skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with the author that the big failure point was the "triumph" that resulted in a new fully-separate department, before any of the covid-triggered failures or new development. You've lost at that point. You can't make it me against you, in-house software vs everybody else, you have to share the pain and credit. Otherwise only you feel the pain and any of your "wins" will be improvements that require time and expense from other departments without them getting anything tangible comp- or recognition-wise in exchange. Let alone getting into the "this means the jobs of people I employ to do it manually in the old system will be gone" aspect, which the author touches on too. (And I imagine that even the big failures during Covid maybe weren't as terribly critical to them as to the dev team because of how low-volume the industry was.)

"When there just is no interest in actually improving things, I should leave it at that. "

Yep, if you can't convince them to care about and drive the improvement themselves, you're gonna have a hard time if driving it becomes the most important thing to you.
Britain Signals Intent to Revert to the Imperial System
Society is becoming Reddit and it seems HN is following suit. The next logical step is for society to become 4chan, and we are off to a smashing start here, no?
True, but that doesn’t change the calculus.

The current large companies are in cutthroat competition with each other. If one of them slipped for any length of time, their lunch would be eaten.

But also, new entrants haven’t had time to build secure systems. The creative destruction of attempts to build new platforms would come at the expense of the customers.
Accurate, and I agree.
Typical sizes of option pools are 10-20%, of which earlier employees tend to get more than later ones. To be person 20 and get more than 1% is unlikely, at least as an IC. I'd recommend reading this guide on equity compensation: https://github.com/jlevy/og-equity-compensation

They outline typical equity levels under "Typical Employee Equity Levels"
> Pretty surefire way of helping fence-sitters become client states of China.

By offering to provide less costly subs in support of a war with China? Your comment is nonsensical given the context of the deal.
AI: Ban the algorithms that threaten our human rights, says UN chief
You can argue perhaps the central concern of all of this is, "What happens to TSMC?"...everything else follows...
I've lived a few different places, also working in transportation engineering. I personally care a great deal about accessibility, and would much rather delay cars slightly than pedestrians (for numerous reasons). For example, when reviewing traffic control plans, etc, I always make comments or suggest changes along those lines. But ultimately, it comes down to what the municipality wants to prioritize - unless there are safety issues, it's hard to do more than suggest and push for something better.

If you want to make a difference, making comments (about ongoing projects, particularly) will tend to have more impact. For something more systemic (like light cycles deprioritizing pedestrians), I found the best solution was to move to a better city.

If that's not a solution for you :) then another option you might want to consider is having a meeting with your municipal (or even higher) level elected representative - invite them for a walkthrough of a more problematic space, and try to explain the issues and possible solutions as calmly/rationally as possible. And without attacking car culture directly, as that tends to get people defensive.
DVLA to scrap physical driving licences and MOT certificates
Interesting article and great blog post too.

I was lucky to start my career with a mentor who considered well written exception handling core to software development.

And he was always happy to stop his work (maintaining a core middleware in a telco with millions of transactions every minute) to review this intern's poorly written try/catch, show how he would write it, and why.

To this day I am thankful and believe his concerns over exception handling, good and simple deployment techniques, knowing networking to OS/kernel level, helped me becoming a better developer (or at least knowing where I need to improve).
Yes. Waste of time and money.
I am saying the same thing about blogging and online commerce explicitly.

And the supplementing your income with Uber, etc. thing is slightly different in that you get compensated for each hour you put in starting with your first hour. The big issue I have is with schemes that take time and capital investments where you probably won't make a dime.
Not advocating for being oblivious about modulo op, but you could use stepping in some languages. Example, in Kotlin: https://kotlinlang.org/api/latest/jvm/stdlib/kotlin.ranges/s...
This is amazing, is it always about money? Surely there are other examples.
I am a car owner, but I'd seriously consider eliminating it if other options were convenient and cost effective. I've had my car for just about 15 years now. I am waiting for an electric option that will be a suitable replacement.
This feels like a submarine piece.

http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
How widely known is the Imperial System in the UK? Do people commonly think in lbs and oz?
Card Size
Royal Navy will be getting autonomous machines
A Review of “Kill It with Fire: Manage Aging Computer Systems”
Maybe this one:

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Idea_Factory
Thank you I didn't know about this Binwalk.

I used it and was able to figure out the remaining bits of the file format thanks to you and other tips in this thread.

https://github.com/solarmist/apple-peeler
For me I think it was a manual for BASIC at age 10. It was fascinating, and I learned from an early age what a mess you can get into using GOTO statements. I have painful memories of having to renumber the lines in order to shoehorn new code blocks in.
Scientists Flood Forests to Mimic Rising Seas
Sure, but there was no need to publicly humiliate France by keeping the deal secret until the last minute.

The only real reason Australia didn't first cancel the French deal some months in advance of announcing their AUKUS deal is that they simply didn't care what their supposed ally would think about it, and set the timeline by some domestic needs.

But honestly I don't think the Biden admin will do much to assuage French concerns about not being respected, this administration doesn't really have any genuine interest in diplomacy, mostly just leaving things in place expecting them to tick over peacefully.
Un café liberté, s'il vous plait!
Asking for help from NNSA is exactly the kind of thing I hope the broadband manager will do. We need to find and hire the broadband manager first.
I've created a first step towards that. A general purpose tool for extracting the data back into XML.

https://github.com/solarmist/apple-peeler
No notifications on the platform is a deal breaker for me.
The french have a reason to be upset. Biden announced this without given them a chance to adjust to changing circumstances.

He did it in the manner he did, because he didn't want it leaked out over time and undermining his announcement, which will surely help his approval rating as being tough on China.

This makes the french look stupid and out of the loop. It certainly doesn't make them look like a respected ally.

The deal itself, they can't complain. Australia is below china and if giving them nuclear subs is the right to do for national security, it's the right thing to do.
Even the title sounds judgement. If everyone feels she’s guilty why even bother with a trial? Why does everyone hate her? Her real crime is imitating a male voice, that’s the truth. That she might have been trying to build a new technology to help people, and secure funding and promote the new concept, and the idea that she might have been manipulated or had mental issues, these things are arbitrarily dismissed. It’s a witch hunt. And those respected investors are innocent victims motivated by the love in their hearts not a quick profit I’m sure. Those men, have escaped scrutiny it would appear.
> It may not be for you but if you are going to take the piss, please at least give an example that does not generate a syntax error

I mean this kindly, as a person who struggles to infer implied details in a lot of circumstances: I think the quoted code was intended as shorthand, e.g.

ls ... | grep ...
It'll also get you rid of 99% of React.js tutorials.

A has-text condition always has this risk of matching too much.
Most use it to access their home server that are not directly internet facing. Like how you access work servers through VPN. Same purpose really. Files, medias, apps etc.
I would say politics is germane to everything tech; just tech folks don't like to think of it this way. But it can't be ignored since Big Tech, social media, miniaturization of computers, etc, have arguably played an integral role in every major political event in the past half decade or so - in particular, 2016 election, social media and police brutality, occupy protests, hollowing out of old industry/labor in favor of new industry/labor, Amazon and labor, Tesla and climate change/petrochemical policy, China and everything, especially labor, semiconductors, etc, 2020 election, Jan 6, Republican party thought control...

Defense uses a lot of tech

And besides, I think HN tech community tends to be intellectually curious anyway
Have any other YC companies announced SPACs like this? :)
My observation:

1- US probably predicts that China is gonna breakthrough the first island chain in the next 10 years.

2- France needs to reconsider her Indo-Pacific stratrgy because Aussi explicitly shows that it's going all in with US instead of trying to follow some sort of independent strategy.

3- Win for whoever in EU who supports self defense and a more consolidated Europe.

4- First time a non nuclear country (Aussi has very limited exp with nuclear power) manages to obtain nuclear subs from nuclear countries.
It's not the military hardware that I'm referring to, but the treatment of a longstanding ally that helped found the nation. Did the US participate in the tender? It appears to me that they just swooped in and offered the subs that had been picked over Germany and Japan's proposed subs. The French aren't recalling their diplomats from Germany and Japan, are they?
Good analysis. And maybe the expert vs elite distinction is similar to the distinction between low-level detail vs higher-level summary combined with accessible analogies.
> I said "compared to many of our peer nations". You are acting as if I said "compared to all our peer nations"

This is where the misunderstanding arises. You are actually incorrect. I’m not acting as if you said compared to all of our peer nations. I clearly and repeatedly accepted that we are behind some of our peer nations.

You on the other hand, are using the fact that we are not literally at the top of the list, to argue that we are behind our peers in a general sense.

If you weren’t you’d simply say “we aren’t at the top of the list - there are 8 countries ahead of us”, instead of the false, and more generic sounding “compared to many of our peers”.
Perhaps here it needs a better title. In the actual page the short description comes before that heading.

Not sure what the best answer would be, use the longer text (too long), keep the first significant heading as title (some like yourself find this misleading), or make something up that fits (some may complain of editorialising or just that they think the alternative title is itself wrong in some way).

Or you could look, see it isn't what you want/expect, and move on. It is close enough IMO, not exactly deliberately vague and/or misleading click-bait.
> If you see a sign covered in snow you're going to recognize it as such and make your best guess as to what it says and weather you care.

The first winter after I got my license, I was driving around at night on a road I hadn't been to before.. kind of in the middle of nowhere, unpaved unlit back roads.

I saw a sign, partially covered in snow, and had a hard time making sense of it. Why this odd shaped sign in the middle of nowhere? I really wanted to figure it out and fixated on it a bit too much.. only right after making it past the sign, I realized it's warning about a tight bend in the road right ahead. Almost made it into the ditch. Thanks, sign, I would have seen the curve just fine if I had just focused on the road ahead.
Video: NYPD Crushes Illegal Dirt Bikes After Wave of Busts
I'm not sure about that. I think if enough people flag a post, it automatically... well, it doesn't remove a post, exactly, but it marks the post as "flagged", which also means that people can't add comments to it any longer.
In bodybuilding heavily rounded shoulders is usually a sure sign of steroid use, as an example.
Firstly, cool bleeding edge stuff you're into, I was very interested in a little segment during the Olympics about the technologies used to create crowd noise for the empty stadiums - something that must existed as a small background niche until Covid came along. Not sure if that relates to "live theatre" technologies but it reminded me.

On the topic of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency utility, I'll point you towards another thread where I badly answered a similar question (and re-reading what I wrote I don't answer it at all), the core of the answer is that it's not simple to explain our to understand if you haven't "played" with it yourself to start the mental ball rolling as to its application and usefulness.

Discussion on the El Salvador legal tender go live:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28468982

My specific, but vague, commentary is the 18th comment on the above link.

Bitcoin was created to be an alternative to the corrupt money system that brought about the Global Financial Crisis. That isn't a thing that can be easily understood in its everyday utility to the average citizen, there has to be an understanding of the overall corruption (and potential for corruption) of the current system and there almost has to be agreement about that before Bitcoin can be considered to be something useful at all - ie. If person X doesn't have a problem with the current financial system then Bitcoin is a big, complex, electricity hungry beast alternative to a system that's running just fine, and therefore totally unnecessary.

In the years since Bitcoins inception things like Ethereum have come along to add "smart contract" utility that has allowed for things like Decentralised Finance and NFTs (the current usage of NFTs, I think, is detrimental to its potential for real-world problem solving, such as "proof of ownership" and I can't think of anything other use case right now). Decentralised Finance is so new, however, that we won't know what works well and what works poorly as replacements for existing financial services for a few years - bit I think it's important to go through this process of discovery.
Thanks for sharing this.

I've used your article and other previous attempts to clear up the remaining unknown bits of the file format and build apple-peeler, a tool for extracting the XML from the dictionary files.

https://github.com/solarmist/apple-peeler
Of course any reasonable opposition gets downvoted and responses get ignored.
Sounds like an electric velomobile: https://www.velocityvelos.com/collections/velo-models
The lack of organisational willingness is usually a combination of managerial debt and veeps/senior managers whose annual bonus depends on keeping things as they are.

Managerial debt can happen anywhere, including tech firms. It's where you're dealing with people who don't understand what recent technology can do. Maybe they got it 10-50 years ago. Maybe they were very good at it 10-50 years ago. But today they're behind the curve and unwilling or unable to understand that a working modern solution is possible.

They may also be risk averse for perfectly rational reasons, in which case you need to sell damage management security promises and fall backs with any upgrades.

The bonus issue is a very real problem. If there's pushback from that level it's often because those people can see dollars moving from them to the newcomers. And they'll do almost anything they can to prevent that.

These are very difficult issues to deal with, because they're usually hidden behind spurious excuses and rationales and passive blocking actions.
Nice introduction to nix and niv!
> Some express concerns such vessels could potentially be used for purposes other than smuggling.

Wouldn't it be awful if someone used a narco sub for recreational boating without crossing any national borders? Or what if they used one to transport goods or people across borders and stopped at customs/immigration as required?

That would be concerning indeed!
France refuses to sell nuclear submarines.
They are less upset about the deal itself and more upset with the way it was abruptly announced. It really doesn't make the french look like a respected ally.
I enjoy Go but I don't see it playing nicely with wasm anytime soon. It's runtime is big, it has a garbage collector, and getting the complexity and nuance of goroutines to work in the browser with webworkers seems like a scary challenge.
Does a NATO county selling weapons to a NATO strategic adversary not seem mildly questionable on its own?
There is some pro-US military bias in their analysis and editorial content. But their factual reports tend to be more accurate than the mainstream media.
Actually, as mentioned multiple times in the past couple of days by former French Ambassador to the US Gerard Araud, diesel was an Australia demand, which required France to modify its subs (all nuclear powered) and added complexity to the project. According to the former Ambassador, it would have been much easier and cheaper for France to supply Australia with nuclear subs.
You can't burn hydrogen under water.

Hard hitting journalism from the BBC when even simple school science doesn't cut it.

That's the end.

But even if it was fuelled correctly it would be a shipping hazard. No human safeties and invisible below the water.

Very hard to navigate and inefficient.

This would cost 10's of millions to develop.

Obviously an autonomous boat could do everything and follow the laws of physics, and be safer and have GPS and existing frameworks of navigation and safety (like GPS and Navigation lights) and not take enormous amounts of fuel to go underwater for reason unknown.

There's even a meme how narco subs are really low-profile vessels and even drug money can't make them autonomous (which is about security not replacing cheap labour)

Good on this company for ripping money from the government I guess to virtual signal 'tackle emissions from shipping', good hustle on hustlers on a brain dead public. Very HN

If you really cared about emissions you look at efficiencies in current shipping, like harden and increase capacity on the Suez canal. But the public doesn't actual care about that. They like self-flagellation and it's important for the people controlling them to keep them in a state of confusion. Hydrogen powered submarines collecting mico-plastics will keep them distracted while a billion people live on less than a $1.90 a day.
It's only worth comparing these decisions with the credible alternatives. In Afghanistan, America had to choose between a messy pullout or a swift escalation with the Taliban. Biden himself really was left with a matter of months to execute on either, and it was never going to be escalation.

It could be the case for one reason or another, but I find it pretty hard to believe that President Trump/Romney/Obama/Clinton/Sanders/Buttigieg would have really made it go any better, as though the "withdraw from Afghanistan gracefully" button is right next to "lower the gas prices" in the Oval Office. I am almost certain it would have gone worse under some of them.

By pissing off the French and bolstering Australia, it could just as easily be argued that Biden was being shrewd in signaling his seriousness about the Asia-Pacific by spending down some political capital in France. I think that will end up depending on how contained the fallout from this will be, but it's not like the rest of America and France's shared interests just evaporated.
Conventional subs are quieter than nuclear subs, so are for defending coastal waters not far from port. But nuclear subs project more power, since they can stay underwater for months at a time.
>wish to talk more

Always, but alas, I'm already behind on keeping up with people I know irl. I do have some debate left in me on those points* but you can probably imagine it, you seem like a good chum. Maybe pay close attention to the defendant's case as it develops. Anyway, good luck in your endeavors!

*except where you said I mixed up contrarian and controversial. That's an accurate call-out.

EDIT: I had to wait two hours to post this because apparently I was posting too much. What's the rate limit on HN? I've only got 5 posts on my account prior to this one.
diff and patch feel like tools that have existed forever. I feels weird to think that someone wrote them instead of them just manifesting fully formed with the first version of UNIX.
A little part of me was hoping the objection was on the grounds that we shouldn't be increasing the number of hot nuclear weapons, but of-course it's just a turf war.
I'm just amused that the first thing they can think of is whisky...

This would be the most hi tech rum-runner (er whisky?) ever...
I've been concerned about this.

When I use auto-steer, it beeps at my every 30 seconds if my hands aren't sufficiently applying pressure to the wheel - even though it has control of the wheel, it detects whether there's slight pressure from the driver to determine whether they have their hands on the wheel.

Is this data being sent to them to say that I'm a bad driver?
> but it is the most important property to understand: the rules are the rules and no one can change them without pretty extreme buy-in

At least in the case of the Bitcoin lineage, _tightening_ rules is not too hard (soft fork), while _loosening_ rules (eg. increasing supply via hard fork) is hard.

If you are the dev, control all miners and run all the nodes of your fork - everything becomes trivial (and quite useless)
I feel like I just read this somewhere... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28564507
In some sense "squishy" is a good description of how we design cars, you want the car to squish in a collision to avoid rattling the people around too forcefully.
There’s a market.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narco-submarine
I hate YouTube recommendations. You’re the guy responsible… I have some choice words for you, but I won’t say them here.. anyways, YouTube sucks a sick one. Recommendations are why I avoid YouTube. They are horrible, you track and one suggest what I’ve already watched/stuff I’ve saved. I can’t get away from recommendations without looking for specific videos. It’s so bad, it would take a while to list. Anyways YouTube sux and I and many others used to really like it. All good things must come to an end.
This guy is a genius; https://neal.fun/deep-sea/ is also wonderful
I'm willing to bet they're doing better in life now than if they had stayed.