skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
wow - it's 20months from they first showed quill on HN (April 2020) - let's say it it had taken them 4 months prior to dev first version (Beta) - that's ~2 years to startup.
Giving user 4-days to export data, it's it's pretty similar to pulling the power cable on the server to shut it down ... unless they just had friends & family (piloting) using it, it's very odd. that's also not taking into account data protection / retention periods that business have to comply with local/regional jurisdiction laws.

having said that, concrats on exiting - acquhire or not, it's no mean feat.
It’s also possible you miss a call, so if you check your notifications you’ll see you did. Again, I think this is all super judge mental over something that frankly isn’t my business.
I agree. I think there is something here, it is just not what proponents are currently saying it is going to be. I think we are clearly still in a protracted “hype cycle” for BTC/ETH/DAO/Web3.0, just like the early internet was as well. We have yet to hit the “trough of disillusionment” that all technologies go through. Some tech dies when it hits the trough, but most go on quietly producing value in subtle ways after they get through the trough.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle
It's Schrödinger's Investment. Theoretically worth billions, but interacting with it would cause its value to collapse.
I suspect the ex-Amazonian PragmaticPulp cites was let go from Amazon for a reason. The COE process works, provided the culture is healthy and genuinely interested in fixing systemic problems. Engineers who seek to deflect blame are toxic and unhelpful. Don't hire them!
> Maybe once you learn it, yes, but it has a huge learning curve that needs to be taken into account

Agreed, but so does the alternative. You need to understand and configure software for process management, SSH, logging exfiltration, host monitoring, reverse proxying, load balancing, infrastructure as code, configuration management, DNS, service discovery, firewall rules, certificate management, etc etc. All of these software are built by different parties with different conventions and inter-compatibilities, and very often they are configured by managing configuration files (each with their own distinct format) such that the configs that pertain to a given application are distributed across your systems in dozens of configuration files (as opposed to Kubernetes where you can keep all of your application's configuration in a single manifest or directory of manifests as you prefer).

So yes, Kubernetes has a steep learning curve, but I posit that it's much less than figuring out how to cobble together your own platform by trying to identify and learn the best combinations of software from each category. With Kubernetes, you get a lot of standardization--you're on a happy path with lots of other people who are on the same path and thus benefit from an abundance of information, experience, and tooling which aren't going to be available for your bespoke system. Moreover, Kubernetes is relatively young and maturing quickly--it's getting progressively easier to work with all the time.
That's cool. Looks like quite a big international operation. Who are some of your customers and places where they are sequestering CO2? I had not heard it being done at commercial scale yet and don't see any examples on the website.
ah, nevermind. I had written a thoughtful reply to one of your other posts but it's clear the gap between us is bigger than can be solved in this medium.
> I have to convince other leaders that John would do well the next level up.

"Yes, John has made mistakes and he's always copped to them immediately and worked to prevent them from happening again in the future. You know who doesn't make mistakes? People who don't do anything."
That aounds so freaking familiar... Pretty sure I don't work with OSS saboteurs, so. I will read the doc so, it sounds pretty useful!
If he actually knows how to crash Amazon, you have a new business opportunity, albeit not a very nice one...
> That if the sub were to be equipped with smarter and smarter autopilot software, the humans operators would eventually forget how to pilot the sub themselves the way that commercial airline pilots keep forgetting how to fly.

Well the lack of situational awareness with EFIS (glass cockpit) systems is a known issue. Pilots tend to 'switch off' because of the low workload and then when something goes wrong they're not aware of the situation because they haven't been following along.

This has contributed so some incidents such as the AF 447 crash where the pilots were basically unaware of the actual situation of the plane and flew it straight into the ground (well, sea).

I can understand the Navy wants its crews to be more involved for that reason (and perhaps also because the enemy might deliberately instill confusion by messing with navaids etc), but I think there should be at least a warning if you try to do something that's known to be stupid.
Don't try to tell that to Julian Assange.
Ah, this might explain why my AWS requests were so slow, or timing out, this afternoon.
Nope, just a fan. It was the book that pioneered my love of math.
What sensor are you using?
> I helped build earthen structures with sharper slopes than 25 degrees 30 some years ago that are still holding back ponds today.

I think you may be mistaken - note that a "25 degree slope" is just a different way to say a 2 to 1 slope (2 feet across, 1 foot up). I've seen 2:1 slopes used for highway embankments, but earth fill usually specified as a 3:1 slope (18 degrees) - eg when I worked with an earth fill dam (holding back water, same as yours). I've only seen anything steeper (1:1, 45 deg) used a as a temporary (during construction) condition.

Sheepsfoot rollers are good for packing very fine material (silt, clay) but not very good for packing larger granular material (i.e. crushed stone/gravel). Silt and clay are very water sensitive materials: each has a very specific moisture content where it can be packed properly, if your material is outside of this narrow range it will not get to maximum compaction (and therefore it will eventually settle). Water moves very slowly through clay so if it is too wet or too dry it's very difficult to get it back into the proper moisture range, and if there's a bit too much sun or some rain between excavation and placement it will not get packed well. The only reason I've seen clay-ey earth intentionally used is for inhibiting water movement, IE an earth fill dam - and even there, it was a secondary barrier if anything happened to leak through the barrier membrane.

Crushed stone is (relatively) very easy to get to maximum compaction, and if it sits out for a while and gets too dry you can just hit it with a water truck before placing. It packs quickly and easily, and is stable at the ssame side slopes as earth fill
Crappy pieces of software like that cannot simply be wholly blamed on the vendor. It's up to navy leadership to decide how to distribute funds to vendors to develop software. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a high up navy officer who likes VMS, thinks that the missions planing process is fine the way it is, and doesn't want to allocate money for anything beyond bug fixes. Things like that happen all the time in government software contracting.
Normally, WSJ is behind an annoying paywall.

But at the moment, the whole thing is down! I've been trying to read this page for twenty minutes and I keep getting a 503 error.

Perhaps WSJ is hosting on AWS, which is partially down:

https://us-east-1.console.aws.amazon.com/console/home

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29473630

EDIT: seems to be back up now after an hour or so
It's really hard for me to believe the USN allows countries to blow up their warships then has the courtesy to hide it domestically. The whole purpose of the USN is a show of force and power projection. If countries are allowed to take that sort of action without immediate retaliation that is all gone.
https://archive.ph/fk49K
> Also, if you have the computer checking everything, then those 5 people that are supposed to be redundantly computing the navigation plan are highly likely to be less diligent. Human nature and all. Isn't that likely to result in a worse outcome?

I'm not sure I've even seen a situation in practice where an additional safety check made the situation worse. Those same people that shirk their duties and half-ass their job under the assumption the computer will just find the problems generally make a plethora of other mistakes if a computer isn't there to double check.

Computer verification of work, usually done by applying rules and heuristics, is useful and when done well, and roughly analogous to an additional human checker IMO. If policies and expectations are set right, it's a better outcome.

This may or may not follow for the initial calculation being done by computer and then checked by a human. Some of the competitiveness of people to make sure they do the job well and don't need fixes from a computer/human checker go right out the window and perhaps that does lead to complacency.
2-3 years is no time at all. Someone could hand a movie studio a script in hopes of it being made a movie, the movie studio could wait 4 years, and then make the movie, with no harm to them whatsoever.
Sounds like a Quill customer should get their evidence in place because soon they'll be able to sue Twitter instead of Quill.
Well yea, it's eventually consistent ;)
Amazon presents new method for “debugging” machine learning models
I used to want Wireguard on my router. It was in fact one of the reasons why I went with an EdgeRouter X.

Then one day, when I was away from home and actually needed the VPN, it absolutely melted. Basically everything on the router stopped working, and I suspect it was Wireguard since the router went haywire when I was actually using it extensively. Needed a hard power cycle, which I couldn't actually do.

These days I just leave my router to do its basic duties and have a Raspberry Pi dedicated to nothing but Wireguard. Haven't had issues since. The Pi 2 Model B also performs better for Wireguard and I imagine that the Pi 4 could saturate my 100 Mb/s upload.
> not about doing everything yourself

Good point. I'm a child of a hippie commune, "Back to the Land" was a more common phrase then and still doesn't convey well what many people meant.

When you compare the costs of cutting your own wood to buying it; you touch on the central conflict: "Modern" life is actually a win on efficiency for individual effort. What's needed to make an off-grid / less social / variant lifestyle work is a slightly different value system; where being out in the forest cutting your wood has a value to you that is something you can't buy.

I know a lot of "small farmer" types who spend way too much money on pursuits that will never return a monetary gain. They may not be able to articulate and assess the non-financial gains the perceive; but they do exist and it's a worthy choice for many.

I don't think its something you "go off grid" to find, tho. You find something else, first, that outweighs being so "on-grid" as you currently are. then you'll be able to remind yourself why you're elbow deep in a cow in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve rather than sleeping off an office party bender, and stay sane.
Author here (thanks for posting it!)

Indeed - we mention it briefly at many points, these are just for enthusiasts!

The variety and quality of the ports has become, thankfully, better in the last months - I've heard of people using the PinePhone as a daily driver, but mostly as a "dumb" phone with a browser. Waydroid makes using IM apps slightly easier, but still has a long way to go

The main bottleneck for most is battery life, which is still far inferior to Android's under many points. But e.g. dual-booting devices is slowly becoming feasible, and allows to switch between an Android phone and a tiny Linux computer within minutes, filling at least a small part of this gap.

Also: tl;dr since the post is long, usability-wise the OnePlus/Poco are the only ones on the list with "flagship-like" speed, others are a compromise between open (sometimes laptop-like) linuxy hardware and a modern mobile device.
being at fault for an outage was one of the worst things that could happen to you

Imagine how stressful life would be thinking that you had to be perfect all the time.
Cryptocurrencies: A Necessary Scam?
Twitter on an acquihire roll
He might be able to compel contributors to fork the code on his behalf, but he can't force the miners to use that codebase. He cannot compel a fork of the chain, only of the codebase.

What would happen, worst case scenario, is that the "official" codebase gets code included to give him his rightfully owned monies, but an unmolested "fork" would be adopted by the network and continue on as the widely used codebase, probably contributed to by the same people, possibly under pseudonyms to prevent this horse shit in the future.
Just a guess, but stealth is one of the primary design requirements even passive coils are RF devices.
It only rickrolls you when you click from HN.
Yes. People get really confused when you try to take all these arguments apart and prove to them that we're not done with medicine as a science as long as there are untreatable conditions. And if there are no untreatable conditions any more, then what people would be dying of, barring accidents and crime? So it follows that the end goal of the development of medicine is to make people live forever, in perfect health.

Also, it's absolutely bonkers that what we consider good health is a function of one's age. If you have thin skin and brittle bones being 20yo, that's a serious illness. But if you're 70yo, that suddenly becomes perfectly normal.
Do you know about "--" ?
The Proctor Compaction Test and its related procedures are absolutely vital to understanding retaining wall capabilities. The article oddly seems to miss such an essential cornerstone of geotechnical engineering. Does an amateur need to know about the Proctor when doing a low retaining wall at home? No, of course not. Does a website called "Practical Engineering" get to miss out on such a fundamental design prerequisite? Not IMHO. Great article and video, nonetheless.
us-east-1 is so unreliable that it probably should be nuked. It's the region with the worst track record. I guess it doesn't help that is one of the oldest.
You don't; you ease your executive/sales/etc partners into the new world where they get better software, faster features, and fewer outages, but they give up release dates and micro-managing the roadmap. Calling an epic "Large" instead of "237 story points" is a way of forcing yourself to accept that you only have a rough idea of how long it will take.
We were discussing a specific claim you made that was unreasonable. No moving the goal posts to unspecific claims that haven’t been made yet!
Thanks, will definitely do that!
I often find that I (and my users) get more value out of a document structured around Frequently Delivered Answers, since it often turns out a bunch of questions end up leading to the same underlying issue.

Generally the answers in question are documented in more than one place already, but no matter how many times one restructures documentation there will still be people who end up with a mistake in their conceptual model that means they're looking in all the wrong places (or if you -do- manage to accrue documentation that covers all of the conceptual models you encounter, often you find you now have a percentage of users who get lost because of how -much- documentation there is, so I've largely resigned myself to there being no such thing as a perfect job there, only incremental improvement as time allows).

I suspect this is much more true of programming projects than it is of the gov.uk websites though.
He covered this type of construction in an earlier video, and I think this is the key line:

> Gravity walls and mechanically stabilized earth are effective retaining walls when you’re building up or out. In other words, they’re constructed from the ground up.

The soil behind this type of wall is supposed to have been stabilized by layering a tension material at intervals to keep it from moving. There's a demo of compacting sand with layers of cloth and then using the cube of 'sand' to support one wheel of a car. The material sags slightly and then holds.

My understanding is that those concrete puzzle pieces aren't predominantly load bearing. Mostly they are for erosion prevention and perhaps moisture control (not just keeping water out but keeping the hydration consistent over time and distance).
noob question: Aren't companies using several regions for availability and redundancy?
Yeah, that's the sort of thing I was thinking of. I grew up around a lot of Scotch Broom, which fling their seeds rather violently when disturbed.

But I removed the example because at that point I was talking about parts of plants rather than seeds. I don't actually know of an example of a plant hurling away a non-seed part of itself for budding, though I'd be surprised if it doesn't exist.
Pure speculation: I wonder if Agrawal got the CEO job because he brought this deal in. The timing seems very suspicious.
A simple copy of remaster won’t cut it in the US, but if you did some restoration work then that might be enough. This would only work as a land grab if you owned the only extant copies of the original, otherwise people could just make copies of those.

There were a bunch of court cases about this, music radio, and rights payments.
Air Quality in Europe 2021
IIRC the military actually got a private extension to XP's EOL from Microsoft just so that they don't have to change all that tech.
Make meetings less awkward with icebreaker questions
Doesn't seem to be controlled for the fact that more of their hours are spent having sex than their non-cheating counterparts.
Fantastic advice! Lately I've been re-thinking how I've made friends throughout my life. I had some things right but some others were misguided. Creating intentional spaces was something right. I put myself into situations where I could be friendly with workmates during lunch and definitely felt engaged and friendly with the people there.

Over the years though, it felt more and more hollow. We've had time to step back and think lately. I realized what was missing was emotional openness and that comes with a little vulnerability. While being friendly with workmates is nice, it isn't the place to show emotional vulnerability. I had set myself up to never be able to turn associates into friends.

It finally clicked as to why people keep their work and friends separate. I'm glad you found your groove. The quality of life that comes with having deep friendships is incredible. I hope stories like these inspire others to take a step toward realizing deep friendship.
Totally agree! I have a background in government data science. As I rose up the ranks at the government contractor where I work, more and more of my job focused on corporate stuff that was outside of my wheelhouse. I used to be intimidated by phrases like "That's SG&A, don't take it off the topline." I told me professor friend and she gifted me a copy of Berk & DeMarzo. It's been more useful than any single programming book I've read. Turns out corporate finance isn't that hard, it just has its own language that takes effort to learn.
You're still not doing apples-to-apples comparisons. The source that you cited says 12th–19th-century life expectancy at birth was 25–40 years when infant/child mortality is included, and 55 years when it is excluded. There has not been any “4x increase” in this time period. (Even if you start in the bronze age, life expectancy at birth has not increased four-fold.)

Since the time period you chose, life expectancy at birth has increased by about 40 to 55 years. Near-elimination of infant mortality accounts for 15–30 years of increase, while increases in adult life expectancy account for an additional 25 years.
Windows is not a force for good.

> Selling exploit code hurts people.

As providing backdoors for state agents like Microsoft and other companies do.

I'm ignorant on the matter but is Zerodium a black market? As far as I know they might be selling any exploits to the affected companies.
http://status.mws.amazon.com/
Super important point to make!

This is also why we have the word "infringement" and why we should not be using the word "theft" in these contexts.

To put this idea another way:

Say Jane has an iObject. She uses it everyday.

Bob takes the iObject. Jane now does not have her iObject, and cannot use it everyday.

The iObject has value, and it's expensive to obtain another one. Jane must spend to obtain another iObject, assuming one is available for purchase.

This is theft, and the key legal concept here is someone being deprived of their property.

Joe has made a song. Joe has granted distribution rights to Larry, who collects money for people obtaining copies of the song. Joe makes money from Larry, who also makes money doing all these things.

Ann gets a copy of Joe's song from her friend Jose. Larry and Joe did not get any revenue from Ann.

This is infringement.

Notably, Joe still has his song. Larry still has his right of distribution he obtained from Joe. They are not denied their property.

Essentially Anne and Jose did, or experienced something they were not supposed to.

Also of note, Larry and Joe could still sell Ann a copy of the song! Ann could further promote Joe's song to others in various ways, legally.

There are some additional considerations.

Part of the value in Joe's work is context. People who know Joe, understand his work, identify with Joe in ways that make using Joe's work important to them all represent value. Larry helps add value to Joe's work by doing the other work associated with distribution, and that's advertising, and other efforts that generally promote the work and add context.

Unlike theft, there can actually be value created as a result of infringement!

In the case of theft, the value of the iObject to Jane is associated with owning and using the iObject, and said use could be just looking at the thing, or it could be the iObject enables Jane to do things she would not normally be able to do, whatever. When theft happens, Jane no longer has that value and or whatever was possible when she did have her iObject.

Infringement is weird.

Ann gets a copy of Joe's work from Jose. Prior to that, Ann has no clue about Joe, his work, that it's available. There is some chance Ann would have stumbled on all that due to Larry being good at what he does, but there is also a great chance Joe remains undiscovered by Ann, who would never spend any money that Joe and Larry would receive.

However, Jose promoting the work to Ann changes all of that!

Now Ann knows who Joe is, has context (Jose) and now could spend money for any number of reasons.

Joe and Larry received value from Jose's act of infringement (copy, distribute), and Ann added to that by her other act of infringement. (use)

And that's it, just really want to underscore the difference.

I've long held the view we won't really get workable laws on all this, until we discuss it using the proper words. The nuances are subtle, but they matter! As does the law and its impact on our lives and opportunities.
Ask HN: How do you do website tracking without feeling you're selling your soul?