skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Are cloud certifications worth it?

There's really no way to answer that question as posed. Not enough information.

What do you mean by "worth it?" What are your goals? What's your current experience level? What companies are you looking to work for? Etc., etc. yadda, yadda.

What I can say is that some companies do value certifications highly, while others do not. And which certifications are valued varies a lot, depending on what providers a given company uses.

All of that said, my take on certifications has generally been "do them, if you do, for the actual learning itself first and foremost."

Eg, don't just find and study brain-dumps and then go take the test to get the cert. Study the material to where you can actually pass the test based on knowledge you've internalized. Then you'll benefit from the knowledge whether or not you ever take the test, and - perhaps more importantly - regardless of how any particular employer values whatever certification you do test for (and attain). As far as employment goes, certifications may or may not help, but they'll probably very rarely hurt. If you really want to micro-optimize, look at the LinkedIn profiles of people who work for the companies that you want to work for. If lots of them list related certifications, that's a hint in favor of pursuing those certs. If not, that may be a clue in favor of the obverse.

One last thought: in my experience, I've found that big, bureaucratic companies (imagine a Fortune 500 insurance company or something) tend to value this kind of stuff more, as opposed to say, a 10 person startup in SV.

YMMV. HTH. OMGPONIES. WTFBBQ.
I hate the abuse of this term: "correlation is not causation."

That is true - but it does not say anything about the opposite, or say that the objects are not correlated, which is often forgotten, or said with an implicit "there's a 90% chance they aren't correlated" when the statement makes no judgement whatsoever on the likelihood they are correlated. There might be a 90% chance of causation, even if the statement remains accurate.

Example, this statement: Grass grows the fastest when the sun shines. Correlation is not causation - the grass does not grow solely because the sun is shining. Nevertheless the statement is true.

Edit: My main point is that anything can be simply hit with: "Correlation is not causation." It's a skeptic's cop-out because, who can prove causation, really? Technically speaking, is not even gravity only assured by the anecdotes of billions of people? But sometimes it is stupid to remain a skeptic even if the two aren't the same.
Remember the jokes about the military overspending on toilet seats?

It seems like it’s a bipartisan past time to waste taxpayers money on foolishly over expensive pet projects.
I would imagine China still has the capacity to make these though, they're the world's biggest manufacturer, which includes precision machines.

(I recall a Chinese company buying up all the stock of automated CNC machines for YEARS to meet Apple's demand for the macbook and iphone when they were all aluminium. Not as precise as these though).
>> The hubris of us highly-educated workers to think that degrees or 'elite coded appearance' are what define intelligence. The likes of Boris and Modi are political geniuses with carefully cultivated identities and a keen understanding of the landscape.

Exactly, when I was a young lad, I used to think, if only well educated people got into politics. But now I understand, it is those who are connected on the ground to people's issues or at least have an understanding of them are the ones who get elected. Being educated or not is immaterial. In fact the more educated you are, the more you may not understand people's issue.
It did get me thinking about something here.

The deal with patents is that you make the way your invention works public knowledge. You document the principle and in exchange you get a limited-time monopoly on its implementation. An alternative for this is a trade secret. As long as you guard the secret, you can remain the only one profiting off it. Of course, some things are impractical to keep secret. It's easier to keep a method of making a fizzy drink under wraps than how the gears are laid out in the gadget you sell.

You also can't really make the contents of a book a secret. Anyone can just look at their copy, arrange words in the same order as you did and sell your book. It also makes no sense to patent the words. The contents are already inherently public knowledge to a certain extent and now people could just buy the book from a patent office. And the clerks don't like filing novel-length applications. Music is not quite as easy to make a 1-to-1 copy of, especially before wide adoption of sound recording technology, but a lot of people can carry a tune well enough to plagiarize one. And sometimes you get a child prodigy Mozart illegally transcribing Miserere.

Since it has been deemed desirable [if not unanimously] that writers and artists also have a period of monopoly rights over their work, copyright needs to work differently from patents.

Software has interesting properties. Unlike a book, you can distribute a program but keep its "recipe" a secret. We'll disregard people who are capable of working with compiled binaries; consider them modern-day transcribers of Miserere. Proprietary code is typically guarded just as any trade secret would be. Perhaps software should have been covered by patents instead of copyright from the beginning. After the patent expires, the algorithm would be unencumbered and public knowledge.

But that's not the world we live in. Software is considered to be like a book, not like a pocket watch. You could mail me a printout of the entire Windows 11 source and there's hardly anything I could ever legally do with it. I could change it for my own amusement I guess, like I can take a red pen and change all the names in my copy of Postmodernism for beginners.
The last part is wishful thinking.

The Germans found no counter measures for tanks in WWI and neither did the French in WWII. The only viable counter to tanks between 1915 and 1955 were more tanks as the USSR and US showed.
DevOps is broken
I'm not sure that just the force of rhetoric used is a good measure for how sane politics is.

You can be polite, and still be insane or evil (see: Brexit and all of the politicking and --from what I can tell-- outright lies that were sold to people). That whole process was mostly civil and polite, but not necessarily healthy.
How to do a Hiring Process that Doesn’t Suck
This viewpoint is both evil (literally wanting to kill people... like the "best" politicians of the 20th century! /s) and delusional (UK had approximately 0 GDP growth since 2010, like other main European countries - so I doubt it was Brexit or Tories)

https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/NGDPDPC@WEO/DEU/FRA/...
Perhaps impossible.
The Varangian guard were in Constantinople. So kinda sorta “Roman-controlled” but not exactly Rome.
>This is a better way to live than the "I got mine, fuck you" which seems more common in the US.

This is also exceptionally common in the UK. There's a reason the Brexit vote passed, and there's a reason people voted so strongly for right-wing parties over the last 12 years.
> This is a good policy in general. Say everything you want to say in one comment, and do not reply back to anything. Replies are where people start getting defensive.

Easier said than done, especially when a reply criticizes you, but this is probably right. I've greatly regretted many HN back-and-forth exchanges. It almost never ends well.
Are you talking about a specific model? They appear to be selling high precision jig grinders from Connecticut, which sounds similar to what the Justice Department’s statement is referring to. https://mooretool.com/jig_grinders.html#mooreprogrind
RIAA Flags ‘Artificial Intelligence’ Music Mixer as Emerging Copyright Threat
This returns 0 for '1.2.3' and '1.2'. Might be fine if you are sure they have the same number of components, but otherwise is worth checking.
I would never step foot into a public SF toliet. Last time I went in there the homeless shit all over the floor and toliet and walls. I went in and nearly threw up. A homeless person pointed and laughed at me. Fuck that.
If information wants to be free then information belongs to the commons and not corporate entities that obfuscate the real source of value so that they can profit from it. Making code more accessible is great, profiting from it and not giving back to all the folks that made it possible is not.

I tried co-pilot and understand why statistical auto-completion based on the efforts of large groups of open source volunteers is useful but if Microsoft wants to charge a fee for the service then they need to respect the licensing terms of the code they are using because without the data set provided by all those volunteers co-pilot (and statistical auto-completion in general) would be impossible.
.75 microns? Bah, may as well be a clapped out bridgeport clone! =). In all seriousness manual jig borers feel a little like a Monarch 10ee -- an absolutely incredible machine that will never be built again due to how constraints have changed, that solves a problem that I will never actually have.

Though if I lived out in the country someplace with a huge garage...

Edit: to respond to your specific point it's the 3+ axis CNC that's the key thing, not the accuracy. They were that repeatable in the 50s, but not when interpolating a 3d spline! Can you even 'side mill' a #3 style jig borer without destroying it?
Nicola Sturgeon said that she detests the Tories. her own party (the Scottish National Party, whose central goal is Scottish independence) distanced themselves from those comments. Labour are not saying things like this. the Lib Dems are not saying things like this. and the Tories themselves aren’t saying things like this either

this is the exception not the rule, and as evidence of this, it’s something that’s been turned over and over in the (especially right-wing) media for weeks now

the two MPs killed were killed by Islamic and right-wing extremists, respectively. this has no bearing on how the main parties treat each other
Yes. But that puts an intermediary between me and my customers, which has many drawbacks. It's "Paddle" they will see on their invoices, not me, and it's "Paddle" that has a billing relationship, not my business.
Amazon had about 460 billion dollars in revenue per as lazy a google as I could do.

This makes a billion dollar fine less than 0.25% of revenue.

Except Amazon has been doing this for years.

So a cost of doing business on the order of 0.1% at worst.

Or rounding error.
Is there a way to guarantee that you "just get the sampling right?" Even if there is, is it possible to explain it to someone with a high school education such that they understand it?

Even if you could do both of those, will it hold up when the populist candidate loses and starts railing about how they have so much support, the best support, and the election was stolen from them by the elite-chosen sample?
52 days. Sheesh.
Learning electrodynamics does not have to be hard and boring
> 40x larger

What.
Great suggestion - thank you.
Hijack because blender rarely hits the front page and this seems relevant to my interests:

Anyone who has courses that are not youtube tutorials feel free to throw them at me. Anything goes, as long as it isn't hyper-specific on an obscure part of blender.
Oh cool, they finally reverted their mobile-user-hostile approach and allow for ublock origin now. Hopefully they fully revert their breaking changes circa summer 2021 that drove a lot of users away.
I mean the fact that a significant portion of its potential workers has either been drafted into the army, went into hiding or fled the country probably isn't doing them much good either.
It does, but the comment made it sound as if multiple MPs on different sides were targeted because of their political affiliations. In reality, only one was. I just felt that needed to be clarified.
Cloudflare Workers and micro-front ends: made for one another
One of my jobs is in the public service.

This seems like the usual case of public servants doing everything possible to avoid someone being unhappy with them later. Consultations, union workers, tons and tons of approvals, etc. Remember, you can't really win as a government worker. The priority is not to lose.

You want every little concern addressed? You want layers and layers of accountability? You want the top concern of every person in gov to be avoiding any possible desire to be responsible for something?

You get this.

I've seen this play out many times. No corruption. No grift. Just ass covering.
Look past the veneer and you'll see plenty of ugliness in UK politics -- just a few days ago the (now former) Home Secretary was snarling about her plans to fit up "Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati" with ankle monitors and house arrests. Backsliding into invective, authoritarianism, and radicalism seems to be a commonality across Western democracies these days.
We had a legitimate research use for the data (hosting it for scientists) and it wasn't part of any consumer products. Anyway, I don't work there any more and part of that is I realized that Google can't do research on these sorts of things without getting involved in too much politics.
> San Francisco, which is struggling with a troubling homelessness and public-defecation crisis, needs more public toilets.

The irony in this statement, given the reasons why this toilet costs so much, is absolutely unreal. I had to check the date on this article to make sure it wasn't an old April's Fools skit or something, but it seems red tape and NIMBYism have escalated to such a degree in SF that (a) securing budget for a single toilet that will take 3 years to build is considered a political victory worthy of patting themselves on the back in the press, and (b) a toilet to "ease" rampant homelessness is considered a far better option than actually trying to provide housing or attack more of the root causes.

Wild.
Thank you so much. My daughter is away at camp - I can't wait to show her tomorrow too when she gets back.
It isn't a disease, it's a disorder.

We know a lot about ADHD and what causes it. We know its effects and how beneficial it is to treat it, especially with medication.
Could it have anything to do with the fact that the UK is a much older democracy ? ( the first English parliament was called in 1295 )
It's actually cheap.

3 years of litigation until all the stakeholders agree on all the aspects of this public toilet are not cheap.

And what if the environmental reviews find a bunny family living at the proposed location? Relocating the bunny family will probably cost another million and 2 years of delay.
I thought San Francisco was a public toilet?
hey now, let's not give them too much credit, it's probably a bit of both
> Labour are not saying things like this.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/sep/26/angela-rayn...
Ah come on, when someone says this everyone knows what is meant and that when it happens there's a risk you could end up with a prime minister who is popular within the party but disliked by the electorate (Gordon Brown or Liz Truss).

So yeah you don't vote for a PM ... but there's a clear, well-understood difference between being the leader and the very visible face of your party when it wins the general election, and winning in one constituency then charming enough party members to become PM a couple of years after the General Election.
Steve Jobs to Murdoch:

> The axis today is not liberal and conservative, the axis is constructive-destructive, and you've cast your lot with the destructive people. Fox has become an incredibly destructive force in our society.
Paris has automatically self-cleaning public toilets all around and they cost around $200k each to build and install. There’s no way this is a remotely reasonable cost and is clearly a grift.
Her policies were terrible. Gutting the tax base, subsidizing energy demand in an inflationary environment. Almost all conservative policies are terrible but these ones were so bad that there was a run on the pound. I'm glad you're not running the country i live in
I mean there is nothing wrong with the whole "built-by-union-workers"-thingy. its more all of the Bureaucracy involved thats stupid.
On other benchmarks Intel limited to 255W still beats Ryzen 9 7950X in most cases.

And Intel is on at least 1/1.5 node behind right now so still impressive for me especially 12600k that totally destroys 7000 series right now.
I did not read the article - but here is an idea: much of middle management is translating a higher level plan into lower level details. The ideal for the translation is to be as faithful as possible. This is like a compiler!
The entire article reads like something straight from The Onion.
Incompetence and bureaucracy seem more likely.
I'd forgotten about that, do you have a link handy? It might be doable in MSBuild. I might actually have a use case for this as well, after battling problems of self-contained apps.

The "AOT" compiler is basically "run the JIT upfront".
> I believe people with ADD have a natural advantage in pre-modern settings

Totally, yeah. I can't prove it of course, but I've noticed countless of times that I seem to be extremely more aware of my surroundings than my friends etc. I hear and see more compared to them, which has positive and negative sides.
I don’t know much about UK politics but why can’t you guys get Kemi Badenoch elected? She is younger and did not go to Oxford. Try something different. Maybe Oxford is overrated:)
I appreciate this sentiment.
Antarctica’s snow is turning green
Really frustrating there are no photos.
But do they have the equipment, the materials, the money and the workforce for it?

What they can import is heavily restricted; there was another article that said the chips they import now are grey market, lower grade stuff with a much higher failure rate. You can't even make a moped with wings if your chips don't even work. I guess you could make dumb drones but what's the point if they're less accurate than WW2 V1 / V2 ?
Philosophers Should Pray
Around once a week or so I'll cook something novel but it is a special occasion, but there's a good chance I'll pick it up at a farmer's market or the quirky healthfood store.
This sort of echos my criticism to the way pharmaceuticals are developed, tested, and regulated. They all treat symptoms and not fix problems. Modern medicine has really advanced in treating acute issues (broken bone, laceration, benign pain) but is shit with chronic issues because it’s focused on symptoms. We prescribe statins the moment someone’s cholesterol goes too high, but did we ever stop to figure out why it is so? Maybe it’s because this person’s favorite breakfast is a bacon-maple donut which they habitually consume 5 days per week. What we are really saying is that it’s okay to eat that cholesterol-raising food, just take this to make that number lower.

We’ve optimized our efforts on treating symptoms and not causes. Drugs that survive regulatory scrutiny and are profitable tend to be those that treat symptoms of chronic illnesses. If you can prove that someone’s LDL goes down and they will buy it for the rest of their life, that’s a drug that will survive. They don’t have a miracle cure for this because they are withholding anything, there is just no incentive to research it and if there was, there is no good way to prove that drug X will cure non-visible condition Y without good, measurable data.
Really neat to see growing ARM processor support! Always impressed by the quality of OpenBSD releases.
Because the UK in 2022 is not the US in 2017. One had high growths and low rate expectations. The other had high inflation raising rate expectations, so the borrowing cost more.
> I think the solution is opt-in curation.

That’s a nice idea, but needs just one step done before: moderation should be placed in the each user’s hands.

I need my own filter about what I see. Like:

1. I always want to read A.

2. I always want to read B, but not when he is talking to C.

3. Show me some random people from time to time, like 3 per day.

And we can share our own “filters”, that creates opt-in curation.

Echo-chamber is indeed a problem, hence rule 3. Also I hope for rule 1 to find people who talk to their opponents meaningfully. But if a person wants to stay in an echo-chamber - she can. I just to not want to be forced into someone else’s echo-chamber.
As a former sysadmin who had part of his career in that paradigm, I never again want to wait until 10:30 PM to run manual production deployments handed to me by a developer and hoping their documentation was correct.

Give me CI/CD pipelines deploying containers to a k8s cluster during the day.
So how do we fix it without adding yet another layer? All the govt seems to do is add more layers.
The introduction of the Prose Edda is really wild. Snorri basically tries to synthesize his understanding of history, the Eddas, and the Bible to explain how many of these are the same people or describing the same events.
I went through an entire ban appeal process with Electronic Arts over my Apex Legends account and was treated similarly.

According to one EA Forum Moderator, there are actual people reviewing appeals, but the fact that they upheld my ban saying it was correct only to revert it 2 weeks after I stopped fighting them tells me their process is flawed.

My best guess is bans are handed out automatically based on whatever heuristic, but the human review merely checks the log generated by the automated system for rudimentary errors. Was my account the one flagged and not a different user by mistake? Yes. Ban upheld. (except not, when they gave my account back with no apology)
This is like Canada spending $54m to build the BASIC covid entry app, ArriveCAN...

Source: https://nationalpost.com/news/the-initial-cost-of-arrivecan-...
> I find it stunning that Russia doesn't have the ability to make internally a thing that goes for US$5000 used on Ebay.

If you dig a bit you'll find it's the case for a lot of things. Outsourcing production to Asia&co completely wiped entire industries, the knowledge is gone after one or two generations. Once the infrastructure and the knowledge are gone it's game over, you have to start from scratch again
This is often referred to "high-involvement" vs "high-considerateness" [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deborah_Tannen#%22High-involve...
Sorry thinking of land mass - population of 5x larger.

But the absolute number is larger, even ignoring the population size, so not sure what the person I was replying to means.
Once again, you ignore the only question that matters in this thread. You also prove my own point: the press release under discussion was targeted at the U.S., as the default Newsroom is the one used for U.S. press releases. Unless you care to link to Apple's U.S. Newsroom? The one you linked is targeted at Singapore, as can be seen clearly. Apple customizes it to each region where there is a need to customize it. For the comparison to be misleading, we would need evidence that it is misleading at least in one country where they released this press release, and it isn't misleading in the US based on the evidence previously shown so far, as best I can tell. I had welcomed you to show some evidence as well, but you haven't.

This whole discussion has been pointless.
> I can't copyright a single sentence fragment.

But almost: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_copyright_for_press_...
So the sun is conscious?
I promise you, software development also happens in unbelievable places like South America, Africa and other low connectivity places.

Edit: just came across this submission https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33274186

Seems funny that Stack Overflow would enable offline usage when supposedly no developers have poor connection, they'll simply move to places with amazing networking.
Nothing wrong with lazy and unaccountable workers?