skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This used to be called "secular stagnation". There's not much forward progress, but nobody really understands why. Japan hit this first, in their 1989 housing crash. In the mid-1980s, Japan seemed poised to dominate the world economy. After the crash, Japan never came back.[1]

There was a fear that the US would hit that after the 2008 crash. But the US did come back. At least until the epidemic.

Macroeconomists think macroeconomics determines what happens. Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn't. When it doesn't, central bankers are totally lost about what to do.

Should a country have an industrial policy? The traditional answer in capitalist countries is "no". But it worked for Japan, S. Korea, Singapore, and China, which now make most of the world's good stuff. China's current industrial policy, set in 2015, is called "China 2025"[2][3]. The plan is to achieve dominance in the remaining sectors where China is behind - aircraft, ICs, etc. It's not talked about much outside China, but it's still the operating plan. The main items in 2015 were:

1. New advanced information technology

2. Automated machine tools & robotics

3. Aerospace and aeronautical equipment

4. Maritime equipment and high-tech shipping;

5. Modern rail transport equipment

6. New-energy vehicles and equipment

7. Power equipment

8. Agricultural equipment

9. New materials

10. Biopharma and advanced medical products

Halfway through the 10-year plan, China is doing well on at least 7 of those items.

Western countries are assuming that the knobs controlled by the financial system determine what happens. When the biggest country on the planet isn't playing that game, that approach may not be competitive.

[1] https://www.csis.org/analysis/made-china-2025

[2] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/made-in-china-202...

[3] https://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/2019/1/21/saupload_J...
It's not as simple as 'outsourcing good for capital, bad for labor.' It's been a stupendously positive change for foreign labor in countries that successfully ran low-cost export industries.

Literally hundreds of millions of people in the Third World to were able to raise themselves into the global middle class over the past few decades.

The main people hurt by the outsourcing trend have been middle-class people in wealthy countries who had well-paid, lower-skill jobs producing physical things which are now shipped in from far away.

Good for foreign labor, good for capitalists, and bad for the middle class in rich countries.

This could have even been a win-win-win, if managed more carefully — Germany had pretty robust job retraining programs for people who lost factory jobs. I'd imagine the UK did not.
Even if it's not a full design in writing, important decisions should have a trail. It can be hard to adhere to that, but it's very useful. Life if there's something that you think could bite you, but a manager is very pushy about their way, write it down in an email as a question asking for confirmation. I've had to go back to emails like that, sometimes to actually confirm to the person who made the decision in the first place.
Alice in IoT Land: A cautionary tale
How do you handle access from multiple worker processes? Some languages/frameworks handle have poor multi-threading performance and must be deployed in a multi-process setup (e.g. python webapps). Or is it not a good fit for sqlite?
Do I need to sacrifice my children to have the privilege to be allowed to solve your problems?

Okay. Good bye, science.
Definitely a really good counterfeit.
Cancel culture is equally strong in the UK, where they have free public healthcare and the UK police kills about 2 people per year (usually well justified). These issues seem to be orthogonal.
For a much, much longer treatment of the argument ogomad gestures towards, read Cosma Shalizi[1] g, A Statistical Myth. Note that most of the criticism applies as well to temperature or pressure as to g. For a detailed response to Shalizi, see Human Varieties[2].

[1] http://bactra.org/weblog/523.html

[2] https://humanvarieties.org/2013/04/03/is-psychometric-g-a-my...
OOOOOOH the chinese shills have arrived.

HN is compromised.
> ... it reminds me of dysfunctional companies so much.

Thanks for the link. Sad as is a bizarre display of hazards of imperial ambitions. Looking back, Kamchatka's annoyance must be symbolic in this context.

Reading this depiction of dysfunctions of navies of the country on the brink of historical changes, hard not to draw parallels with the recent sad adventures of Russian Federation's only aircraft carrier [1].

In this light, I really appreciated the In-Memoriam at the end of Drachinifel's video to remember the lives of officers and sailors lost in the imperial battles.

[1]: https://www.news.com.au/technology/innovation/military/hole-...
A lot of the discussion here seems to rest on the idea that there is a "right" option that was ignored in favor of a "wrong" option.

I've rarely seen that be the case. Setting aside politics - the "right decision" would be bad for a team with a very influential manager, say - there's still plenty of extra nuance to purely technical choices.

"This will break at some point but probably by then we'll have gotten a lot of value of it and we can afford to fix it then."

"This might break but there's a 70% chance it won't and it would cost twice as much to do it the safer way."

"This will probably break in this specific way, but we don't understand the alternative technology well enough to even predict the odds of it breaking."

And so on.

Bad leaders aren't often transparent about all those sorts of considerations, so if you find yourself in that situation, be wary.

But if you aren't making your arguments in a tradeoff-aware way, your "I told you so" may not be very useful.
The faster it fails, the faster you might have an opportunity to point out the failure points and suggest the correct solution.
Ask HN: Recommendations for Books on Writing?
I want to propose a book club for writing as an engineer. Writing is fundamentally and critically important, but it seems that we don't emphasize it as much as we should for engineers (outside Amazon, where apparently it is a prominent member of the leadership pantheon).

I'm interested in any suggestions that HN has for great books on writing as an engineer! Accessibility and ease are important factors for a book club as well.
GPT, is that you?
We have quite a few in our Slack channel: slack.timescale.com

Feel free to ask over there :)

(Btw - TimescaleDB is designed to work with Prometheus. You can see more here: https://github.com/timescale/timescale-prometheus)
My moonshot idea would be a 100% carbon neutral battery recycling plant w/ zero waste.
Ursula K. LeGuin had an essay in her collection Languages of the Night (can't remember exactly which essay) where she said “Nobody who says, ‘I told you so’ has ever been, or will ever be, a hero.”
An old fad, probably. Romans did this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frigidarium
I still don't understand that why is the system not zero sum. The system has a way of replenishing itself. But if we consume (or harm nature) at a rate higher than it can replenish, then it'll not be able to sustain.

Why do you say that the system is more complicated that zero sum ? Is it because of the infiniteness of sunlight ? Or is it because of the scale at which humans effect nature, or the sheer vastness of nature. Is this from the system perspective, or a human perspective ?
>Think about some highly intelligent reptile predator species, with a taste for mamal meat.

I mean, let's be realistic, we could still do business in that scenario. Maybe trade a few million tasty human popplers for a stargate or zero-point engine or something.
> The idea that the person "needs to construct stronger arguments" seems to put the blame on the person with foresight when circumstances can vary a lot.

It's also extremely dismissive of experience. Sometimes you just know an idea won't work out because you've been down that road before. You can't just distill 20 years of experience into strong counter arguments for every proposal, it's just too time consuming, especially when you've got other stuff to do. But our industry severely under values experience.

It's similar to other useless platitudes like "present solutions not problems". It sounds good on the face of it but ignores that solutions take much more of a time investment than seeing problems does, seeing a problem is merely the first stage of a solution.

And trying to get rid of "I told you so" leads to "consensus" decision making, which is it's own workplace cancer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67QsrpNH96Q
This is still hugely frustrating to the people working on it. I build high pressure distsys architecture and I've worked on some incredibly cool bleeding edge tech that nobody will ever hear about and I can't even put on my resume because of NDAs. The subject pops up on hn maybe once every 3 months and I'm just dying to talk to other people in that industry but it's just a private group so I enjoy what tidbits I can read, they're always low reply posts, and pay for white papers for most of the rest.

It actually became really important to me over the last 5-10 years. I have no desire to discuss the secret sauce but I've been at companies so secretive that we couldn't even send a github issue up on our personal accounts because some context might bubble up eventually as to what we built and who we are.

I am so, so much happier working on my niche at places where I can interact openly with people from other companies/projects, not in a competitive manner but as engineering peers working to improve some subsystem of our architecture.

I feel like the shift is coming, especially with all of the open standards groups companies are rallying behind. I'm loving that. It's just taking its time to come east of SV.
Census data on percentage of blacks living in poverty.[1]

2018 - 23.3%

1966 - 31.1%

[1]https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-p...
As someone who grew up in China, I think this analogy is overblown. PG and others are up in arms about "cancel culture," but I'm not seeing substantial evidence of people's voices being suppressed by the masses. The few anecdotes cited (James Bennet fired by NYT, JK Rowling finally being called out for being anti-trans, random people being unfairly fired) don't seem to point toward a mass movement toward intolerance in the US.

On the other hand, it's clear, especially to young people, that traditional liberalism has failed at actually addressing inequality, racism, and other systemic problems that the US faces. A big part of what people refer to as "cancel culture" is frustration over the ineffectiveness of traditional liberalism, especially when the far right seems to play by a different set of rules.

I'm definitely concerned about far left zealotry, but I don't think that's what I'd happening in the US.
The Star of This $70M Sci-Fi Film Is a Robot
> And that innovation is “just” glass cockpit, and some more advanced avionics. Not changing the principles - you fly a bit faster, a bit safer but still need a license and do all the preparation and checks. But it’s a bit more fancy. From 200k to almost 1 MM.

Nah. Avionics, etc, and what goes into a plane is cheap compared to the purchase price. Even when you talk about G1000, G3000, etc, they are not the primary cost drivers.

What's killed the price of general aviation aircraft is that very few units are purchased. In turn, prices go up; in turn more old planes are kept flying and fewer units are purchased.

Four seat aircraft without glass cockpits and without notable innovation are a few hundred K.
What did you do when you get such a return, and what would Amazon do?
>Cameras are usually pretty well hidden.

Can you link to some examples of some "well hidden" cameras at a major retailer? Most retailers don't bother to hide their cameras, so they're just kinda lying out there. They're not overtly obvious, but if you know where to look (eg. ceilings), you can find them.

>And isn't a website you don't own a public place?

Not really, it's public in the sense that anyone can access it, but it's also private in the sense that all your activities are instanced and not visible to anyone else.

>Do you expect Google not to track what you do on their site?

Facebook got flak a few years back when it was revealed that they were surreptitiously recording everything you typed when you were creating a post, even before you hit submit[1]. Clearly the average person doesn't expect that their activities to be recorded 24/7.

[1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2525227/Face...
Regarding the lack of secondary level CS education, it is a problem everywhere. You have to be passionate about teaching CS because practicing it is so lucrative. There's a global shortage of CS teachers especially at the secondary level.
No, the site links to papers that go back to 2017.
If you can't be bothered to recognize even a single instance of this happening, then you've shut your eyes and ears.
Yes but that process is very unfriendly. First you need to know you are going to spend over 1 year abroad. Since you can only apply before you leave. Second it takes month to approve and costs 500+ USD to apply for that permission.

If you left without the intent to stay longer than a year and had to extend for unforeseen circumstances (say a global pandemic heavily reduced air travel options) than you are out of luck.

For me it would be more convenient to spend 6 months abroad and then a couple months in the US then go back and spend another 6 months abroad.

If I do that technically I'm complying with all the rules and my green card should be safe while also not reseting my clock for citizenship. But the USCIS seems to be a bit vague on what would happen if I did that.
Thanks for your comment. I don't know the name for it either, but the statement in that example sounds unfalsifiable, and the reasoning is very reminiscent of fascists/Nazis.
I think the example of the students of the Princeton professor is very similar to this subtype:

> I sometimes ask students what their position on slavery would have been had they been white and living in the South before abolition. Guess what? They all would have been abolitionists! They all would have bravely spoken out against slavery, and worked tirelessly against it.

Most people, myself included, like to believe that they are independently-minded. Given that most people aren't independently-minded, most people are wrong.
That's an inaccurate picture of resource allocation. 100 hours of a globally unique resource could satisfy 100 1-hour demands. You sum those.
Could you use the moonshine test on hand sanitizer? If it burns blue then you know it’s ethanol and if it burns yellow it’s methanol? I’m not familiar with the other ingredients in hand sanitizer so I don’t know if this would work (so don’t try it at home!) I’m only asking out of curiosity.
175 translations of of the Tao Te Ching
Give me an fn break

@Dang prove chinese are not here
On Writing Well by Yale professor William Zinsser was required reading as an undergraduate for my history thesis, and the lessons in nonfiction writing have served me well as an engineer and tech consultant. The political satirist Christopher Buckley recently recommended it during an interview as the single best book about writing[1] which prompted me to dust off my copy!

[1] https://www.nhpr.org/post/10-minute-writers-workshop-christo...
Drugs and AI: Why ML is flawed
I just can't imagine how strong types can be viewed as anything other than an immense benefit. Maybe on some personal projects or a throwaway prototype or simple scripts it might not be worth the effort, but if you're working on any kind of software that needs to be maintained over a period of years, having strong types is always better than not having them. Strong types encode extremely valuable information about the composition of application data structures, omitting them can save time up front, but it's just a form of technical debt that every engineer on the project will have to pay back when they're tasked with debugging data errors in code they didn't write. So many engineering-hours wasted by developers stepping through a debugger trying to figure out why some complex object is arbitrarily missing certain properties or why the same property is sometimes a string but other times its an object with its own potential superposition of states. It's a nightmare.
Their job isn't to prevent loss, it's to catch people.
I think we probably agree 100% about this, but the reality today is what’s important to people losing their job today.

I don’t think you mean to downplay the impact of someone losing their job today, but that’s how it came across to me.
One person's goal might be to bicycle across the US. Another person's goal, to retire at 65. A third person's goal -- work for a FAANG. Someone else's to find a life partner and raise a family.

Better and worse tools for thinking about each of these goals iare different. That's why I asked.
I suspect that aeroplanes will look very similarly in 100 years as well. There's such thing as physics that are the main reasons.

Don't look at fighter jets, as they are basically jet engines with guns and little control surfaces added.

As for airworthiness - there's a good reason for that - these things literally fly over your head.
The constant hammering about using the HWY99 corridor vs I5 is kinda telling. It's obvious they aren't even looking at a map. If you did look at a map you'd see that the I5 route only saves 70 miles out of 470. And you need to drive the rail line up and over the grapevine and and through Tejon Pass. If you keep the route though Palmdale and Acton then you save less than 30 miles.
Unpaid internships are the best indeed
Ambition and modesty, also you may want to swap major and minor, it's nearly impossible to get a dev job with this (if this is your goal)
(Ab)use of xterm's tek4010 for animation
People lose their jobs all the time for a single tweet or customer interaction.
That's exactly the reason that newsletters are effective, though. Objectively, the format is terrible (email is like trying to design for the web in the early 00's when each browser supported an overlapping subset of features), but email grants immediate, unfettered access to you, unmediated by social networks or websites where the author doesn't have total control over your experience.
Thinking of a Cybersecurity Career?
BTW, the Cooper Press version for serverless is terrific. Among the best newsletters I subscribe to.
https://www.tcs.com/business-4-0/report/behaviors-digital-tr...
Just read this and tell me if any of this makes sense. I read it 10 times and couldn’t figure out what is the value they are bringing.
A big part of maturing as an engineer is realizing that if you’re not talking about something under NDA that’s actually cool, someone else on your team is, and it just makes you worse off.

The rabbit hole goes deeper. Sometimes you’re hired to recruit your friends where you’ll necessarily have to break the NDA to get them excited.

A lot of people look back on R&D work where they did not thrive and quit. I think a big part of it is not realizing what confidentiality really means. They miss out on working with their smart friends, they miss out on getting ideas from other people, they realize there are not enough people they know whom they could trust with confidential stuff. They turn out to be way too square to be doing R&D work, they're hung up on breaking the little rules so how are you going to break the big rules? They're being paid to break rules and they're just afraid to break them. Then when it just comes to doing good work, it’s so important to talk to friends and family for useful feedback especially since you almost always find out from your boss that you’re doing something wrong way too late.

This is especially acute at places like Apple that glorifies confidentiality. They’ve been more successful than ever with their more relaxed attitude towards leaks. It was totally unproductive but it was cargo-culted into places like e.g. Facebook, Snapchat and Samsung that have a hard time recruiting because nobody finds out what they’re going to be working on.
The real trick is that caring about anything in the modern corporate workplace is a mistake. Unless you hold equity and board position in the company, then you are completely replaceable at any time for any reason.

The only thing you should be doing is ensuring that the chain of decision making is documented so blame flows upwards. And exercise some discretion in ensuring you get away from managers with a track history of poor decision making.

Workers don't own the company, and they have almost no power (nor the time to engage in the politicking which would give it) within the decision making structure there. Look after yourself first, and plan to leave when people who do think they have an ownership start making bad decisions.
Is it on a ferry or is the map just not accurate there?
I don't see it on the list.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Train_ferry
I still use 10.4 on a 2005 PowerMac several times a week for various creative projects.

The ease of use is so much higher than recent MacOS versions it's not even funny.
The Optimists
I guess my point is more that as a huge tech company that wants to hire many very good ML researchers, a culture of publishing is necessary
If I recall correctly, most of the moonshine blindness was not due to improper distillation technique (i.e. not cutting your distillation head), but rather that methanol was often used to dilute ethyl alcohol.
Depends on the factory type and who is running it.

Considering that it’s run by Foxconn, who have significant experience in production and a reputation, i doubt there’s going to be much.

Also, as a phone assembly facility, it doesn’t make the same environmental damage that a coal fired power plant, or a steel manufacturing plant might have.
DCRainmaker has a specific guide for a range of Garmin watches and machines - https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2020/07/how-to-upload-your-garmi...
Thanks for the link. It seems the implementations are already improving. From the posted benchmarks it looks like it got twice as fast, which is still slow for some use cases (like ephemeral use for forward secrecy) and slower devices. The best solution will be hardware support.
Which third world countries have better 4G, than... say Estonia?
My educational background is a Canadian Bachelor's in an unrelated engineering branch (chemical). I took a few CS courses, got some experience, and have been working in the US for the past 5 years as a software engineer on TN at multiple places. I'm now getting RFE pushback on my latest renewal (same job - backend engineer) that I do not fit the software engineer designation, so our team is seeing what they can do.

I thought there would be major accounting/tax headache for my company to have employees in Canada, although it wouldn't be an immigration issue for me. If it was as easy as flipping a switch, I'd make the move. I also have another US job offer that is going through the same issue (RFE), so I'm sensing a pattern here.