skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Life is a human communication game first, as the “best system” we’ve socially engineered is externalized support towards common goals. It’s not science or engineering; it’s sympatico.

The problems we’re solving at these jobs (I reserve work for its meaning in physical systems, jobs/career for you know), are ostensibly people problems. So the decisions I make are optimized for that. I don’t call it politically optimal, but optimal, because that’s it; that’s THE game of life.

It’s subtle language emphasis maybe, but I used to visualize my thoughts as a text stream and “rewrite” constructs I did not appreciate in the moment. Redefining ideas like “optimal” to be human first behavior. Ideas like “optimal technical solution” are boxed away for when I’m working.

It helped me understand managements drive, to have folks doing useful things, but also made me question how useful much of this is except as busy work.
> Certainly, but it was not the West that, for the most part, enslaved and then sold the African slaves.

Surely the righteous West could’ve freed those slaves and not fought to keep them for centuries?

If you read the wiki link further, you’ll see that they paid Africans to find slaves, because they couldn’t survive on their own - amidst warring tribes and diseases. They would transport slaves as cargo, resell them throughout the West, indenture them in plantations and factories, make a racial caste that would propagate for centuries, mistreat them and kill them, and so on. It’s absolutely insane to frame colonialism in a callous manner such as you have, in 2021!

> Because I can all but guarantee that the Shell paid money

This should be investigated by the Western govs that Shell works with. Everyone knows this is happening all the time. How are they allowed to bribe poor countries, in the first place?

> you are getting nothing in return, then ask yourself where that money is going

Politicians in the West are also equally corrupt, on all sides, and none of their earnings are distributed to the people. What kind of weird argument is this?

> I'm South African, always have been

Doesn’t matter. You still seem to misunderstand colonialism’s effects, and post modern colonialism as it stands today.
> China has surpassed the US economically, it has made it clear it wants to dominate the technology space.

What? Should the stun their growth so that they can show their obedience?

This does not make any sense.

> While we are in denial, it is clear even to naive Chinese that they are at war with the US when it comes to technology. The only upper hand that the US has over China is the decades of research expertise in core areas.

It's quite obvious why they want to have tech on their own, since that's basically what makes a nation first world. That doesn't mean that there's any war going on. Do you think you're at war with the EU, too, due to the Euro and their economic growth?
ExoMars parachutes just about good enough to land rover safely
That sounds like antaphasia based on what I've read. You might be interested in the materials available at https://aphantasia.com/

They have a more in-depth test there called the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire
One way to reduce compute costs significantly is by using a much lighter stack. Typical deployments to the cloud are based on the traditional OS model, and more often than not are a container-in-a-VM solution to deploy some service. The reality here is that there is so much unused, unnecessary and wasted compute resources. Why deploy a full OS and kernel which will only ever serve static web content, for example. And then there's the attack surface that comes with a full OS, running additional services like SSH which may only ever be used once.

Major vendors like Amazon and Google are happy to provide this to anyone and with simple on-boarding, but, as is clear in the article, it's expensive. With Unikraft[0], you can completely re-package your application as a unikernel, automatically. It's a single VM image and does nothing more than just running the application. It boots straight to the main application, it doesn't have a shell, and has nothing else running along side it. The result is a huge cost saving (up to 50%), since you're no longer having to pay for these extra resources just to run the a full traditional OS image plus your application.

[0]: https://unikraft.io
Is comparing Ethereum costs to BitTorrent costs reasonable? They are both decentralized, but they do completely different things.

It seems it would be like if I compared the price of gasoline ($3.80/gallon here) to the price of water ($0.00018/gallon if I use a lot, 25% less if I use an ordinary amount) and said this shows that gasoline is way overpriced because they are both liquids.
> If your political beliefs prevent you from associating with somebody because you have labeled them so firmly as to write them off entirely as a person, you have jumped the shark and become the problem.

If someone is having their bodily autonomy threatened by legislation pushed and passed by a political party and a choice for potential partner actively supports and votes for those people to gain or retain power, it's not an irrational decision to decide they're probably not compatible.
>The only upper hand that the US has over China is the decades of research expertise in core areas.

And the ability to draw and assimilate global talent.
The product crashes on MacOS Catalina, Arch, Ubuntu and Win 10. Lightning fast indeed. /s
And about the same number of Democrats believe the widely debunked conspiracy theory that Trump colluded with the Russians to interfere with the 2016 election or that members of congress were paid Russian assets. That's the thing about polarization. It's easy to see the crazy when it's your political enemy doing it.
This is almost certainly due to a windows limitation, which is in turn caused by compatibility for a DOS hack where a bunch of devices were visible through special file names. CON is the more famous one of those.

Microsoft still recommends avoiding those file names. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/naming...
This is why I love devdocs.io. I think it's supported by freecodecamp.org
> 1. You can Only Work for People That you Like.

> This is a curious rule and it took me a long time to learn because in fact at the beginning of my practice I felt the opposite. Professionalism required that you didn’t particularly like the people that you worked for or at least maintained an arms length relationship to them, which meant that I never had lunch with a client or saw them socially. Then some years ago I realized that the opposite was true. I discovered that all the work I had done that was meaningful and significant came out of an affectionate relationship with a client. And I am not talking about professionalism; I am talking about affection. I am talking about a client and you sharing some common ground. That in fact your view of life is someway congruent with the client, otherwise it is a bitter and hopeless struggle.

From graphic designer Milton Glaser’s essay, Ten Things I Have Learned
That thread seems to indeed suggest that people are confusing seeing something with imagining seeing something. The point about the common inability to draw an accurate bicycle seems to prove it.
It says "chinese" for a reason dude, and the problem is obviously that you are harassing innocent people.

And if you don't see that as human rights problem, consider you're wasting your finite intelligence resources on dead ends and so you're not finding the traditional spies that's just some dude that's been bribed.
MGM lets potential employees try out casino jobs in VR before signing on
8 year old issue suddenly getting lots of attention :)

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=966856
HDMI is contributing to consumer confusion at least, and fraud at most.

In order to get the benefits of this protocol, you need the source, the monitor, and the cables to meet the spec. That’s a lot of opportunities for confusion, waste, and loss of consumer confidence.

The protocol specs may be great, but the confusion will eventually lead consumers to think that HDMI 2.1 is just industry jargon, like “hi-def”.
Please fix Microsoft OneDrive to allow customers’ choice of file names.
They say the "main motive", not the sole motive. Cost is also a motive, for sure, but do you consider they'd move to reduce costs if there wasn't scalability?
What are the prices for the various plans? :)
On the other hand, what if your tiny company spends only four figures per month on AWS and has only a single developer who also acts as a sysadmin as needed? Is it even practical for a company operating at that scale to colocate servers in an environment that has anything like the private network and multiple per-region availability zones of AWS? Not to mention that, presumably, the developer would have to implement and test their own equivalent of AWS's auto scaling and multi-AZ database services. To me, AWS is worth the money.
> In today's world, we need the ability to spin up and down deployments very quickly.

Do you really? In my experience, admittedly outside of SV, pretty much nobody needs that.
> Wind and solar over production can be stored in superconducting loops ...

Superconducting loops are definitely not the storage technology that will economically scale far enough to store weeks worth of energy usage of the attached electrical grid.

But weeks worth of storage (of energy, not necessarily electricity) is exactly what is needed to enable a stable grid based upon 100 % renewable electricity generation.
I remember reading about aphantasia while I was in art school. It made me wonder if the opposite also might exist: being really good at visualizing images in your head, and whether or not some of the people in my school might have it. The few classmates I asked thought I was being ridiculous, so I dropped the subject. I still wonder how one might test this though.
And I have audio aphantasia. I can't remember the sound of anyone's voice and can't recall music. Never had a song stuck in my head. But I can remember the words and content just no tones/sounds/etc.
If you like Vermeer, you might also appreciate the works of Han van Meegeren (and it's possible that you unwittingly do).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_van_Meegeren
The thing off-chain is itself a blockchain, with miners incentivized to work in good faith. I imagine, though haven’t verified, that ensuring the right consensus is committed to ETH can be figured out with mutual staking orchestrated via smart contracts on both ends.
Google staffs up to build OS for unknown ‘innovative AR device’
Companies used to run their own electrical generators. That seems analogous to running your own servers.
Image similarity is a terrible way to do this; you lose all temporal data, which would make different speeds of motion impossible to discern. You're much better off feeding your XYZ + timeseries data into a hidden markov model, then classifying gestures with SVM prediction. There's a really great C++ gesture recognition library that I've used to do just that for a VR game that featured custom spellcasting gestures [0]

[0] https://github.com/nickgillian/grt
There is one primary reason why large companies are migrating to AWS Azure etc that most people seem to be missing here.

It’s outsourcing the blame. This is the key to boardroom success. When something goes wrong in their own data centers, the CXOs need to shoulder the blame.

Large corporations outsource everything, including the guy who cleans the copiers, copier not working, blame the maintenance vendor.

Something went awry with the infrastructure, blame AWS

App development project went down the tubes? blame the contractors & outsourcing companies.

The Cxo comes out blameless each time
> does anyone know what sort of IT jobs require physical work?

I have seen a few positions in the US for datacenter technicians. Those positions had explicit requirements(probably because of ADA) to be able to lift over X lbs as part of day to day activities.
> On a computing resource basis can you operate SQL Server on a rack in Equinix for cheaper than that in AWS? Sure, but who is going to pay for the person to patch it every week, or upgrade it to the latest version, or upgrade the SAN disk, or upgrade the hardware every 3 years, etc. etc. Let's take this a step further - who is going to hire these people? And fire them? And train them? These are all transactions costs that get hidden in the "$0.20/hr cost" of spinning up an EC2 instance.

Who cares? This is IT and is not relevant. And they have Brent and he will solve everything.
Wow, this is interesting. And I am now wondering if describes how I process visual information mentally. Outside of dreaming I do not specifically see anything visually if I close my eyes and think about something. I can describe. I can attempt to draw badly (more of a comment on my low artistic ability).
An accurate, extensive scanner for finding vulnerable Log4j hosts
Buffalo Starbucks Workers Vote to Unionize
On the other hand it seems that I have hyperphantasia (I can visualize anything, animate it, rotate, check any of the details) and at the same time I work as an software engineer, but in contrary to what people might think it helps me a lot as I can visualize and remember all the parts of the code that I work on.

I once worked on a tool that should let me code using blocks (like in Unreal Engine for example), but to allow it for me to write in my favorite language (Golang). I was really surprised with the overall experience and usability of this solution and I think it could help people like me to focus more on the coding aspect.
Patina should work too, can be used as a verb in french, se patiner, just patine as a noun.
This is a distraction. Elon Musk has more wealth than a person who saved 1 MM per year for 300,000 years. While an old person is likely to have 20x the saved income of their younger year's - wealth inequality is driven by capital holders amassing more capital and in turn passing it on via inheritance.
> It has a clearly skewed understanding of the power differentials of the pandemic and then blames the nations with less power for being able to pull less strings.

A stupid but justifiable policy from the past 2 weeks cannot be a good example of why South Africa is spiraling the toilet. Sorry. Pick better examples. South Africa has been spiraling the toilet way before COVID.

> Secondly, damn are we really gonna blame colonized countries on low vaccination rates when vaccine access is still being hoarded, it’s production still close sourced, and antivax movement is still strong in western nations?

Who exactly is South Africa colonized by currently? And further:

- EXCLUSIVE South Africa delays COVID vaccine deliveries as inoculations slow ( https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/exclusive-south-africa-... )

- South Africa Asks J&J, Pfizer to Stop Sending Vaccines
“It is entirely owing to hesitancy,” Crisp said. “We have plenty vaccine and capacity but hesitancy is a challenge. Unfortunately it means that many unvaccinated people may have an unhappy festive season and will possibly result in hospitals being congested.” (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-24/s-africa-...)

- South Africa's low vaccination rate is NOT a supply problem and vaccine hesitancy is stifling demand so much that it had to delay delivery of doses, say experts - but the rest of Africa still needs more doses
( https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10248699/Low-vaccin... )

Let's not pretend like South Africa has a vaccine supply shortage, because that would be a lie.
Then why doesn't it error out when faced with NULL?

I mean, we hear over and over again when learning SQL "NULL bool and FALSE are different things"...

But the SQL engine itself treats NULL and FALSE as equivalent all the time.

DECLARE @x INT = NULL
SELECT 'foo' WHERE @x = 1

If three-value logic were truly embraced, that should be an error, because we don't know the state of @x. But SQL talks out of both sides of its mouth about Booleans. It freely just assumes that null is false, which we, as developers, are never ever ever allowed to do. There isn't even an operator included in ANSI SQL to let us convert null boolean values into false, because for some reason bits and bools are two different things and you can't just say

COALESCE(x = y, false)

It's not just that three-value-logic is painful, it's that SQL makes working with them miserable because, at a linguistic level, it seems to politely forget that three-value-logic exists.
While you focus on the other party, you are probably ignoring the detrimental things the party you support does. This is by design. The GOP supporters do the same thing and can list all the horrible things the Democratic Party does with equal fervor.

Did you know the GOP doesn't have superdelegates like the Democrats do? Superdelegates are certainly an example of manipulating the will of the people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdelegate
About 26 jabs for the duration of your lifetime:

That is until they start merging jabs together.
More profitable for them but user hostile
It seems like a reasonable compromise to share tips with the back of the house, without the effort and degredation involved in tracking exactly who tipped how much to whom. Nothing's perfect.
Rust: Linear Types Can Help
He claims that something similar exists in Italian, but I can't figure out any examples.
The problem with this is question is that it all comes down to how you define "relevant". What is very relevant to one person is not the same as another, and news orgs are in the business of sending out as many updates as they can.

I follow the AP directly, which IMO is pretty good about being concise, relatively impartial and generally does a good job of covering national news. You might try a few different aggregation newsletters to see what feels right for you. But you're always going to make tradeoffs between missing stories and receiving low-value updates, because your low-value updates may be someone else's hugely relevant story.
You have to run the numbers for your specific company, expected scaling behavior, compute work load, and expected system administration overhead and compare all scenarios.

I will say that if your work load is relatively fixed in magnitude and especially if it's bandwidth intensive, you can probably beat the "big cloud" providers by at least an order of magnitude. If it's extremely bandwidth intensive you should never consider mainstream cloud as outbound bandwidth is absurdly overpriced... like 1000% markup or even more. I can't exaggerate how insane bandwidth pricing is.

If you are just prototyping something, your work load is highly elastic, or your product is rapidly evolving, the flexibility and outsourced sysadmin of cloud will probably make sense.

Edit:

There are edge cases too. If your work load is, say, inbound bandwidth and storage intensive, AWS might be great since S3 is cheap and inbound bandwidth is free. Just keep in mind that you might pay a lot for egress if you ever need that data out. Will you?

Run your own numbers and be detailed!
Big corp financing is weird, and IT is often its own cost center responsible for its own budgets. This means that every time my department asks IT to do something for us they send us a bill. And that bill is always several times more than going to an external provider. At a place I worked, hosting in-house would for example cost a minimum $150/server/month for something with the same spec/performance that would cost $20/month on AWS. It could also take up to 10 days to get that (virtual) server set up. As a project owner and someone responsible for my project/department budget using an external cloud over in-house hosting makes rational, economic sense

Building up an IT infrastructure that can provide services at roughly the same quality and cost as AWS takes a large investment in talent and infrastructure. And many companies don't see the value in making that huge upfront investment for something they might not need. Better to start with AWS, and once you get to the point where you can lower your costs by 50-70%, then start looking at moving in house.
Rust: Less Painful Linear Types
> Highlight the worst possible examples

... and then exaggerate those on top of it.
> It isn't bad because "China," it's bad because it increases the power of an authoritarian, imperial-minded, genocidal government

You’re literally repeating the “China bad” argument

I’m not going to argue that the CCP is benign. But either the thousand talents program is specifically harmful in some way, or you’re against it because “China bad”. And you appear to be arguing the latter.

My opinion of thousand talents is it’s an attempt to reverse brain drain. I personally know a Chinese immigrant with a green card who was struggling to find funding for some kind of cancer research here in the states, then found funding working as a regional thousand talents back in China and now runs some lab or startup or something in Anhui.

Of course, hiding funding and income is another matter altogether.
Cost of SaaS or API prices are usually orders of magnitude higher than their infrastructure marginal costs.

Although this idea makes practical sense, from a financial standpoint I don't think there will be enough incentive.

Bandwidth savings in infra will represent <1% savings relative to the SaaS/API price.
The Value of Play-to-Earn
I love everything on the page, it looks so retro yet so modern and futuristic.
You'd think professional engineers would have enough autonomy to make decisions like these...
I watch Youtube with Firefox all the time (on both Windows and Mac) and don't perceive any problems.
Ah, responsibility land. More freedom to do as you want, and more risk because you can make mistakes and then have to face the consequences. Though it also often means you get to work on things that are a bit more interesting as well.
Infrastructure is crumbling. Wages are not keeping up with inflation. Employers have treated employees as their property. A hell of a lot of people can barely afford medical care.

Infrastructure is crumbling partly because we think of nothing with starting new highway projects and sprawling suburbia.

We have created a car dependent society in which we need to use cars to do anything useful around town. That required people to borrow money to buy cars as opposed to using quality and excellent public transit to get to work, or just walk.

And yet you're talking about how great it is we can rent a sports car for the weekend? And therefore we don't need to question the rich, who not only hoard resources but have a massive amount of influence over how our society is run? What?

Hoard what kind of resources? Share in productive capital? I would be more concerned about housing, which by the way is usually one of the greatest expense a household could have and it is one of the greatest driver of inequality in wealth.

We need to have a serious and painful conversation about housing, and how exclusionary policies are driving inequality, and we need to push through reforms that will anger a lot of upper and middle class voters and create winners and losers on a large scale in order to create a more egalitarian and wealthier society.
> Nah. One of the most common uses of null is to communicate missing values in the sense of "this entity has this attribute but we don't know what its value is". This is a fundamental feature needed in data management.

I rarely use nulls like that. And then only for things outside of SQL databases like lazy loading or caching. And even then I still prefer null == null to be true.

If nulls are for what you have written then why we are calling them "null" - no value? Why not calling them "unknown". Even then what is benefit in introducing non boolean logic to a relational query language? I have never seen anyone using any of three-valued logic benefits when writing SQL. Every time I get unknown logical value it means I have made a mistake in my query, which would be better handled by rising an error.
Space mining patents you're allowed to use