skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Static translation is, in fact, the simplest to accomplish, and it is time proven as well. This is what IBM have been doing with AS/400 for more than three decades. AS/400 runs on a virtual ISA, and applications are alwyas compiled into the virtual instruction set. Pointers, for instance, have been 128-bit since day 1 (1989 circa). Upon the first startup, virtual instructions are compiled into real CPU instructions, and the recompiled application image is stashed away in a cache. Consequent application restarts use the cached application image. IBM have been using POWER CPU's for the last few generations of AS/400, but they have also used drastically different CPU designs in the past as well. This allows to run applications that had been written in 1991 today, for example.

Dynamic binary translation (a predecessor of modern JIT) is a completely different story, though.

Now, a few years back, Apple introduced iOS app uploads in Bitcode. Bitcode is the LLVM's own intermediate representation of the abstracted LLVM ISA. Apps available in Bitcode, when downloaded, are statically compiled into the ISA of the actual CPU one's iPhone has. Again, apps uploaded in Bitcode in 2018, will run fast and effeciently on iPhone 18 as well. I could immediately draw parallels with AS/400 a few years back when Apple announced the Bitcode availability.

I could not quickly check whether Bitcode was available for OS X apps today as well, but it would be hard to imagine why Apple would not want to extend the approach to the OS X apps as well. This is where it can get really interesting as apps available through the OS X app store in Bitcode, could be developed and compiled on a device running on the Intel ISA, but they could also be statically translated into M1 (M2, M3 etc) ISA at the download time and, at least theoretically, they would not require a separate ARM / M1 app image (or a universal binary for that matter). Unless, of course, the app leans on something x86 specific.

I am on the hunch that the real disruption that Apple has inflicted upon the industry is not just a stupendously fast and power efficient chip (it is very nice but secondary), but the concept of the demise of the importance of hardware ISA's in general – use the intermediate code representation for app binary images and use whatever CPU / hardware ISA that allows to realise the product vision. It is ARM today but it can be anything else 10 years down the road. I wonder who can push the mainstream PC industry in a similar direction and successfully execute it, though.
I find it funny that the author is concerned about Scale being the kind of company people join for brand rather than "substance". He never mentions the biggest reason people join companies (esp. in SV): to get rich. It is true that undergrads will intern for company's brand and that makes sense b/c just having FAANG on your resume completely changes your job search experience. But most fulltime employees are looking primarily to maximize their pay + RSUs.

Also, as others have mentioned, companies/leaders need to give people something to "give a shit about". For some people that may just be working on "High quality training and validation data for AI applications", but I imagine for most people that's probably not quite enough to make them excited about work. But, who knows? :shrug:
> It seems like the US Navy has a patent on a space bending space craft.

> https://patents.google.com/patent/US10144532B2/en

> It looks like the secret US navy TR-3B. The language here is oddly specific. Is this real?

This is an EMDrive variant that AFAICT hasn't yet been tested or validated (contrast with the Shawyer frustum design, which has been tested, but not validated).
>"Lunar regolith, the thin layer of dusty rock that blankets the Moon, is not so different from the minerals found on Earth. By weight, it contains about 45 percent oxygen which is bound to metals such as iron and titanium, making it unavailable."

>"The electrochemical process takes place in a specially designed chamber - the ones used for research are about the size of a washing machine. Oxygen-containing material is submerged in molten salt, heated to 950 degrees Celsius. A current is then passed through it, which triggers the oxygen to be extracted and migrate across the liquid salt to collect at an electrode, leaving behind a mixture of metal powders."

PDS: Some posters have suggested that the electrification of molten salts to extract oxygen was a process known for a long time. Probably true, but this is the first I've heard of it (Disclaimer: I am not a Chemist or Chemical Engineer... in fact, I'm not even a real Scientist! <g>)

But, this is interesting!

In the case of water, electrolysis yields Oxygen and Hydrogen (is Hydrogen a metal? Some scientists say 'yes -- but only at a very high pressure'). In the case of a metal mixed with Oxygen; an oxide; apparently oxides have to be heated to very high temperatures and mixed with a salt (compare this to H2O being mixed with a salt prior to electrolysis, AFAIK, the salt is just there to make the H2O conductive to a voltage), and then electrolyzed and then you can extract the oxygen.

Now, I wonder if the process could be completed without a salt, because well, H2O can be electrolyzed without a salt -- you just get a whole lot less Hydrogen and Oxygen bubbles -- this is because not as much current is going through the water without the salt added.

That's because water without additives acts as a resistor.

The salt basically makes the solution into less of a resistor, and more of a conductor.

But let's say we wanted to accomplish this feat without adding the salt. How might we accomplish this?

Well, we could raise the voltage to compensate for the resistance that needs to be overcome.

Yes, this would mean lowering the current of the electrodes proportionally.

But, maybe we could use a trick, like the way a Xenon flash bulb is lit -- to make this thing happen.

Basically, in a Xenon flash bulb, a very quickly occurring high-voltage arc pulse first ionizes the Xenon gas, then a secondary much lower voltage (but much higher current) is continuously passed across the now-conductive ionized path blazed by the initial high voltage pulse.

So I wonder if something like that could work to extract oxygen from lunar regolith, without requiring (or requiring as much!) salt... or heck, heat even(!)... perhaps you could do something like get the oxygen out at lower temperatures...

It would just be a question of enough voltage to start the circuit -- and subsequently enough current to sustain it...

It's also equal-and-oppositely possible that all of the above is a complete and total crackpot theory...

...Take all of the above with the proverbial... "grain of salt"... <g>

(Pun intended... <g>)
Apollo 1 was particularly bad because they were attempting to simulate relative space pressure on the ground. So they pushed the internal pressure up to 20 psi of pure O2 (sea level is ~15 psi).

That is something like ~7 the Oxygen density of normal air. Things burn hot and fast in that environment.
Human nature. If your child is late from a party, say, the mind wonders and eventually thinks the worst.
What incentive is driving this trend is democracies? In UK, America, Japan, pretty much every other western/European democracy the government debt is ever growing and money printing is only growing and growing.
Because everyone from the left to the Heritage Foundation condemned the murder.

What most don't condone is burning down buildings and attacking and harassing diners.

BLM is the ultimate motte and bailey.
Okay - so is your implication that he is some kind of failure if he struggled with depression and committed suicide?
Virtual Reality. It will be a drug when it is going to completely replace the reality and, as with other drugs, the addiction will make it highly valuable.
Possibly a fire? Take it with a few grains of salt.

https://mobile.twitter.com/VitalVegas/status/133256096974723...
When Apple, Google, and all ARM based things actually run something other than Angry Birds, Chinese Adware Strange Rope Hero and Pokemon ripoff games for babies with video and malware app adds and closed "walled garden" "app store" ecosystems where you have to pay $10 or more for even an mp3 or video player, let me know. Otherwise all this mysterious "performance" is even more useless than a 75mhz Pentium from 1996. When anyone can actually program for ARM without "licensing fees" also let me know.
I agree. As a Linux user, I hope we don't get left in the dust if Windows and Apple both decide to go down the ARM route.
I did not find it hard to not make assumptions. Perhaps it's your approach to life that needs examining?
Does anyone know why British people call it "the R number"?

It's like calling the speed of light "the c number" rather than "c".
Yes but make sure one of those things isn’t heroin
Racism won’t be a problem once color of the skin is no longer a point of the argument.

As long as people demand x/y hires to be of a certain race or color, the companies will have to continue hiring for diversity, and not for the best qualified candidates.

Stop counting who is who, and the market will take of itself.
On RAM: This is their low end chip; there will likely be another chip within a year supporting more ram. Nevertheless, there are reports from programmers and video editors that suggest that the 16 GB on M1 go a lot further than 16 GB on Intel. No hard technical reasons on why that would be.

(Also, anecdotally, I don't understand why HN keeps saying 16GB of RAM isn't a lot. I just upgraded my home desktop to 16 GB, and only because I also upgraded my screen from 1080 to 1440, and videogames were dipping below 60fps. Sure, at work my desktop has much more RAM, but for a laptop? 16 GB seems fine.)

On GPU: There's been some speculation that the eGPU's don't work due to driver support, not hardware issues. Once again, I wouldn't be surprised if the higher end chips in 2021 have a dedicated GPU inside the Pro and Mini.

On real world workloads: See the above about anecdotes about programmers and video editors. I don't know if there's any great sources here besides reading twitter and trying to avoid biased fanboys.

I'm waiting for more of the languages and tools I use to become fully supported on the M1 before I bite the bullet, but I'm finding fewer and fewer reasons to be skeptical of the performance numbers...
reads article

> Much of Coinbase’s culture stems from the one around Bitcoin, current and former employees said. Bitcoin, which embodies a libertarian philosophy that snubs its nose at the pieties of mainstream institutions, has attracted a generation of fans known as “crypto bros.” Many have propagated a brash male-dominated way of life, facing criticism for sowing racism and sexism.

reads your username
I'd say in the end everyone is dead.
Interesting – I had assumed this was a state responsibility, like vehicle registration, driver’s licences, and road rules. After all, the constitution doesn’t give the federal government the power to regulate cars. But it seems that it does assert the power, as you suggested, to override state vehicle standards using the interstate trade and commerce and corporations powers: https://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/mvsa19892...
I just tried DeepNote, wow! I havent seen such a clean interface in a Jupyter Notebook for very long time. So intiituve and very easy to use, I was up in < 5 minutes with GCS + BQ integration
When it's 50% of the black employees, yeah. When discussing issues in crosstabs, you can't use the overall number as the denominator. That's bad statistics.
Open source React SaaS project integrated with Stripe
The only easy part of vintage computing was simplicity gained from highly limited software and hardware.
What Is Offshore Outsourcing: Definition and Benefits
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_51(i)_of_the_Constitut...
Airlines' new 'health passport' could revive international travel
I think it’s human nature. I have it intensely and not sure why. Maybe a desire to make it make sense in your head somehow?
> Wasn’t R<1 the magic number for ending the first lockdown?

NO!!!

Sorry this is infuriating. What’s the point of getting to R<1 if you then immediately end lockdown and have it shoot right back us? It’s a necessary step, but just abstep in the process. You need to stay in lockdown long enough to get case counts low enough to be able to fully trace.
Prhede375 Gmail.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24188557
Military Lessons from Nagorno-Karabakh: Reason for Europe to Worry
Bill Gates is wrong about education
46. RIP.

"Let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life’s books each day. … The one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day is never short of time.” - Seneca
> When running translated x86 code, they switch the mode of the CPU to conform to Intel's memory ordering.

I'm curious if this means that while any app is running in Rosetta2, does that mean the entire M1 CPU is in "Intel TSO mode", and therefore all processes run slower as a result, or can it do that for just the Rosetta2 Process(es)?
I think this comment nails it. For me, I'm happy with a shared struggle towards some goal (though of course it cannot become the norm.) Pressure-Ease-Pressure-Ease cycles are also fine for me.

...but if all that results on a nice pat on the back while some salesperson or product manager gets promoted, then it isn't really a shared struggle anymore. Rewards need to be distributed to the entire team that struggled, not just the ones presenting the project.

Further, i think organizations need to understand that different people want different things. Consulting firms have a firm-wide up-or-out policy...but tech companies should probably subscribe to a up-or-steady policy where some choose to worker more intensely for growth while others choose to work normally and remain stationary.
Spanner, or Google Cloud Spanner is what a YT engineer told me over a year ago.
Well, you’ve convinced me! Unfortunately I’m no one important.

I’m surprised this isn’t talked about more. Maybe because the subject feels icky to people. Best of luck in spreading the word.
I suppose it's just less likely to be misunderstood among people who 8 months ago had never heard of the concept of "R" (or "the R number", or "c" probably) - especially in a language that people hearing "R" in a sentence will probably hear it as "are" or "our" before "R".

I'm much more annoyed by use of "coronavirus" to describe this specific virus.
At the end of the day, those that get hired because of their certificate can't actually take up budget resources and not be able to expertly talk about HA architecture and deliver on a technical roadmap. You can't hide behind a certificate. A technical professional actually needs to deliver a solution to a real-world business problem and when you don't it is highly visible. (Slow service, downtime, lost data, breaches)

If certification is indeed useless, and exams are simply basic marketing exams, it will eventually become a red flag in the hiring process.
This needs a name, but when you have a very small minority in a much larger group (women who are software engineers, black people in a white company or guys who work as childcare workers) you can see insane levels of hated against members of that group, even if most of the larger group goes out of their way to be friendly with the minority, because even a very small percent of the larger group that hates the minority can still be numerically larger than the entire group. Not to mention that one bad manager can cause trouble for numerous employees.
Tony Hsieh (Founder of Zappos) dies at 46
> Given this great summary, I’m sure you’re aware of the Casimir effect. I understand that it is controversial whether this generates usable negative energy or is merely apparent negative energy relative to surrounding vacuum, but Miguel Alcubierre specifically mentions it as the only known experimentally observed negative energy.

As the Casimir effect pulls two surfaces toward each other, the net motion is zero. Not very useful.
Vaccinations won't be mandatory.

Just in the same way you don't need a credit card or a driver's license or a SSN.

I'm looking forward to Mr Biden's national tracking app.
Seems reasonable enough considering many other instruments are available in a range of common sizes. The bigger problem I see is the ergonomics of most instruments are terrible and that will continue to be a burden at any size until they are radically redesigned and modernized.
So many high school analogies with pg. One wonders if he is trying to say something to his high school self..
Ecuador too has been 100% renewable since forever.
Yes, but Apple also used their financial muscle to secure all of the 5nm capacity from TSMC. We're not comparing apples with apples here.
> 2. Accurate estimation of development times is impossible (not difficult, actually theoretically impossible). All estimates of development times are wrong, some by more than an order of magnitude.

Personally now-a-days I care more about velocity. If the team can deliver the smallest value added to the system within a week, we are good. The more constant velocity the team has, the more Management trusts you to produce value and get their things done without the need to have massive estimation parties that almost always end up being wrong.

The sad thing is, once the velocity gets bogged up or waving (Org change, contantly changing directions,..) the estimation parties are here to stay and it's quite hard to get back to where the team was.
To be fair, someone else invented electrolysis, they engineered it to work with regolith.
I really loved his work, he was my personal hero. Great thought leader and entrepreneur, but also humble and caring human being.
I would often ask myself, what would Tony do, when I have some business challenge or problem.

Rest in peace Tony.
It’s not really an achievement when you have a population of half a million and have lots of possibilities for hydro power.

There are other small countries such as Costa Rica or Norway which are also already on “100% renewables” thanks to hydro power.

Also, this is usually just for electricity. They are probably still burning lots of fossil fuels for heating and vehicle traffic.
Why is it hard to understand?

Two days ago, a cousin (who I only barely know because we connected on facebook, genealogically) informed me that her father - my mother's brother - had passed. My mom's first question was "any particulars?" It's natural to want to know what happened, and it's not shameful to be curious.
Sometimes it's just fun to speculate.
Fwiw the content is below the errors, and is still browseable etc.
For some, it comes from wanting to avoid death. The desire to add it to your database of how death happens in order to know your enemy. I'm not arguing this is following a scientific principle. This is more emotional.
“100% renewables” usually refers to electricity only.

They are most likely still burnung fossil fuels for heating and vehicle traffic.
> (not sure do they need heating during winter days)?

Average daily winter temps in Hobart (capital of Tasmania) is 8.5C (47.5F). It snows enough for ski resorts in Tasmania [1]

So yes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skiing_in_Tasmania
McKinsey's recommendations sound like something out of an AI trained on sociopaths.
So it's electricy only. In regards to heating most of Australia is either either using electric space heaters or reverse-cycle air-conditioning.
Tasmania is probably the second coldest place in Australia (after the Snowy mountains). Some cursory googling suggest that even there central heating is not common.

(Natural Gas in Australia isn't that cheap anyway, we export nearly all of ours)
Around 5M monthly users depending on how you count them.
If the path is mixed with pedestrians, 20mph on a bicycle is irresponsible whether peddling or ebiking.
A new term I've seen used is "black & indigenous people of color" (BIPOC), which conspicuously leaves out Asians and is fuzzy on Hispanics.
Probably the iMac is throttling due to battery getting old.
Open or at least documented file formats pretty much solved the file format problem. It's incredibly rare for me to encounter any file format I can't use natively or easily convert into something else.
Apologies if I missed it, but how would authentication work? I'm trying to figure out where ok the scale from Spring Security to JWT and React it falls on.
I think that's one downside of targeting increased diversity. Diverse employees might wonder if they were hired for talent or for their identity.
Send me an email (in my profile), I'll give you guys a server and capacity on my CDN.
The amount of founder/CEO backlash on this thread is eye opening. The OP said many things, among which he talked about the effort required to put in to be a master in your craft.

No one is forced to work for such a company. There are many low/mid paying comfortable jobs you can do that suit your personality.

The reality is that drive and effort. How you redistribute rewards is another thing.
I don't doubt your technical skills, this comment is just to help you see the side of the employer. They don't have time to onboard someone on AWS, they need someone to be able to speak "AWS" out of the gate and contribute immediately. General knowledge isn't helpful, when you need to be able to fine tune each AWS specific services.
The phenomenon is called "conformity." Nothing in it ever suggested it only applies to large groups. Reading the first paragraph of Wikipedia will tell you as much.
That's just the natural life cycle of social platforms.

Looking forward to what will come next
Are you saying London doesn't have crosswalks? I find that hard to believe.
this is pretty much a every company thing...at every company i've worked at...not surprised
Why are black employees the only PoCs that matter? Are you suggesting 100% of the non-black employees aren't marginalized?

To get a complete view, surely you need data from Asians, Indians and other minorities.
We are in dynamic world and businesses need to stay away from politics and focus on its core value. Someone leaving has nothing to do with racism. We live in a time where few people and the media are manipulating the rest.

Note that I am Black too.
Richard Sackler, for starters. He's the former chairman of Purdue Pharmaceuticals, and investigative journalists have uncovered a boat load of paperwork showing that he personally pushed for marketing tactics that would result in addiction and death. The sudden exit of the entire Sackler family from the board and executive positions in 2018 reeks of wrongdoing too, especially since reports indicate that Richard continued to call the shots after resigning. Given that Purdue Pharma recently pleaded guilty to criminal charges, I suspect that various proprietorial offices should have enough evidence to get a subpoena of his personal records.

But again, tons of people have researched this stuff. The problem is that I cannot personally bring a criminal charge against Richard Sackler. Which is why your "people just want to be mad on the internet" attitude is extremely obnoxious. The problem isn't that what needs to be done in these cases isn't known, the problem is that the people who have the power continue to do what we don't want them to do.
I'm not the only moderator, just the only one (now that Scott is gone) who posts publicly. The others do a great job!
It of course also runs doom. Sort of. https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/movfuscator/tree/master/vali...
I install an OS and I have to set it up, which for some require an internet connection capable of downloading multiple gigabytes of memory.

When I watch the 8-bit guy, I see him turn on a computer from 1984 and while it sometimes fails for hardware related issues due to age and use, when it works it frequently just starts up in a few seconds, right into a basic prompt.

Meanwhile my laptop will sometimes get stuck displaying the boot logo when I start it with the button on the dock, sometimes it will refuse to see the external screen.