skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Observation as a Canadian: Until the US decides to finally convert (e.g. never), the rest of the anglo-sphere will be forever stuck in an awkward inbetween zone anyways. We supposedly converted to metric in the 70s but it's only ever been half-hearted, as many trades (especially construction) continue to work in imperial measurements, and most people work in an awkward combination of the two.

As Canadians we typically measure our height and weight in ft and lbs. But temperature in celsius and travel distances and speeds in kilometres and km/h. Except for cooking/recipes, where oven temperature is measured in fahrenheit and we have to deal with recipes with cups and ounces and so on. ... But recipes are also often in litres and grams. So...

And most people can think of thermostat or pool/lake water temperatures in fahrenheit as well as celsius.

We're supposed to be metric, but good luck finding a reasonable selection of metric screws/bolts/nuts at the hardware store. Online order.

Really this is all to do with deep integration with the US economy and its own bizarre mostly-imperial-but-metric-where-it's-important.

My poor father was a machinist, and originally was trained in metric Europe (Germany.) He found the whole situation extremely frustrating.
That's what a lot of people said/thought about Brexit!

Unfortunately, the more we bury our heads in the sand and ignore things, the more chance they have of actually happening.
They probably are since the methods and requirements are very different to what you buy in the store.
>"It is also possible that this project and you being the only one handling it were analyzed as a risk"

If that was indeed the case then hire a "backup" person. Way cheaper.
This story is pure spin. The idea that FB, which started out as a way to meet girls according to its founder and has warped into a surveillance-based advertising business that sells an addictive product to an uninformed audience and acts as a tax on online businesses by inserting itself into every aspect of ecommerce -- the idea that such a company is a `technical innovator` of some kind is hilarious.

FB has not invented any tech, unless you count React (an in-house copy of Angular) as tech. FB will not be bringing us any innovative new user interface devices, despite the hilarious high-school-level mockup strapped to someone's wrist. Zuck himself admitted that FB didn't even see video coming as a factor in social media. What innovators are these?

The reality is that FB is a washed out but still enormously profitable surveillance advertising and tax company. The writing is very much on the wall and Zuck knows it. The "Horizon" that's coming for FB is their end-of-life as a company. He knows that unless they manage to continue their surveillance advertising and taxation business in the "metaverse" (itself a washed-up idea), the user base and commensurate ad revenue can only decrease in the future.

This story was placed on CNET by some garbage PR firm to try to spin their image in a different direction -- one of an "innovator" who is ushering in the future.
>Lots of parents out there would put their kids in sterile rooms if they were able to.

It's pathological microphobia
I haven't seen people celebrating his death.

Anyway, this isn't an example of cancelation. You can't cancel a dead person. He wasn't killed by Twitter, he apparently died of illness.
Get Lost in the Catacombs with Our Latest Maze
Low interest rates disincentivize saving and incentivize reckless speculation. In a world where savings accounts yield 0.25% and bonds yield negative, even ordinary people are forced to consider investments like crypto, SPACs, and high growth tech stocks just to maintain their wealth. Monetary policy has made us all into gamblers.
>in games like Cyberpunk 2077

There’s only the same handful of graphics-intensive games that are being brought in every online argument and tech review outlet, like Digital Foundry. I can understand it when viewing games from a pure technological standpoint. But if viewed as actual games, you play through demanding single-player games like Metro, Cyberpunk or Control once, and then move on. The vast majority of produced titles play perfectly fine with barely any noticeable difference between the latest and greatest €2000 GPU, and something from a few years back like GTX1080, or a Playstation 5.

I don’t think there are enough demanding games come out to warrant the purchase, especially if you count only the ones that are actually fun to play as a game, and not just admire raytracing lighting or reflections.
It’s not binary. You go slowly, and stop if it’s starting to impact the behavior you’re observing.
Are these people dead set on pushing the UK as far down the global economic ladder as possible?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J10_2natxys
Opposing view: go listen to the cancel culture three parter on the You Are Wrong About podcast. They deep dive into the whole idea going back to callout culture, Dixie Chicks, the woman who got fired while on her flight to Africa for that tweet, and the basic conclusion is that cancel culture as such does not exactly exist. It is a bit of a boogeyman and in reality is large set of outcomes for actions that are not always even a net negative.
> None of them ever brought up issues raised in the CAGE letter, and one even called recently to say

The article acknowledges these men are being held captive until the Saudi government decides they're properly reformed, and restricts what they're allowed to say. How can you trust they're genuinely consenting in that environment.

> Even on the face of it, a white woman in Saudi Arabia, probably isn’t running around a rehab centre without authorities knowing what she was up to.

You've got the problem completely backwards: I'm not worried she's sneaking behind the government's back, I'm worried because she let the Saudi government puppet her into making propaganda for them.
Calculate? No. But you do not need to calculate, you can measure it indirectly, by running something like:

X ← 2000
while true:
eat X kcal/day for about two weeks
if your weight has increased:
X ← X - 200
if your weight has decreased:
X ← X + 200

Observe that this can also be modified for gaining/losing weight. It is also robust --- X actually need not be physically accurate, it is just a number in our calorie tracking app, so even if we are miscounting something, we are hopefully doing so consistently over time.
You will never stop the almost zero effort attacks which are usually people scanning the entire internet for their small set of vulnerabilities. Only block or report abuse when an attack becomes persistent (trying to break a password) or if it seems like someone is actually targeting you.
No. There is a very wide range of competence & honesty in managers, bureaucrats, and politicians. And you'll accomplish d*mn little if you replace or remove the consultants who gather around the crappy ones.
>"Seen as"

Without understanding that it can be simply and cheaply fixed by training second person is gross incompetence. Those single cell morons should've been fired instead.
> Given that our authorities are weak, and the mob is causing us real problems, what should we do about it?

Obviously, cancel our authorities. :-)
None of those are equivalent to zeek. It’s cohort includes snort, suricata, etc.
I feel like the cost of cancelling someone is quite high, paid in social capital. Especially when you mean the original definition of cancelling, to deplatform somebody.

From a minority position (e.g. far-left, person of color, or LGBT), you ask people who are sympathetic to take action against somebody and exclude them. Your ally does not neccessarily support your ethics 100%, but they will agree. Then when backlash comes, they will suffer a portion of it, too. And there is often an element of forcing people to position themselves - either you are an ally, or you are an enemy / whatever-phobic.

This is a concious political strategy of identity politics, and it does work. It helped leftist, feminist and other groups affect society even from a position of relative weakness. I think that's not bad - MeToo, the growing acceptance non-traditional gender identities, people using gender-inclusive speech, and so on. I've supported such campagins, too - using moral outrage to get (actual!) antisemites, neo-nazis, christian pro-life sects deplatformed from using our university rooms. But activists should be aware that this can lead to attrition among allys. Next time it might be less trouble to just disinvite every political group, including you. And once you called all your favors for topic X, don't expect to get any help with topic Y (since you are still in a position of weekness after all).
I studied queueing theory at school 20 years ago for my CompSci degree. Last year I implemented a QT model (relatively simple version of M/M/1) to control the queueing length at a very large chain of hypermarkets (core mechanism: use historic lambda and mu timeseries to predict future lambda and mu, reverse engineer the formula to get the right number of checkout counters to keep average queueing length to the desired number of seconds). The thing is now used across many countries. Very satisfying payoff after 20 years..
He means that the average gamer that isn't gaming in 4k at 120Hz and/or going crazy with a high end VR rig (these things are still a tiny minority comparatively) will not fully utilize even the capabilities of the current hardware.

Whereas the huge machine learning (and also cryptomining) markets can't get enough hardware resources. And those companies are buying these GPUs by truckloads, every month.

Gamers are a very vocal but ultimately completely irrelevant market for these manufacturers. They account only for a tiny part of their income.
It’s extremely popular and useful software. Government and corporations use it all over the place.

> I have no idea what the software does but it sounds like network-sniffing, privacy-intruding malware being severely sugarcoated?

It used to be named “Bro” as in “Big Brother”. So yea, it was designed to be very intrusive to privacy concerns.
What’s the alternative, knowing that you’re working with a system with unknown specific architecture and whose only way you can get feedback about how you’re doing is via the patient? You can stimulate parts of the brain without damaging it btw. The surgeon just needs to know what that part is specifically.
This definitely one narrative, but there are lots of reasons that could also contribute to a change. A few:

1. Your system was likely more complex than you describe here; What's generating HTML with dynamic data between the database and the client? Did you "100 lines of JS" have any dependencies?

2. Maybe your company wasn't charging for this simplicity and peace of mind correctly. Companies would pay for for SaaS-style products that looked a lot like subscriptions even back in 2007, we just didn't call them that.

3. It sounds like this was run on-prem. That's expensive (and scary) for a lot of companies if supporting software is not part of their core skill set.

4. We're not solving the same problems today as 2007; much of that low-hanging fruit has been picked. I'm guessing your original system was internal facing at your clients; everyone wants to integrate into much broader client-facing workflows now.

5. If you were only doing annual updates not much was changing. That's awesome but implies a pretty static problem domain.

There are countless more motivations, and the baseline has shifted dramatically. I'm not saying the reason you present is wrong or not the primary one, but it's dangerous to attribute malicious intent when there are lots of "simpler" reasons as well.

>> This is why we can't have simplicity: because it doesn't scale.

I'm not sure your example leads to this conclusion. Simplicity is a set of abstractions. When we expand the domain broadly enough they start to leak. This is related to, but not the same thing as scaling.
Absolutely agreed! I think where so many of us have seen this go awry is when companies think IT isn't a core activity.

And I also see companies consistently screw up defining their deliverables and by not building in a draft review process (early enough for feedback to be actioned on).

If you have nebulous deliverables and a single project end date... of course consultancies are going to throw together what they think the minimal acceptable product is, at the last minute. We don't build software that way anymore, and for good reason.
Consider the case where millions of people are convinced, influenced by a swarm of people on twitter, that someone in your company should be fired. Those millions of people are an impactful portion of your customer base. You can either do what they want you to do or lose a lot of money; perhaps enough to impact the viability/health of your company. At that point, it's not unreasonable to back down and fire the person, regardless of your own opinion on the subject. Sure, you can stand up to it and keep them around; but is it reasonable to risk it? To risk the jobs of the other people are your company?

An army isn't powerful because there's one powerful person at the top. An army is powerful because there are many people at the bottom, and they are organized to act as a single force.
I was ready to pledge on KickStarter, but it's only for the U.S.

I hope that doesn't lose him too many pre-orders.

Edit: I didn't realise that page was from January - the book is available from Amazon. I thought from the HN title that it was just linking to the homepage, not a specific old page.
Great job all around! My favorite is the motivational (landscape) imagery and caption!
> abandoning the decimal money

That would serve the already-rich like Jacob Rees-Mogg as it would make it more difficult for the masses to measure the broadening inequality gap.

Perhaps that is the plan, including with Brexit: the currently rich maintain as much power as possible and push the rest as far down as possible (to prevent losing their positions at the top of the hill).
>No one is saying games don't need bigger GPUs is this post some sort of bait?

Not at the rate ML does, and people still do fine playing even latest games with smaller GPUs. Which is why the vast percentage of the buyers for these beefed up cards are ML people, not gamers.
Do you have some link perhaps? I can't find it but would be really curious to try.
> Another man said that he had explicitly told the film-maker that he did not want to be featured in the film but his wishes had been disregarded.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/film/2022/j...
Everyone uses it. Gov/Military deploy it everywhere and I’d estimate most of the Fortune 1000 does too.
That’s awesome. We have a few upcoming for the southern hemisphere. Excited to see them!
I agree with you in general but I disagree in the specific case.

I think using frameworks encourages developers to follow some standards, much the same way everyone was very excited about microservices was a concept that could encourage decoupled software. Somehow we end up with a mess in both, and it's exactly for the point in your link: "There’s a good chance you’ll end up creating an “ad hoc and informally-specified implementation of a framework"". I think this is ultimately true for any element of software design that is not specified and enforced, and over time with enough complexity added to some areas, it creates the mess.

So the real "feature" is formal specification and enforcing the spec. In other words: rules and constraints for designing software. An architecture. You get a kind of "off the shelf" architecture with any framework you pick up and use, and this of course segways into the age old story about outgrowing frameworks and frameworks not being good at some specific problem, the code base slowly got too complicated for what we do, etc. The "spec" the team is using (wittingly or not) doesn't get updated.

When you have two devs implement the same concept in 2 different ways, it's a hidden disagreement about the project. It should get discussed but often it doesn't.
I subscribe as well. The US weekly news magazines never had the depth of The Economist but at least in pre-Internet days they gave you a reasonable summary of important things. But in the past decade they've totally declined into irrelevance. Not even sure what print editions still exist.

I don't read it cover to cover. There's a fair bit of international detail that I just don't find very interesting or relevant but it covers so many things that there's plenty to read about.
The proposal as far as I’m aware requires businesses to also provide imperial units. That at the very least will require labelling changes and to have internal inventory systems to also need support for imperial units. It seems entirely nonsensical.
>Did you try playing at 8k with top-of-the-line graphics card?

No, the same way he didn't try 200K / 1000fps. It's not really needed.

Even if some people are so extravagant as to got to having it, they're not enough to drive the sales of such cards at the moment, in fact few even have an 8K display or TV, so the combined expense for card and monitor makes it a non-starter anyway.

Which is why the vast majority of those cards goes to ML people.
Sadly this would not satisfy - the point of Brexit isn't to make Brexiteers happy; it's to make Remainers unhappy.
That's what we thought about the chances of Trump becoming president.

But we should have learned by now that absurdities are not impossibilities and should be taken seriously.
I mean Mogg is someone who comes across as having his finger on the pulse of society… the best description I’ve ever heard for him is “A haunted victorian drainpipe”. Ultimately the guys stake in Irish hedge-funds are served well by destabilising the pound. I can’t think of one member of the tories who isn’t in politics to make themselves even richer. Everything is grandstanding at the moment.
Class warfare seems to be a standard part of far right ideology, from Trump crowd to European far right.
Clickhouse isn’t really relevant for a lot of us. SingleStore outperforms clickhouse and the latter isn’t MySQL wire compatible. Far more features come with SingleStore too. And if you speak to people running Clickhouse, they’re also maintaining a Postgres set-up. With SingleStore, you get your OLTP and OLAP in one database. So our users & sites table sit in memory (backed up by disk), meaning ultra fast read/write speeds (comparable to clustered/high availability Redis). And then we put our pageviews/events in columnstore (disk) which offers rapid performance for analytical queries.
This is an example of the dead cat strategy, named by an Australian political strategist “throwing a dead cat in the table”.

It’s a distraction so shocking that it can’t fail to divert media attention.

It’s a favorite technique of Boris Johnson who is even mentioned in the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_cat_strategy

The imperial measurement thing is a dead cat Boris threw on the table during his political descent.

When you see it for what it is, you can take joy in imagining the meeting in which the politicians tried to think up the best dead cats to throw on the table and settled on this.

“Yes, Prime Minister”
I think the point was that people turned against him because he _didn't_ turn against someone else that was the target of cancelling. He wasn't cancelled, per se; but he did suffer negative consequences for it.
> By your logic, any documentary that interviews prison inmates would be unethical.

All ethical filmmakers carefully consider ethics in situations where people might feel compelled to participate. Prison is one such situation.

I'm not saying it's impossible to ethically film inmates, but it is very worrying she brushes off the possibility she might need to carefully consider it.

It's (almost always) unethical to interview inmates held in repressive dictatorships because there are so many different ways you can violate their rights and put them at risk.
At least in Turkey, such parents find new doctors if their old ones does not give them the antibiotics they want. Doctors either dont care or are greedy enough to keep such patients at the expense of fucking up theirs or their kids immune system for life
Nice to see him mentioned. He's very little known, yet one who can argue properly and one of the few that make much sense.
sounds like the most scary kind of surveillance software.. who's it going to provide security for? the host machine, or nation states?
> Hard coding things occurs in simpler life forms with very limited to no ability to solve problems.

Hard coding also occurs frequently in humans. There are countless things that are universal (or almost universal) human experiences. Smiling, laughing, pain, walking, kissing. Even things like language seem to be based universal constants (although the specifics vary).

> We see more complex brains coinciding with a greater ability to create abstractions about the world and leading to a greater flexibility when it comes to problem solving

Yes, but the question is whether that ability to create flexible abstraction relates in any way to the ability to have conscious experience. And if so, then how. We can see from deep learning AI models that it's possible to create flexible abstractions artificially. They don't match humans at the moment, but we've yet to hit the limits.

> It could, but would that be a more efficient way to interact with the world

More efficient than what. The point is that we really have no clue what phenomenal experience is.
I was briefly employed by Accenture after an acquisition.

It was exactly the corporate hellscape you'd expect, and at the end of the day you can't escape that. But a lot of the day to day experience depended on what team you were on. If you had good leads on your team, you could be protected from a lot of bullshit and focus on getting work done.

The only "good" projects I'm aware of were projects that the acquired company had sold before the acquisition.

For lower level employees (especially offshore), the corporate bullshit is impossible to escape, but depending on where you fall on the ladder, there are some good opportunities for advancement. If you're a ladder climber, you can make a lot of money in a Managing Director position or above.

I didn't enjoy my time with them and would never work with them again, but I guess my point is that it's possible to have good experiences working there. Maybe this post will make it just a little bit less baffling that some folks choose to work there.
It means china has to setup a R&D center with the right and competent scientists and engineers to design, improve and build top notch chip making tools.
China doesn’t need to take Taiwan’s fabs to escape US trade bans
Lucy Mission Will Zoom by Earth This Weekend
gorilla terminal charts are powered by trading view, think of trading with with more advance data that you need
>The next major version of HTTP, HTTP/3, will use QUIC instead TCP/TLS for the transport layer portion.

What an odd way of phrasing it. It should be, "The next major version of HTTP, HTTP/3, will be QUIC and so drop TCP for UDP and require CA based TLS for every single connection. Regular connections not requiring a third party corporation to approve will be impossible."
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/film/2022/j...
That was also my first thought. I see only cost and no benefit. Except maybe when you have a cargo cult mindset and think that returning these measures will return Britain‘s glory.
Can anyone name one benefit?
yeah It was silly, the displayLink drivers of the docking station had to get an update specifically for those models.
In my case there was no mistake possible: there was a solid second between typing something and actually see the text on the screen. Unusable as is.
Thank you. I would prefer to maintain full control of access to the site and not trust a large vendor such as CF. I know they have mechanisms that would stop this, but they may also impact normal users in a negative way.