skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
199x.. a friend is working as support technician of some highly-reliable-and prohibitely-expensive boxes. One day some lady from Big-corp-xyz rings, and says that her box would restart occasionaly. Whut? Taking all the machinery for diagnostics, he goes there. Takes box out, Opens it, plugs the cables, ... a hour+ later, nothing. The thing works as expected and no amount of fiddling around would make it restart by itself. He puts it back at its place under the desk.

- You sure this.. restarts?

- Of course, happened twice today

- Huh? Can you show how it happens?

She sits on the chair, start typing some document, crosses her legs and starts shaking the upper one. And, after a while, hits the reset button with nose of her shoe.

- You see? Just restared, i could not even finish the letter..

- Ahhhh. Okay. The.. location of the box is causing some.. intereference. Moving it.

He moves the box to the other side of desk, where no legs can reach.. and that's it.
Point 1 ("Understand the business aspect of your work, and what makes money. Eventually, only that matters.") is depressing to me.
Isn't the argument about lazy loading?
> Software price hikes are driven in part by inflation. The cost of living has surged post-pandemic in most economies. Higher electricity costs, chip shortages, and rising wages all increase the cost of doing business.

Not that there hasn't been inflation, but prices have gone up much more in the last year than inflation itself has. Inflation is 3.2%, lower than the 100-year average in the U.S. It was higher a year ago, but still only about 9%. All of the price increases in that article are significantly higher than that, most are multiples of that. Even if they hadn't raised their prices for a few years prior, that still doesn't add up. I don't buy inflation as a valid excuse, though I would it as an invalid excuse they're still using because people perceive it as true.
> I happen to be a reviewer for software artifacts in a scientific journal

That's very cool. I have a question for you.

I'm taking a bioinformatics class, despite not having the chemistry prerequisites. I'm getting a crash course in biochem, and the rest of the class benefits from having an expert in what-kind-of-quotes-to-use.

I've been thinking: would it be helpful if the care and maintenance of these compute environments wasn't left to each scientist but was instead aggregated (perhaps per-class or per-university)?

We're setting these chemists up with conda in Ubuntu in WSL in a terminal whose startup command activates the conda environment. Not exactly a recipe for reproducibility after they get a new laptop.

What if certain compute-heavy classes published flakes which the students could...

a) use while taking the class so we stop wasting time on troubleshooting ssl deps via conda

b) reference in publications after the fact. They could say:

> Here's a Jupyter notebook, download it and run it in the UCCS biochem environment like so: `nix run github:UCCS/CHEM4573?rev=16afd67`, its output lets us make the following conclusions...

I know it would be helpful for the students in the class. Do you think it would be helpful to them later on when they were publishing things?

I'm thinking about packaging the dependencies for this class, giving it to the teacher, and pitching it to the university:

> Set up a technical fellowes program. Waive tuition for us nerds and in exchange we'll support your students and faculty through the maintenance of these environments.

I don't mind paying tuition so much, but I'd like to do something to get a bit more cross pollination going between scientists in need of tech support and techies in need of something meaningful to work on.

Am I dreaming here, or would it solve some problems? Do you think I have a shot at convincing anybody?
They claim to provide liquidity, even though they are just front-running trades that are already happening anyway.
We're very casual about throwing out the term "engineering", and maybe this came from the deceptive way in which Microsoft came up with the Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer certification which then entered the lexicon, or the use of the term operating systems.

True Engineering is not software development, and vice versa. The knowledge required to be an excellent engineer is not the same knowledge required to be an excellent software developer, and vice versa.

Even if we look at the most software centric parts of engineering in the fundamentals exam for the PE, we see a huge emphasis on the physical world that is key for Electronics Engineers, but not for a software developer https://ncees.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/FE-Electrical-a...
This is a great perspective check.

Water is truly a near-infinite resource. If we can master desalination then humanity is in a great spot in regards to fresh water.

It also frames the challenge well. Desalinating a cubic mile gives you 120 million tons of leftovers. Another extremely difficult challenge.
You weren't around back then but you “get a sense”?

This was the Civil rights movement era. But I guess you'll say that normies didn't care about that.

> "I’m from the government and I’m here to help." wasn't said til 1986

Yes, we mustn't forget the pioneer of populism and anti-elitism Ronald Reagan.
Rooftops are great, we have a 100m2 rooftop terrace and kids love it. But I had no idea how hot it gets. To the point where I don’t even step outside during those heatwaves. When the offical temperature was 36C we had in fullsun above 46C and the concrete panel was too hut to wall barefoot. So my take is that in dry/hot areas rooftops are just unliveable.
Sounds like maintaining a glibc fork would simpler than fighting the official ones with dirty tricks, but I assume they know what they are doing.

I am not sure glic maintainers "deserve hate" - very little people actually do. But it is probable that their incentives and culture run against the changes that would be required here. I can figure that "preserving Windows games compatibility" would stand _very_ low on their priority list.
Online AI-based test for Parkinson’s disease severity shows promising results
Interesting, guess it's just a southern Quebec thing then. August is particularly...cold.
The aws/gcp/azure tax is starting to bite hard. At least we have choices. IBM rode a similar gravy train for many many years.
The hit was ordered by Sam Giancana, the Chicago mafia boss. Jack Ruby was his lackey.

From wikipedia: Ruby was known to have been acquainted with both the police and the Mafia. The HSCA said that Ruby had known Chicago mobster Sam Giancana (1908–1975) and Joseph Campisi (1918–1990) since 1947, and had been seen with them on many occasions.
I'm so glad I'm not wasting my life working in finance.
My theory is that in a really stressful situation the mind hyperfocuses and "processes more frames per second" to react quicker. Just like with movies this mean that replayed at normal speed the movie serms very slow, hence the long timespan memory.
> I'm sure the dozen or so Linux laptop gamers in the world will be ecstatic.

https://omdia.tech.informa.com/pr/2023/04-apr/omdia-steam-de...

And that’s only Steam Deck.

> only a small fraction of games run well, to play games?

?????

You mean most games from previous gen consoles and thousand PC games?

https://www.protondb.com/explore
My neighbors cut down trees around their house so that the solar panels could have unobstructed Sun.
So long as stable also means "unchanging" (in the sense of no new machines are being deployed). Our biggest win from AWS was never having to think about DDoS; our second biggest win was never having to wait for our Ops team (who was very good overall) to have the discussions about how to deploy new hardware, new storage, etc.

I get annoyed when a new EC2 instance takes 2 minutes to launch now. That time used to be not productive to measure in hours.
My team's systems play a critical role for several $100M of sales per day, such that if our systems go down for long enough, these sales will be lost. Long enough means at least several hours and in this time frame we can get things back to a good state, often without much external impact.

We too have manual processes in place, but for any manual process we document the rollback steps (before starting) and monitor the deployment. We also separate deployment of code with deployment of features (which is done gradually behind feature flags). We insist that any new features (or modification of code) requires a new feature flag; while this is painful and slow, it has helped us avoid risky situations and panic and alleviated our ops and on-call burden considerably.

For something to go horribly wrong, it would have to fail many "filters" of defects: 1. code review--accidentally introducing a behavioral change without a feature flag (this can happen, e.g. updating dependencies), 2. manual and devo testing (which is hit or miss), 3. something in our deployment fails (luckily this is mostly automated, though as with all distributed systems there are edge cases), 4. Rollback fails or is done incorrectly 5. Missing monitoring to alert us that issue still hasn't been fixed. 5. Fail to escalate the issue in time to higher-levels. 6. Enough time passes that we miss out on ability to meet our SLA, etc.

For any riskier manual changes we can also require two people to make the change (one points out what's being changed over a video call, the other verifies).

If you're dealing with a system where your SLA is in minutes, and changes are irreversible, you need to know how to practically monitor and rollback within minutes, and if you're doing something new and manually, you need to quadruple check everything and have someone else watching you make the change, or its only a matter of time before enough things go wrong in a row and you can't fix it. It doesn't matter how good or smart you are, mistakes will always happen when people have to manually make or initiate a change, and that chance of making mistakes needs to be built into your change management process.
The huge amount of time saved with plane vs boat makes the former the superior option. There's no way a ton of CO2 is worth the comparative QALY loss you get from five days in a boat compared to the other things you could be doing with that time (if you're on a properly efficient liner rather than a super inefficient modern luxury cruise liner). Even the extreme upper end of CO2 externalities don't go above $1000/ton with most reasonable estimates below $100/ton.
Once we start getting into large units the argument seems ridiculous. Especially with stuff like a hogshead that is a slightly different amount depending on what is being measured.
I wonder if we could use that as a building material.
Do you think this problem could be solved by having the backend service randomly redistribute packets? That is, if each service kept/processed a percent of the packets and randomly forwarded the remainder to other 'backend' service computers.

Membership and status would be easy: are they forwarding random packets to me? Then they're up and running. New computer sends packets? New service member, so tell them about members you know of. This would also allow multiple public ingress points (like running multiple simple load balancers) so clients could change which computer they send to, and bandwidth would be ~balanced.
Is this your diagnosis? That things are more corporate in terms of outcome? Genuinely curious, as a Bay Area native, why UT/Texas can’t begin to compete given how many issues face SF currently.
Unfortunately typical of compounds that have promiscuous activities. Lets wait for this to be replicated or applied before getting excited.
Thanks for writing this up, I found it very useful and I promptly went to go check that we're paying our payroll taxes haha.
I would argue the real issue was the lack of an automated system (or multiple automated systems) that would hit the kill switch if the trading activity didn’t look right.
Yet most boats today are full of electronics anyway
> 8. Do not be adamant about your views.

I worked at a MAANG where this was not the case. The pecking order of "seniority" was who was the most "right" and who could poke the most holes in everyone else's ideas while denying others' contributions while bragging about how essential and important their work was in a semi-agro manner that discouraged dissent and curiosity.

In my view, marks of intelligence include lacking strong biases, comfort with ambiguity, be willing to propose hypotheses, experiment, gather data, and be proven wrong.
Larger boats are all diesel/electric series hybrids anyway (not sure if this is common at the scale of this particular vessel). Saltwater is nasty (and freshwater isn't great either), but avoiding electricity isn't easy.
What risk are they taking exactly? Bugs ruining the business isn't meaningful risk for the customer. It isn't like day traders are at risk of going bankrupt due to that after all.

They claim liquidity is their value but given how they act they don't seem to be providing measurable liquidity, either in terms of price or volume. (Yes they increase volume by getting in the middle of trades but that isn't useful volume...)
"I don't know of a reasonable way to guess the right location."

1. Drag curve handles out to 1/3 of the length of the curve segment they control.

2. Eschew s-curves between two control points.

3. Don't turn more than about 90º between two control points.

I learnt this about a year into what is now a 23-year career as an Illustrator artist. It has served me well. You will note that the first interactive example on this page is asking you to violate rule 2.

"Béziers can't represent circles. If you try to approximate one by hand, it'll look lopsided."

If you try to draw a circle by hand, it'll look lopsided too. Any pro traditional artist will have a compass and a few circle templates in their kit. In Illustrator there's an ellipse tool one keypress away. I've been drawing at a pro level for about thirty years and while I can probably pick up a pencil and draw a better circle in a couple quick arm motions than you can in a bunch of little sketchy attempts, they're still nowhere near perfect, and they don't need to be.

I also draw about 90% of my paths with the Pencil tool, which just abstracts worrying all of this way. Unless you are doing very geometric work, or require the absolute minimum possible number of points, I feel that using the Pen tool to draw everything is about as sensible as writing a program entirely in assembly language. And if I do need to work under a tight point count constraint, then I will still draw it with the Pencil, then pull out Astute's Smart Point Removal tool, which does a great job of optimizing the heck out of my paths, much better than Adobe's tools for this.
And tech carries out churning out artificial intelligence systems that consumes way more energy than genuine human intelligence while being worse off at the same tasks most of the time
> we need to switch from a high density model, too dense for today state of tech and society, climate etc

The populations of dense cities use fewer resources than the same population spread out in low-density settlements, especially when those cities are laid out to be properly walkable. It's just basic economy of scale.

> in cities there are MANY ICE vehicles whose engine produce much heat, much more than any electrical motor;

In cities, not having a vehicle is an option. Outside of them, it's basically required in most places.
The metric system came about around the same time as the U.S.
Either way, that intuitive understanding of the imperial system may just come about due to one's growing up with it.

I have the same (I assume), innate understanding of the various metric units, given that I was exposed to it all my life. It's easy for me to glance at something and know if it's as big as a centimeter, a couple, perhaps a decimeter or even a meter. The same goes for the volume of something.
I think it has more to do with your education, and experience in life, than it's with... the arbitrary way someone came about with those units.

Nothing against the imperial system, I understand how difficult it is to leave it now, and no-one could predict if the metric system were to take off at the time. I wish all of us would use only one though.
Ah, I miss the days of dial up internet (not just on Linux) ... :-)
This is why most software companies tend to ship buggy messes that need to be constantly patched and updated. Software engineers never get to fully focus on optimizing software for the long term because as they gain experience within the org. they are moved away from engineering into management of other engineers.

I think I get the motivation, an engineer managing a team of engineers can achieve "more" in less time. However I put "more" in quotes because a single expert engineer can build better, faster, and more reliable than an entire team, once they have mastered the systems and tools. That will never happen if they rarely touch code and instead attend meetings to talk about planning and scheduling.
Time dilation is well known to occur in dangerous situations.

https://doi.org/10.1111%2Fpsyp.12836
You are almost guaranteed never to have to another Euclidean geometric proof again after you take the gaokao. It’s like the LeetCode for chinese college admissions.
Depends on whether they truly take on the risk. Interestingly I can’t clearly tell from a quick google who exactly ended up holding the bag here, and what became of upper management.
That doesn't disagree with what he's saying though; it's still in a transition phase. Range loss issues from cold weather and/or towing are still a concern, inability to charge at home is a concern, large upfront costs are still a concern, the weirdness of fast charging stations is still a concern. They're solvable issues and in time will be, but they're issues lot of people don't want to deal with while things are still in flux and don't see enough value in paying the cost of being an early adopter.
so why would anyone ever move into such an apartment??
I've seen deranged full-volume yelling for minutes on end, laptops being smashed into bits on desks, and a full on punch-up between middle aged men in nice suits in a fancy office.

This story seems a little tame, honestly.
Fathom AI Notetaker (YC W21) is hiring a principal SRE (remote)
They intentionally change cover art for exactly this purpose
If a seller and a buyer are in market within seconds of each other, they would have traded successfully without a third party taking some of their money. As I understand it, HFTs are trying to avoid taking meaningful long-term positions (which is why latency matters to only them).
This is self reported and not aggregated properly. I would be really cautious drawing conclusions from that.
Eh, everything that goes in the ocean requires a lot of engineering to survive. Batteries can be sealed if needed, electric motors can be sealed too. For example thrusters for ROVs are typically electric motors. They just enclose the motor in a housing and run the shaft out to the prop through a rubber seal. A lot of older stuff looks like it wasn't highly engineered because the important engineering was done a long time ago, and now the stuff is old and crusty. But there was a lot of work done to make gasoline engines work well in the water I suspect. We can do the same for electric.
>For the noncognoscenti...

Expected nothing less from the legendary Clojure linguistics aficionados!
Helping or hindering? US scientists debate how to save giant sequoias
Yeah. Read a book.

https://www.amazon.com/Kiss-Ground-Reverse-Climate-Ultimatel...
I don't have a recommendation
Commercial fishing vessels are already festooned with electric motors, batteries and electronics. Somehow all that functions in saltwater.
Chinese scientists have developed a new geneediting tool that doesn’t use CRISPR
Vendors don't owe it to you to fix your bugs unless you have some sort of support agreement that says otherwise.

Its not abusive to close duplicate reports of a bug that is not currently prioritized. It would be impossible to prioritize every single bug.
Do you really think most people are making an informed choice, as opposed to clicking the button that gets rid of the pop up fastest? Especially on mobile where the pop up obscures basically the entire site, and the byzantine process of opting out takes several clicks?

I think this was a spectacular failure of the EU to consider legislative effects, and problem solve. But that seems to be their recent MO.
Brilliant.
They could advise the highest courts and not lose his head with those kinds of moves.
Show HN: This tool helps you stay excited while achieving ambitious goals
Hey HN! Was frustrated by guilt over lost streaks and by a general lack of keyboard support in habit trackers. Wanted to fight discouragement. Started building my own habit tracker based on my best current understanding of human (and animal) productivity.

Came out the other side with something that works unreasonably well. Pressing my keyboard to mark a task as complete feels like I'm a dog getting a clicker click as a training reward. Turns out I'm doing operant conditioning on myself and have never been more productive. I can't say this approach is for everyone, but maybe you'll be pleasantly surprised.
couldn't even read to the second paragraph?
This year they launch for USSF, OneWeb, Nasa, SES, SDA, Intelsat, ViaSat, Iridium, Axiom, ArabSat, PT Pasifik, ESA, Echostar, Maxar Technologies, Northrop Grumman, Jared Isaacman, German Intelligence Service, Astranis, Korea Aerospace Industries, South Korea, Ovzon, plus several dozen smallsat operators and of course SpaceX's own Starlink.
Why does a bottle of water at a ballgame cost $5, at a food truck $1, and at a supermarket $0.15?

Personally, I find the ballgame price exploitive, but the food truck has added a bunch of convenience (and a few pennies of refrigeration cost) and that's worth paying $0.85 extra to a lot of people.
That's fair. Then don't read the search result from the economist. Read the result from the Census, or the Forbes article, or HuffPo if you don't like their stance.

My point is simply that your question is valid, but has been asked and answered a thousand times before. Nothing in your question is specific to this audience that we'd have a twist on the answer that isn't represented in any of the thousand existing answers.

I'm curious, since you didn't get much discussion on your question here, did you take a minute to answer your question elsewhere?
The variants I've heard on this joke are:

Because the land didn't wave back

Because it's full of seamen

Because it's full of <name of game> players
I think what you've done is mastered an unintuitive (or even counterintuitive) system. That's well and good, but it doesn't mean the system shouldn't be improved. It would make life no worse for you, and better for people with less experience, less time to experiment.
> But I've never met an artist or graphic designer who didn't express some deep frustration at Bezier controls and how hard they are to work with.

That surprises me, because Illustrator (especially earlier versions) is all about Bezier curves, and in my experience it doesn't take long before you start to "think" like the Pen tool. I don't recall working with an artist who couldn't intuit how they worked after creating with them for a few weeks.
In "the hard thing about hard things" they echo this advice as well - usually your executive team should have previous experience with the exception of maybe one person.
The featured article is about a 23 year old secret service agent hired directly from college and quickly assigned to protect the first lady - what if the secret service before 1963 was just not that competent? How much does that explain for us?