skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This comes across as quite rude, TBH.

But answering you on the merits: it’s entirely possible, yes.

For example, what if sensible life choices include moving out of state to a place where there is less tech industry? Just changing jobs can interrupt healthcare and cause costs. And the process of switching providers is, in the experience of a friend with a family with complex healthcare needs, sometimes so kafkaesque it might not be worth the risk.

What if sensible life choices involve blowing the whistle or just being critical of the industry? Can you risk it?

What if sensible life choices mean wanting to substitute time so your partner can go back to work? Does their plan match yours for the benefits you’ve both come to rely on?

It’s not unusual at all for people in all sorts of situations and on all sorts of incomes to effectively end up tied to a job by the security of specific features of a workplace health plan.

Use your imagination before you just jump in and belittle an argument.

I do wonder if people in the particular FAANG bubbles are just too young and healthy to understand that healthcare plans aren’t just a tradeable, interchangeable perk: once you are really deeply using them, they can get a lot less interchangeable.
After a certain level of complexity the scientific method probably can’t apply, because there are too many interconnected variables and not enough energy in the universe to parse them all.
Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents
I recently read Ellen Ullman's memoir about her life as a software developer in the dot-com bubble era: "Close to the machine: Technophilia and its discontents".

The book was written before I was born, but I can still closely relate to most of the cultural points made. She does a great job defining the anxieties and frictions you experience working in the duality of the very formal computer systems and the subjective, messy working contexts, filled with deadlines, bureaucracy, "rockstars"...

Her takes on the internet are also super relevant today. A favorite extract of mine:
"When I watch the users try the Internet, it slowly becomes clear to me that the Net represents the ultimate dumbing-down of the computer. The users seem to believe that they are connected to some vast treasure trove — all the knowledge of our times, an endless digitized compendium, some electronic library of Alexandria — if only they could figure out how to use it. But they just sit and click, and look disconcertedly at the junk that comes back at them".

What other similar books would you recommend?
We = Podman (machine + desktop) Team
To be fair we still might have a crisis, but far less of one and far more easily addressed. With nuclear as the base of the power grid we’d just have to electrify cars and we’d be most of the way there.

The real catastrophe was that coal and not nuclear powered the ascent of Asia. If we hadn’t frozen nuclear power in the 70s it’s possible that there would have been a mature modular nuclear industry whose technology China and other Asian countries could have bought or copied instead of doubling global emissions in 15 years by massively scaling out coal.

Check out some of these graphs:

https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions

(I’m not claiming this makes the crisis uniquely their fault. It’s a global problem and virtually everyone has participated in creating it.)
That did cross my mind, but how far should they really take it? Should they also deflate a tire to see how the vehicle responds to that?
>data driveness quickly leads to an unhealthy focus on short term results

In my experience it's not data, but when finance and/or sales call the shots. Their incentives are quarterly so without good engineering pushback you get a lack of long term vision
This is a great article. I've consulted with many startups that are really scared of OKRs and KPIs and have some PTSD around them, but they need not be scary!

Here is a scenario:

It's January and Sales is getting feedback from customers that if the business has a managed k8s offering, they would not only buy it but expand their use of the platform generally. Sales passes this information to product and product does some research, finding that indeed there would be a market for a managed k8s offering. They pull together a report and start to shop it around to get feedback and buy in from around the company, consulting with different orgs. After a while, a business case is flushed out and the management green light an MVP k8s offering that will generate revenue by the end of the year. An objective and key result for the business becomes: this year launch a managed k8s offering so a small number of customers with an eye for $50,000 MRR.

Every org should then have some performance indicators that indicate that the business is tracking towards the release of this product this year, it doesn't not need to be complex just as the OKR should not and does not need to be complex, it's simply an indicator that we're on track (and it's ok if you're not, maybe the OKR was unrealistic, that's ok!)

Eng: KPI: stand up k8s - KPI: make k8s stable - KPI: make k8s more stable - KPI: tie k8s into the rest of the stack - etc

Product: KPI: Research how k8s should be be exposed - KPI: Research how k8s service should be billed - KPI: MVP product design and test internally - etc

Support: KPI: understand staff to support a new offering - KPI: Training and hiring for new staff to support the offering - etc

Marketing: KPI: understand the message to the market - KPI: understand how competitors are marketing their k8s offering - KPI: understand how to advertise new offering - etc

Etc - etc.

OKRs and KPIs do not have to be a whole song and dance, they are simply a way to keep a company of organizations aligned and moving in the same direction regarding agreed upon objectives for the business, folks get super hung up on granularity. Doing this well helps tie together some of the most important aspects of a healthy and successful go to market: Vision, Mission and Purpose. I understand the vision of the business, the things we will make true in the future. I understand the mission of my team and organization on how we will realize this vision. I understand my purpose within the vision and mission and why I am an important component.

I firmly believe it's only with this as part of your foundation can achieve employee satisfaction, have directionally forward teams, and become a "high performing business".
In countries communicating in non-English languages which are written in the latin script, there is a very large use of Latin-1. Even when Latin-1 is "phased out", there are tons and tons of documents and databases encoded in Latin-1, not to mention millions of ill-configured terminals.

I think it makes total sense to implement this.
So lets pump more CO2 into the atmosphere.
Not sure why no one has done it? Not carbon neutral I guess, but paired with this and solar power it would be. Batteries are already so good is probably part of it too. But adding about 25% travel time on long drives is annoying.
Are you a banker?
Now is a good time to take a look at what Chinese citizens are doing to circumvent governmental censorship & surveillance. Refer to Trojan-gfw/V2ray/xray-core. They are well tested within an environment much more hostile than the west and should thus work just fine.

For messaging, self host or use a matrix instance outside of UK jurisdiction so that Big Tech cannot secretly weaken encryption without your knowledge.
It's even great in the sense that a speedometer tends to make people aim for "I need to go 65 mph" instead of "I should not go above 65 mph" which a speed limit is actually intended to mean. The speed limit became a target instead of being a limit.
And if that were the case and someone did it, journalists would get plenty of opportunity to get in on that story. They don't have to be the first to trigger every failure mode.
When I worked at the George Eastman Museum many moons ago, the staff entrance had a distinct vinegar-like odor that I believe was from vinegar syndrome isolation storage for the film collection at some point in its history before the archive building was made in '89. That place has an AMAZING collection.
The problem with capitalism is it works too well: a company doing well can subsidise a lot of bad management practice and still do great. And because it is doing great they believe what they are doing is great. But it is largely a snowball effect. Talking about larger companies more than startups here.
As we all expected, for most of us nothing will change and HashiCorp is not committing Harakiri.
CVE-2023-31147: Insufficient randomness for DNS query identifiers in C-ares
Still… you have to admit that it’s a pretty weird and distinctly American concept where you essentially pay to have friends.
Probably not during the night
Advertising is unethical. If you publicly provide data I have no ethical contract to be forced to use that data in a certain way. If you want to force ads then use a different delivery mechanism and at that point I will gladly entirely avoid it
> It's really weird the spin on this.

The "spin" is coming from you.

> Space X rockets (and others) blow up all the time

SpaceX has done ~227 successful Falcon missions in a row. Those rockets do NOT "blow up all the time". Further, the success rate of the Falcon 9 is 247/249. Meaning, 99.20%. For the block 5 variant it is 192/192 or 100% success rate.

SpaceX is also developing some rockets. You seem to be comparing rockets which are under development and where SpaceX often gives a low probability of success with missions that are supposed to work. The development rockets are NOT in production, they are NOT used to bring cargo in space. It's really apples vs oranges.

> So not sure why this is being reported so negatively (well, actually, I do, of course...)

Instead of giving some stupid hint just say what you wanted to say. Up to now what you said doesn't make sense to me, so no why not explain the rest as well.
Amazing! Had no idea about the concept of biocontrols. I wonder if there has been progress on lanternflys. NYC is getting torn up by them regularly now.
I saw someone else mentioning 7.92TB enterprise for ~$800, that's pretty compelling and crazy at $350. But, I'm just putting together a home server right now and it's all built out with 2.5" SATA drives (9x Samsung 860 EVOs I got cheap when my previous company went out of business, going to put 7x Toshiba spinning drives in once I get the data on them backed up). Got a Dell R730 with 256GB RAM and 24 cores for $350 landed off ebay and couldn't resist. Set up a VM last night for my son to do a backup of his laptop before he upgraded the OS, wanted to foster his desire to do a backup for sure. :-) "Ok, send me your SSH public key by magic-wormhole and install restic..."
I vaguely remember you can do this in pulseaudio, so technically you can stream nextflix from a linux box to a tv over hdmi. Maybe.
archivists hate robots.. doesnt matter if the error rate or risk is lower than with human handling, many refuse to believe it.
About 50 engineers spread across 7 teams
Why are space agencies racing to the moon's South Pole?
It's also a mathematical tautology. There's only a few ways to evenly space the cloudy days. There's exponentially more ways to clump them.
>well, actually, I do, of course...

I think it's because Luna-24 nearly 5 decades ago was a success, and reported Soviet success rates of their probe programs were 100% (despite the actual number being lower), alongside some cheekiness due to Russian timeline being chosen to land just before the Indian mission.

I don't think that such a failure of a 50 year old technology with a previous "100%" success rate is that weird for people to have such a take about. I think it is weird that you suggest SpaceX rockets are blowing up all the time, when a much more direct and accurate comparison would be the Japanese/Israeli lander failure.

Do we consider Japan/Israel serious contenders to NASA/ESA in space here? Probably not in the same way as India and China.
A barely HTTP/2 server in Zig
Getting Started with AI in Ecommerce, Exploring Benefits and Practical Uses
I guess I'll say what I think. I do think it is targeted at that smallest 80% of companies with some digital footprint, and also at most of the top 20%. Or more specifically, I think maybe it's targeted at like the 5th percentile to the 99th percentile. That bottom 5% probably just needs Excel, and that top 1% is probably writing or heavily modifying all their own tools.

But I'm not sure the advice is very good from the 5th percentile up to ... maybe that top 20%? A lot of the stuff in the article assumes the availability of sophisticated data architects and mature infrastructure groups that I really don't think the median company has.
> Keeping prices low is a great thing

In absolute terms, no, it isn't! Think "race to the bottom".

Coupled with the proper checks, low prices can be great.
From 'Life in Code':

"We build our computers the way we build our cities—over time, without a plan, on top of ruins."
I don't have anything shared online but I can look at publishing it if there's interest. It's one big script so I'll have to clean it up and remove any sensitive data from it first.
In the Brazilian electronic voting system, there is no mechanism to check that the counting on each machine was performed correctly. Validation only occurs after that point.

So if the machine somehow subtracts 256 votes from one candidate and transfers them to another, the total remains the same and this discrepancy isn't caught.

It sounds ludicrous, but actually has happened before: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaZ_RSt0KP8

This is just one example of how the Brazilian system isn't ideal. The criticism against it is very well supported by sound arguments, and it's a shame that it got politicised. It's a pure technical matter.
> I might be overestimating power lines or people's willingness to have transmission lines near them.

The question isn't about power lines. The question you started with is "Hydroelectric is generally counted as a renewable, and it's also a storage system."

The problem is that yo uneed to build a lot of them, and you can't just build them abywhere you want.

> What's the ampacity of a typical high voltage line?

Zero. The storage capacity of a high voltage line is zero.
> Consciousness will add a random component to the predictions

I get why our form of consciousness is essentially incompatible with determinism (our brains process data in a massively parallel way - minor differences here and there like the length of a particular dendrite, or even quantom effects, will affect the results). But a synthetic consciousness might not have that particular problem. You might be able to "reset" it and get the same result given the same input.

> and might make them completely useless as a tool

Our own brains are non-deterministic and yet we manage to get at least some usage from them.
Sorry if I was unclear. I didn't mean that the resolution changed, but rather that pages should take into account how big elements will actually appear in the real world. Typically if I open a website and half-and-half my browser with a terminal the website goes into mobile-mode. The page however is about three times wider than my phone screen, and the hamburger menu is more than twice the size of my mouse cursor. Just because I don't have the page open full-screen any longer doesn't mean that I suddenly can't click the same size buttons or read the same size font, so there's no point in making everything big and clunky.
In Windows, everything is part of the operating system. You just set the window flags, you just beep the audio, you just send WM_CLOSE, you just disable MouseKeys. In Linux, everything is a specific program, with a name, and with commonly used alternatives. Your program to move a window to a particular location must be compatible with the program for having windows at all (X or Wayland), the program for laying windows out (dwm? KWin?), and probably the program for the desktop (GNOME? KDE?). The net effect is one where a user is probably able to write their own AHK-style scripts, but sharing them around is basically impossible, and figuring out what to do is much harder due to navigating a forest of tool-specific documentation.
The Frontier of Adaptive Computation in Machine Learning
I guess we can put things this way: the closer the codebase is to a collection of uncorrelated chunks, the more one can read it "systematically". OTOH, the more the dependencies between the various chunks, the more useful/efficient a "reverse-engineering reading" becomes.

"Bad" naming, operator overloading, both add such dependencies. As a side note regarding operator (well, symbol) overloading: it's just plain awful in mathematics: e.g. a "+" signs can refer to an actual operator between scalar, between vectors, between functions, between spaces, an essentially syntactical element (portion of a name), etc.

It makes simple things so hard to understand for novices.
I don't get out of bed for anything without a CVE so I can confirm I actually have a threat from the vulnerability, often times they're things where you'd need to use an obscure feature or local privilege escalations on single user systems, etc.
The language of nasa is starting to ramp up. When they fire Boeing and rent SpaceX rockets we’ll know things are getting serious.

I also think this is a great example of cognitive dissonance we tech people display, “oh we’re going to the moon in the name of freedom to stop the Chinese claiming all the resources for themselves. That’s good. I like space travel.”

Reality is, we’re off to do the same thing we’ve always done, fight over control of resources. There’s hope in knowing that throughout its history, there’s one thing the US has done competently.
An aside:

MIT had, decades ago, the Handy Board [1], which was like an Arduino for the 1990's. I built a few and really enjoyed the Interactive-C language [2] it employed (enjoyed).

That particular environment, a small hobby microcontroller, was an ideal one for interactive-ness. Want to determine some reasonable values for your ultrasonic distance sensor? Type a line of code in the monitor and you'll get back an analog value seemingly instantly.

The modern Arduino IDE could perhaps learn a thing from the Handy Board + Interactive-C IDE.

(I believe in fact the C was compiled to byte-code and then run on a thin interpreter on the Handy Board, but that's beside the point.)

(Also, tangentially, the 68HC11 was the first microcontroller I learned assembly for ... I have little experience with assembly but thoroughly enjoyed that command-set, that chip.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handy_Board

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_C
Interesting. But ultimately it's an association of an association...in mice.

People who marry and live together over time share an infinite list of things. While I greatly appreciate the u known power and influence of the gut, I also appreciate the role of diet and lifestyle (e.g., exercise) on health. Ultimately, birds of a feather flock together, so the possible correlations is endless.

This is the kind of study I wish was duplicated by another entity, as opposed to simple peer review. An association of an association in mice...in a one-off study is all but just a random rumor.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street
"Bottom of the energy hill" is a chemist's short hand way of saying that we can't practically extract energy from CO2 reacting with anything useful, meaning chemically this is at the bottom end of reactions that happen without energy input. To convert it into something reactive, you need to invest energy to split it up again into its constituent parts, which is what happens during photosynthesis.
> Aldi has better prices

For the same quality? With the same workers' rights? With at least ea liveable profit for their providers?
>However, consciousness will add a random component to the predictions and might make them completely useless as a tool.

I think I was with you until this part. I think the best way of making sense of what you mean by "random" is that you are presuming that something with consciousness would have agency, and therefore would be open to making it's own independent choices.

Whatever the case with agency, it wouldn't be the same as randomness.
I have yet to read it, but it looks and feels like more of a review article than anything claiming to be progressing the field.

The thing I find interesting about the idea of the paper (again, haven’t read it, so this is an assumption) is that there are philosophy academics who don’t put consciousness on a hand-wavy metaphysical pedestal. More of that please.
Indeed. There's no substitute for vision.
>However, for the past ~6 billion years, distant galaxies have been speeding up in their recession, and the expansion rate, though still dropping, is not headed toward zero.

Am I not getting something here or is this sentence not make sense?
If a company wants to rank engineers then there is always a metric to rank engineers. That metric may simply be how much the manager or director likes each engineer. That's still a metric and it still can be gamed (ie: classic kiss ass culture).
I did keep an eye on it because it was a good indicator of problems. But I never drove the team based on it, any more than I would try to increase a car's speed by grabbing the speedometer needle.
I think I've quit a few companies you consulted for. Your KPI examples are terribly vague.
That idea is mentioned in the article, with the hypothesis that there was more dark energy in the past that has since dissipated. They label that idea as "New Physics" in the chart above that comment.
So you're not testing anymore, because a failed test would show up on someones dashboard?
Irrelevant management KPIs at least tell you what management cares about.

"I'll know it when I see it" iterations of bringing different "no not that" KPIs to management is frustrating in the opposite direction.

Ultimately management wants to set the tone in both scenarios, at least when giving you dumb KPIs they have done some work and volunteered information.