.1 W/cm^2) and such, they very quickly ionize the matter they interact with. The lasers where "Plasma Mirrors" are relevant are even more intense than this, say 1e16 and above. However, given you are playing with high magnitude orders of intensity, you have long tails of intensity before the peak of the pulse that are a few orders down (say, 1e14 W/cm^2) but are intense enough to damage the target you want to interact with. The idea is to have a thin target of something before the main target in the optical path which acts as a shutter. The idea is such, the probability in high field laser physics of ionization essentially approaches one the higher the intensity of the incident light. The thin target, called a plasma mirror, permits more low intensity light below some threshold and starts to ionize when the intensity ramps up well above 1e14, turning into a very good mirror. The effect is it only reflects the higher intensity light, creating a cleaner, shorter pulse of high intensity laser energy.

The second concept seems to be the geometrical shape of plasma mirror. I think this is the new idea, because plasma mirrors have been here for a while. The idea here seems to either statically or dynamically shape the plasma mirror so it also focuses the light. I believe the record for high intensity is 2e22 W/cm^2. There are plans to create a near 1e24 W/cm^2 facility in Europe. The sims here suggest an intensity of 1e25 W/cm^2, which is interesting for a number or reasons, because it is near the point where this field starts to touch strong field quantum effects, still a few orders down but approaching the strong field region of QED.

To be critical, as usual, these are simulations, which is fine, but it will be important to see how what physics they included in their simulations. Recent literature has shown the traditional methods we use to model this physics starts to break down as we increase the intensity of the laser above 1e24 or so.
Comms director here. I know this frustration well. I think it may be because you’re trying to get a one-liner to do all the heavy lifting on what is usually at least 5 different things which serve different purposes for different audiences at different times. Not sure if you’ve done this before, but below are 5 frameworks I make the most use of these days, and there are of course many others to choose from, but it might help!

Elevator pitch:
The most succinct way to describe precisely what you're offering. You won't even need to go 2 floors in the elevator before you've managed to say it out loud: "For (target customer), who has (customer need), (product name) is a (market category) that (one key benefit). Unlike (competition), the product (unique differentiator)."

Purpose:
The reason you get out of bed in the morning. Importantly, it’s something you’ll never fully achieve. Example: NASA’s might be to explore, document and make sense of the entire universe.

Mission:
A big objective that you can and will complete in the next 3-5 years. NASA going to the Moon in the 60s would’ve been theirs.

Vision:
The world as it would be if you achieved your purpose. Similarly lofty and idealistic as the purpose.

Tagline:
Can be descriptive, marketingspeak-y or aspirational. The more tightly you define and deploy the messaging above, or depending on the type of audience, the more freedom you have here. If someone you were trying to get the attention of saw only your logo, company name and this, would that be enough for them to want to hear an elevator pitch?

Together they give you a great toolkit that you can build sophisticated and coherent messaging that attracts and aligns yourself, coworkers, customers, the media, investors, etc. Hope this helps!
One application (which I used to work on) is generating electric field strengths beyond the 'Schwinger limit'. This is a field strength below which various QED processes are exponentially damped, such as electron-positron pair production. Generating such field strengths in the laboratory (as opposed to, say, the surface of pulsars) will allow studies of strong-field QED.
> why is collective bargaining any more useful and individual bargaining

Because collective bargaining means that the party with the largest resources and the power, in this case the company, will have to at least take into account their ability to operate.

> Collective bargaining gives employees leverage over employers by drastically reducing the supply of labor available to the company if their bargains are not met.

Exactly. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that when that power is used appropriately. As evidenced by a very long history that turned out to be an extremely good thing.

Note that such niceties as workplace safety; medical coverage and 5 day workweeks were in large part due to union involvement.

This whole discussion is right along the lines of 'what have the Romans ever done for us' from Monty Python.
After months of investigation they may have to re-hire the worker and pay them back their salary.
It amounts to "these multinational companies employ armies of accountants to use every trick in the book to avoid paying taxes on all the sales they've made in our country, and it's not fair"
I thought your previous comment was maybe sarcasm, but apparently not... Do you think that "children" are morons the day before they turn 18 and they cease to be morons (and getting your jollies from them is no longer exploitative) on the following day?
I think the point that RMS was trying to make is that using inherently charged and prejudice language against an individual is sensationalist and (as mentioned) prejudiced.

We should be able to have rational, mature, fact based discussions and entertain suppositions about what may have happened without jumping to conclusions.
> The most pragmatic approach to microservices is to start with a monolith and shave off the intensive parts to separate services as you need to.

I've seen that attempted several times but I've never seen it succeed even after several years of shaving things off here and there.

The problem with this approach is the same problem that causes all technical debt -- cleaning up technical debt takes time away from developing new features, which is the company's highest priority. Adding more engineers to the team to help tackle debt won't help because management will see that as an opportunity to get more new features.

Now that the dust has settled, it's become clear that the real advantage of microservices is to decouple teams.

Shared codebases become harder to work with as the number of engineers increases, and that hurts developer productivity.

Don't build a monolithic service for the whole company -- have every team manage their own services, on their own development and release schedule, and their own production scale. Their dependencies on other teams should be based on APIs, not code sharing. Whether an individual team chooses a monolith or microservices doesn't really matter.
Some amount of practical philosophy or received wisdom is necessary for everyone, just like some amount of mathematical awareness. The formal study of philosophy as a discipline, like that of pure mathematics, is not for everyone. For most people it would be deeply unpleasant for almost no benefit.
Because we are becoming more mature.
Sounds like their cup didn't runneth over with democracy even beforehand... that's bizarre. Like a modern House of Lords that just leans into giving corps a seat in government...
Stallman has never limited his "well technically..." outbursts to topics of sex/rape. He seems to do it with any topic without discretion.

A couple of days ago I attended a talk he gave at the Seattle Public Library and he did the "well technically..." routine to an audience member who claimed to be a fan of free software ("It's strange to say you're a fan of freedom [...]" or something to that effect.) He also did it in response to several other topics, but that one stood out to me.

I don't wish to pathologize aberrant social behavior since that could probably be turned back against me pretty easily, but if one were so inclined I think classifying Stallman would be pretty easy... Pedantry and lack of tact is a trait I've seen before.
Team Fortress started as Quake1 mod, which then Valve made to a Half-Life mod TFC, and later as the TF2 [1]. Also Counter-Strike was a mod as well which again Valve made official versions of.

I started with the Quake TF and now still pay TF2 sometimes. Basically been playing the same game for ~20 years.

1:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_Fortress_2#Origins_and_ea...
> it's not a 'story' - there's no investigative reporting - heck there's no reporting at all.

https://slate.com/technology/2019/09/kickstarter-turmoil-uni...
It seems like when something does break, ebs failures cascade to other services (RDS) and you're pretty much hosed...

Ever since the first big us-east-1 ebs outage I've tried to avoid ebs, but I am using it for root volumes on most of my instances which makes me nervous -- so many instance types don't have instance storage, I guess I need to look at c5d instances again.

I thought this writeup my smugmug was pretty good and still applies: https://don.blogs.smugmug.com/2011/04/24/how-smugmug-survive...
Much of the open source community doesn't know who RMS is. Much of the rest don't have a problem with these sorts of comments, and just assume RMS is a victim of an SJW witch-hunt.

>Someone like the ex-Mozilla CEO was shunned and booted out of his position for much less.

Entirely different factions within the community.

The people who don't take issue with Stallman's comments also likely had no problem with Brendan Eich, and believe he was a victim of an SJW witch-hunt as well.
Due to oil fields and lack of housing I imagine.
I believe the paper that lead to all of those articles blaming the plastics in the ocean on Asian rivers was one that was specifically looking looking at plastics carried by major river systems [1]. This was to complement a previous study on plastics from coastal strips [2]. The large Asian river systems have catchment areas that hold billions of people between them and would carry a substantial proportion of the worlds riverine pollution even if all other things were equal. The microplastics in the environment in the first world come from first world activities, including littering and driving (and hence producing car tyre fragments).

Low and middle income countries need better public services - including waste and waste water management - and enforcement of environmental laws. High income countries need less waste and enforcement of environmental laws.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15611.pdf

[2] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/347/6223/768.full https://jambeck.engr.uga.edu/landplasticinput "There is one high income country on the list, the United States, and while our waste management systems are well-designed and very effective, and the only mismanaged waste is from litter, we have a large coastal population and a large waste generation rate."
Actually no, the "photonuclear" region is actually already achieveable, the issues in that field are more mundane/engineering related, often how to increase efficiency, how to make things repeatable instead of 5 shots per week, etc. 1e25 W/cm^2 is approaching the next frontier, the strong field quantum regime.
> They focus intensely on some topics, and harmlessly pontificate on many other topics.

This was on an MIT mailing list, though. Even if we grant that he just wanted to engage in idle intellectual speculation, he ought to understand that an academic environment is not the right place for it.
The AWS console is a bit clunky, but would you really prefer it if it was changing all the time?
Aren’t those all reruns though, not originals? That’s quite a different situation. Existing shows are a known commodity. One of the things that enticed the producers of House of Cards was the revenue deal.
Steps to an Effective Design Review
Even better: throw differential dataflow machinery at all the template handling of C++ code, interprocedural constant peopagation (and similar steps), and of course the linking itself.

It's sad these foundations only seem to exist in rust.
The title should be:

1 is Legengre's constant

... but the HN submission system has stripped the "1" from the front.

You still have time to fix this. It can be put back if you click on the link to edit the submission. But you only have 2 hours from first submission.
Because his views on things like these do not matter when considering him as a figure in the open source community. There's no reason to believe that this would impact the quality of his software or his ability to communicate with people about software.

FWIW, I feel the same way about Eich.
I really, really, do not understand why some people's reaction to this is trying to get him fired or to apologize.

Right here we have one human being that will ponder on random issues and offer his honest opinion. He will do it without regard for social pressure. This is an incredible rare thing! This is an amazing thing, go browse your Facebook or LinkedIn feed and see how "authentic" it sounds. What's more, this gentleman is a very rational person and does not shy away from thinking about pedophilia and various paraphilia. What's more he seems truly inquisitive in understanding how to measure what Minsky did, what motivations and perceptions each participant had, etc. This is so much more important than just getting revenge, being constantly angry on the internet or just saying Epstein was evil and calling it a day.

We need much, much more people like Stallman and much, much less people that will cry foul on a Medium post when someone doesn't go along with what they want.
> The BIOS can just install vulnerable SMM handlers and then you're screwed.

Writing SMM handlers is not an easy job. Using the API provided by Windows to make installations as described by the article is an easy job. The installed program is just plain simple user space code that can use all services of the operating system. No special skills required to make it phone home.

Are there any reports of an SMM handler able to phone home? (Honestly curious)
It's an interesting problem. There's some sort of rule of thumb here (it needs a name).

. Due to network effects, websites sites tend towards monopolies.

. Due to human tribalism, websites tend towards bias.

Even given some sort of publishing rules, I can't imagine how you veer away from this. The quest for wealth might keep you from choosing up sides, but not always.
Seeing quite a few of these outrage and holier than thou post lately and I'd like to see even less of them in the future.

Hackernews does a pretty good job on filtering out all the political stuff but all this #metoo, "can you believe he said that?" posts are not things that I want to read about here.
lat, long:

“I have fallen and broken my leg. I am under a rock at *thirty three point five nine six one three degrees north and one hundred and seventeen point seven nine six nine two degrees west. That’s thirty three point five nine six one three degrees north and one hundred and seventeen point seven nine six nine two degrees west.” Then wait for them to read it back to you. Then repeat that as many times as there are different people involved in the rescue.

Versus 3 word:

“I have fallen and broken my leg. I am under a rock at 3 word code: off-road — starfish — postmark.” Then wait for them to read it back to you. Then repeat that as many times as there are different people involved in the rescue.

Where I am rn, btw. (Though thankfully not my situation) And the number of decimal places more or less corresponds with the size of the 3 code and an appropriate level of precision, given the environment.
My apologies. I went back and reread your comment and I clearly misread it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_constituency_(Hong_...

"Pro-democracy supporters criticise the functional constituency system for giving a minority too much power and influence. The right of corporations and legal entities to vote is also controversial, as it gives some individuals multiple votes. For example, in 1998, Sino Group chairman Robert Ng and companies he controlled held roughly 3-4% of the votes in the real estate constituency, according to an analysis by the Hong Kong Human Rights Monitor; they described this as being equivalent in voting power to 15,940 people in a geographical constituency.[5][6]

In some functional constituencies, the entire body of eligible voters comprises legal entities that are not natural persons. This is known as corporate voting."
Quite a few nations in the Middle East were never organically formed. They were carved and cobbled together by various agreements, such as Sykes–Picot. The resulting creation contains an unstable combination of factions and tribes that are often hostile to each other. Lebanon, Jordan, Yemen, and Iraq are all great examples of that.

Many of these nations are now failed states, containing factions that are more powerful than any sort of central government or military. Chief examples of that are Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen.

However, there are ME nations-states that do have a strong and coherent central government. Egypt, KSA, and Iran are examples of that.

So a more accurate model would be a mixture of failed artificial states interacting with states that are more functional and coherent.
I'm in a very similar boat to you, I think I've deleted three messages this morning...

But it would still be possible to get my attention. The average message is something along the lines of Hi {name}. I was at your site {domain} and had some ideas. [the same copy every single person gets]

If instead someone emailed me something that showed that they not only knew what domain they were mailing but understood what our product offered and how maybe they could help I'd probably keep reading. For me that might look like:

----

Hey Paul,

I love what you've built with WonderProxy, this GeoIP testing niche you've carved out is super interesting, I wish I'd known about it years ago! We had this horrible integration that refused to load in Germany but worked perfectly in our office, debugging over Remote Desktop at 3am still haunts my dreams.

Anyways i'm actually wondering if there's a way we can work together. I'm a senior PHP developer and I've got a lot of experience building OKTA integrations. It looks like you've started offering SAML, but let me tell you OKTA is like the secret sauce to get loved by IT departments. Your team is likely capable of building this in-house, but why spend tens or hundreds of hours learning the ins and outs of this stuff when I can build it in half the time with a quarter of the bugs :).

let me know if you're interested

----

I'm not saying I'd hire that gal/guy, but if it was something I wanted we would at least have a conversation. I'd optimize for quality messages to qualified companies, rather than quantity anything.
The other way of dealing with this is to put normal services in an autoscaling environment like Kubernetes. You don't have to go as far as Lambda to get the benefits.

Moving to autoscaling is really more of a cultural problem than a technical one. If teams are used to being able to reserve excess capacity they will be wary of autoscaling -- what if they try to scale but there is not capacity to do so because other teams used it up? People need to trust that the system will give them the capacity they need or they will continue to overprovision.
You mean this?

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/282505033/always-punch-...
I mean the scats are not really cubes, they’re cubic. They don’t have sharp edges. The explanation given in the paper makes sense, and is indeed fascinating!
"Does anyone know of examples where unionization created a better forum for communication?"

If you're looking for a white-collar example, I think newsrooms and film sets fit the bill. Read any account of working in newsrooms or on film sets before unions contrast it with conditions today.

Without collective bargaining, line managers face pressures to get more effort for less pay out of workers. As the employee, you are _bargaining all the time_ and you _bargaining alone_. This can be extremely stressful, particularly when market conditions for the firm are in flux.

With a collective bargaining agreement, you are not alone in your bargaining and when a collective bargaining agreement is in force, you get a break from haggling over the issues it covers. Managers are largely unable to exert downward pressure on working conditions, so they face less pressure to do so from superiors. This leaves managers to focus on those issues employees generally want managers to focus on: obstacles to getting the work done, smoothing over interpersonal differences, ensuring efforts cohere.

"I know unions are powerful forces for rectifying inequality especially around pay disparity. But, is there evidence that they improve communication between management and individual contributors? I would assume adding an extra layer would worsen things."

Unions don't add a hierarchical layer, though American employers often try depict them this way.

The typical arrangement would be for one of your peers in the workplace to be elected steward for a fixed term, during which time they ensure the terms of the contract (collective bargaining agreement) is enforced and advocate for employees that management have accused of failing to hold up their end of the bargaining (a counterweight to HR/labor departments which represent the employer perspective before arbitrators or the labor board). You of course get a collective bargaining agreement by electing a bargaining committee.
Hypebot is the hype man who never lets me down
It's spooky to see this going on. I can only hope that this is resisted by those companies and the people sufficiently enough to limit the damage this could do.
Amazon is surely big and rich, but do they really exert the same psychological/social power on you? You don't read your news on Amazon, you don't send messages to your closest friends on amazon, you don't go down reading rabbit holes from following links on Amazon (not really, anyway).

Certainly purchase data is very powerful (ask supermarkets!), but I think it pales in comparison to the breadth of data Facebook and Google collect.
This is what Hyper-threading[1] is designed to do.

The point is that it's expensive for the OS to switch threads, so the CPU instead tells the OS it can run two threads at the same time, and does so by sharing execution resources.

Gives a nice boost for programs that do a fair bit of calculations while also having a fair share of cache misses. If you have tight loops with little memory access you won't gain much.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-threading
The concrete line has to be drawn somewhere. It's quite low given that (and this is a daring conjecture by which I firmly stand) the majority of 18 - 21 year olds are completely out of bounds for anybody who wants a stable mature relationship. They are culturally wild. Discovering drink, drugs, sex... So, the question is: why would anybody want a relationship with somebody under 18 if not for sexual exploitation of their lack of experience?

EDIT: I was a wild 14-21 year old, it's perfectly natural that they are bonkers. Fair play to them!
> A significant number of the seats in Hong Kong government are voted/belong to "industry/corporations"

Sounds like they're pulling an America