skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From the article:
"One practice that introduces bias into the shaping of defense policy is the revolving door between the U.S. government and the weapons industry. The movement of retired senior officials from the Pentagon and the military services into the arms industry is a longstanding practice that raises serious questions about the appearance and reality of conflicts of interest. Mostly because employing well-connected ex-military officers can give weapons makers enormous, unwarranted influence over the process of determining the size and shape of the Pentagon budget."

This seems to answer your confusion about why they are concerned about this.

The article also seems to suggest that they aren't trying to ban former Generals from getting jobs, they would just like to regulate it better, the first two proposals seeming to be pretty important:

- Bar four-star officers from going to work for companies that receive $1 billion or more in contracts with the Pentagon annually.

- Extend “cooling off periods” before retired officials can go to work for the arms industry to four years. This would ensure that key contacts or key information that the official may have been privy to while serving would not provide an outsized advantage.
Pay them a decent retirement and encourage them to teach at AWC or similar institutions.
How is this rule-of-thumb automatically applicable to everywhere? Some places have higher taxes and lower housing costs, others are the opposite. And that's just within the United States.
Just like all the anti-Sharia laws that were proposed in the US?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/30/anti-sharia-...
JVM based is clearly possible, as the most popular mobile OS the world uses it, and on far less capable devices.

But even if you ignore that, there were plenty of choices: Go, D, Nim.

The key criteria was control.
Yes but wouldn't be great. The problem is that these ultra low level assembly languages actually throw away a lot of information that is useful to parallelism. Recursive functions are great for HVM, but when compiled to assembly, that structure is lost.
Only 250 years? I can trace back my ancestors to the 1500s, and I know where they are buried. I have books of stories of many of them. They are real people to me. I’d hate to think of them being dug up to date someone’s curiosity. They are my family.
> I understand the military-industrial complex, I just don't know if senior military officer job selection is really the thing to get upset over.

Why not? The article provides a few cases of this situation leading to wasteful spending. Limiting this revolving door can eliminate waste.

> Where do you expect US generals to get jobs?

I'd pay them not to work. Same for retired Congress members. You get 100% of your salary for four years to help close the revolving door. That's the deal you make for taking the job. This can be enforced on military officers, but would probably be deemed unconstitutional for Congress.
I don't know, does Erlang elaborate to a simple core language?
In America, living with roommates has absolutely been a norm through at least one's mid 20s. The idea that everyone gets a clean, safe studio apartment within walking distance of all important and fun things has always been a luxury, not a guarantee. You're definitely right that people want more now.

Which is a good thing, we want to live in a society where people keep asking for things to be better. But it's also good to remember where we came from, and try to be humble.
Good.

The West does not understand caste. Their only comparison is slavery which is completely irrelevant. The closest thing to caste in the West is class.

This is the British social classification experiment all over again where they came to India, invented criminal tribes and martial races, and took the fluid jati/varna system and froze everything as part of law instead of letting society deal with its problems at its own pace. The result is there for every one to see. Three hundred years later, politicians in India want a caste census to maintain their caste-based vote banks, and caste groups that used to rule entire kingdoms demand to be classified as backward castes because it helps them compete with other caste groups who are benefiting from reservations/affirmative action.

If the US legally recognizes caste, in 50 years time, you will see Indian politicians campaigning for votes on caste lines in California.
This is a painfully cynical take and beyond that I’m not sure what he’s trying to say. If it’s all crap, make it better. Do something, don’t just complain!
I'm describing what I think is a predictable second-order effect of this explicit enumeration.

Prop 65 seemed like a fine idea. Let's make sure people know about the carcinogens in their daily lives! Oops, now that stupid sticker is on everything, because you've created a fear in the minds of retailers and manufacturers. It's entirely useless, nothing has improved, but now people spend additional time wasting paper and ink and resources to stay clear.

Or for a more recent backfire example, see the FDA's new rules on sesame seed labeling (https://reason.com/2023/07/28/fda-commissioner-no-one-envisi...)

The law itself thinks it's covering a hole in existing protections, so people are going to modify their behavior accordingly to make sure they don't get in trouble. What's the easiest way to do that? For Hindus already employed, they can take extra care to ask about a candidate's background to ensure they're not skewing their workforce. Indians applying for a job now get to check a box next their caste. Most will probably check "prefer not to say", or maybe they check whatever one they think will give them an advantage. For non-Hindus, they can just decide to hire Mike Smith, who doesn't even know what a caste is. There's this whole new thing that must be accounted for, and those doing the accounting will find the easiest path through it.
https://nitter.net/VictorTaelin/status/1710766199288570079
Before Skynet and The Matrix, there was Colossus: The Forbin Project
You're not going to like what comes after Pax Americana
So ....

McDonald's?
Right, but what is their "world impact"?
I have a copy of "computing mechanisms and linkages" by Svoboda, MIT radiation labs press. I always wondered what functional applications cams had, and now I know (it was a library sale book, one of a huge series published at the end of ww2)
the iso is 68mb or so, so the model is not there, how does it work?
(tried on Oracle VM and didn't work but seems it is not supported)
poorly understood and difficult to enforce laws cause a ton of harm. basically any time somebody wants to delay or obscure, their best tool is an unenforceable or redundant law. "oh, before we can start on that project / cancel that project / hire that person / fire that person we need to consult with legal to see the impacts under suchandsuch law"
> And while corruption in the so-called "military-industrial complex" exists, based on my 20 years in uniform, I'm not sure it's worse than in other sectors of the economy.

Your response to the corruption is whataboutism? Should we aim to end corruption regardless of what happens in other sectors?
What the heck is that title? Did OP just attach whatever related words came to mind?
not really, many of the states does not use last name and many take up their fathers name as last name.
It also varies from state to state, so the probability of you identifying another person caste from their last name is very small.

With many people taking different names that are modern from parents ,its really hard to know .
Then you use one of the many workarounds discussed. All these worlds are yours, except Makeupyourowntitleuropa. To make the argument for attempted landing there, there'd have to be at least some evidence that HN is missing out on interesting (URLless?) things due to its oppressive title regime.
AWS has many products that have done well for being innovative. They also have a long list of products that were "late to the game", maybe even offer little more than being hand-wavily "managed services".
> not hiring anybody who actually has a background relevant to the original system so that it can be maintained, not allotting any devs to groups which desperately need a code monkey to automate things, then assigning a senior to be that code monkey

An example of saying one thing and really meaning another, in organizations, is when they bring a tech Expert or Very Senior person in that tech on the grounds of needing a person to shore up their team, but then assigning that Very Senior some code monkey tasks. Of course the organization doesn't want to make any changes the Expert recommends, but by hiring that person they can claim they are addressing issues. Of course, it also gives management someone to blame and fire if (when) things go south.
I worked as a CPE before moving onto SRE and this is spot on. Jamf and others like Kandji are excellent tools for deploying, configuring, and erasing the device at scale and same thing for InTune for windows.

There’s no equivalent for Linuxes other than agent based CMs like Puppet or Chef and those tools don’t deliver the same features as the tools that are offered for windows and macOS.
In this long rant, there is only one concrete thing named that is supposedly bad:

> I saw someone that was working on a few Git branches, twenty years my senior, and they decided to clone the entire repository ten times, then checkout a different branch in each repository clone "because it's easier".
> Can you imagine the kind of havoc such a person could wreak upon infrastructure and code if left unchecked?

But I'm very confused, because this is the workflow paradigm of several VCSs that are not named Git. If this is their only concrete complaint, then I have to assume that this person has no idea what they're talking about.
You get 2x-4x salary. Your military retirement + full healthcare and your mid 6 figs from Lockheed and friends. Why wouldn't you?
That article was a very nice surprise and apart from how crushingly accurate it is (before somebody jumps in to defend all the corporate chaos, of course) it also had me giggling several times while reading it.

The answer of course is financial incentives. It is the answer 99% of the time, I know quite a few high-profile managers at this point and they are all very smart and get stuff done people and yet they allow themselves be dragged into endless meetings and they know the script (that the OP author is referring to several times) and they recite it by heart. Because if they don't, their manager is going to think they are useless and will inevitably fire them.

People find a cushy place to work in with a good salary, then just work their way up the economical ladder (or the organizational) and will do anything that's needed to achieve that goal. It's as simple as that, and I am convinced that a good chunk of these people (probably 20%-30%) are very well aware they are bullshitters but they think they have no choice.

At the same time, I've known a few company owners long time ago who were just BEGGING their managers to tell them the problems exactly as they are, swore on their lives they will not fire the managers for bringing them bad news (and made contracts that made sure of it in no uncertain terms)... and yet all of the managers below those people were sycophant yes-men.

Quite tragic really. All of this is a collective delusion.

I keep remembering this old article -- "Bullshit Jobs" -- and yep, it still rings true to this day, and will likely do so for decades more, likely centuries even because our societal changes are slower than glaciers...
Or someone who compromised too much in their lives.

I think the bigger point is that corporations don't value "you" (royal "you") and these days are becoming a lot more blatant about it. Any ultimatim made by someone with power over you isn't a good one to take long term.
It's worth noting that when this was designed, mechanical clocks and watches, which work on similar principles, were already a few centuries old, as were various types of mechanical calculators.

Moreover, I'd say that "debugging" one of these is actually easier in many ways than software --- everything can be inspected directly and manipulated.
Only if you define “rights” and equal treatment in rather libertarian way. Americans’ ideal family size is the highest in decades. Almost half of women (46%) ideally want three or more kids: https://news.gallup.com/poll/511238/americans-preference-lar.... But the American ideal of “equality” is giving women the choice to be treated like childless men in the workforce. And America’s idea of “rights” is allowing women to abort pregnancies, rather than the “right” to social and economic support for having children.
I pasted paragraphs from old academic papers (90s) and gave me 97-100% AI generated. Have you even tested this?
> Do keep in mind that the US did have a strong abolitionist movement as part of their culture.

To be sure. The 18th Amendment was passed by a majority of Americans. However it outlawed, "intoxicating liquors". It was the Volsted Act, passed to be the nuts and bolts of enforcement for the 18th, that outlawed everything, much to the surprise and dismay of a fair faction of its supporters. The Presidents of the United States maintained a liquor cabinet in the White House throughout Prohibition. The actual implementation of Prohibition lost many of its supporters and the negative unintended consequences of prohibition lost many more.

> But economically, it is perhaps better to view the drug business as a victim of organized crime

Of course. Milton Friedman said, "If you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel."
You're making a lot of assertions with no sources across multiple comments.

>Well we know the discrimination happens, and currently is not prevented by courts.

How do 'we' know that?

> The harm to businesses, is that say you own a business and don't want to serve people of the wrong caste, now you can't. That's very damaging to you as you want to be a bigot but you've lost that freedom.

You're also losing business and violating laws.
How? Programmers don't have executive powers. You are very often told that this is not your job and you should be doing yours and leave the "experts" to theirs.

Well, they are not experts. They are not even at the level of informed amateurs. But they have the power.

What would you do?

Sure, there are good companies and you can switch until you find one but let's recognize that statistically speaking this absolutely does not scale -- likely maximum 20% of the programmer workforce can do that. Maybe even only 10%.

So again, what would you do?
There's https://www.indiehackers.com/
I also follow some people on twitter who are indie or founders
@levelsio,
@ronyfadel,
@ossia,
@jakemor
It’s not tech in general that’s slower moving, but rather that software development is slower moving today (in my opinion).

To launch a minor feature at a modern tech company you need to:

- pitch your idea to your manager and get alignment

- get approval from your skip manager and buy-in from your product managers

- align your idea with your partner team’s roadmap

- go through a design review with your team

- go through a design review with your principal engineers

- write a task breakdown

- actually write the code

- write tests for the code

- write integration tests for the code

- fix build issues

- push multiple code reviews and respond to comments

- whoops you need to rebase and that shared component you used just changed it’s interface yesterday breaking your tests

- your integration tests failed in preprod blocking your coworker’s launch, better fix that

- a couple rounds of AppSec, UX and PM review

- time to coordinate the launch of your feature toggle with 6 partner teams

- oops there was a minor bug you need to roll back your feature and resolve it overnight

How much of this overhead existed in the 90s?

If a single lone genius like Ken Thompson or John Carmack wants to write a new feature or product and get it out to customers they have 10x+ the work today (at a modern tech company).
Just ran across this useful comparison with another very recent paper that effectively corroborates some of the core findings, I believe by an author of the other paper: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/F4iogK5xdNd7jDNyw/comparing-...
The type person who makes O-9 or O-10 is one that just needs to always be working. It's no different than C-suite executives in any other field: they go insane if they're not doing *something*, so why not do something they've spent 30+ years being successful at.
And conservation laws, uncertainty, fate, selection, awareness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_consequence
If you felt that strongly against vaccines, sure. The same rule applies. You have a bad culture fit and need to find a place better fitting for you.
e.g. Kardashian speak
Too bad the DOJ attorney does not "grill" over that. Instead, quote the Reuters article

> Dahlquist asked Juda if they had introduced changes to ad sales in a way that raised the cost-per-click by a consumer that advertisers pay. "I believe that's fair," said Juda.

> But Wendy Waszmer, a lawyer for Google, asked Juda on Wednesday afternoon on if there were ways that his ads quality team could raise prices unilaterally. "No," Juda responded.
> An example of saying one thing and really meaning another, in organizations, is when they bring a tech Expert or Very Senior person in that tech on the grounds of needing a person to shore up their team, but then assigning that Very Senior some code monkey tasks.

Happened to me about 2 years ago, and it was my shortest contract ever. Lasted 3 months.

And it was not my imagination, I was complimented and groomed into thinking they are hiring an expert to help them with difficult problems. Immediately after I made one huge PR (120-ish files diff) that helped them resolve a very thorny problem, and after it was approved by the CTO and several other seniors, and after I was complimented of the quality of my work... I got reassigned to a new project where I was ordered to pull tickets and not even formulate tasks, and to just "do what I am told".

I didn't even last two months when put in that position. Me and the CTO very quickly hated each other and he started acting like he never said the things he did during the interviews, and me leaving was a relief for everyone, myself the most.
The nature of the law isn't relevant to the analogy. The point is that you can't say anything about the current state of the law simply by noting the size of the opposition to a new proposed law. The analogy would work just as well if it were a law that prohibited the killing of children, punishable by generational imprisonment. There are any number of reasons to oppose the introduction of such a law, and none of that would be evidence that killing children is currently legal.
Hello, hello, I am the original poster. I had surmised why this person was doing this, but didn't want to spend ages venting about a particular person, especially in a way that might actually cause that person to realize they're reading about themselves one day. Suffice it to say that there are other serious issues.

Here's a more concrete thing - I work on a product that took years and a spectacular sum of money to get going on the data space (all it does is land CSVs into S3 and then load them into a database every day, < 10GB per day). The original designers decided that the entire thing should be powered by spreadsheets, so we now have about 10 full-time staff editing spreadsheets that trigger build pipelines, one of which I believe has 400 separate worksheets in it.

However, you are right that, broadly speaking, I have no idea what I'm talking about. I have made peace with this.
Is this how throat singing works? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qx8hrhBZJ98
Suddenly it was ok for very old people to die. But lookdows lasted only 2 weeks anyway, so it was not an issue.
I thought GoDaddy did this, but stopped. Haven't seen a problem with them in years
a more appropriate interpretation (according to the site guidelines) is that the poster was implying corruption in the us economy is very low and that military corruption, being no worse, is also very low.

aiming to eliminate corruptoin is a bit pie in the sky.
Do you have a link to the sticker? I'm interested!
Why use which instead of just calling nc directly?
> People do not want to import this shit into the US.

It already exists whether you wish to acknowledge it or not.

The question, at the end of the day, is whether or not existing law is sufficient. Presumably we are expecting that caste falls under "religion or creed" in terms of protected characteristics.

Has that actually been established?
You can setup an simple structure for the files to be organized (I do directory structure with owner/year/month/...) and then back that up separately as well so all your PDFs are still with you and somewhat organized even without the tags.
Dont Bring Me Problems, Bring Me Solutions
Hello! I am the author, and you've saved me writing this out. The whole point is that you actually can't do something (and that's okay! I don't complain anymore either!). Burnout comes from believing what people are saying in corporate contexts without looking at what they're actually doing.

I have come across so many government teams that say they want to start using version control... as if someone has been stopping them all these years! If they were serious, they'd just do it, so you're better off just looking at what they're doing than talking.
My wife has her father's name as her last, so what you say definitely tracks.
Only stories alleging caste discrimination trend on HN and are assumed to be true. Not when they're withdrawn for lack of evidence, so we can't blame GP for not knowing that.
Same thing happens in China.
> Memetic reproduction need not coincide with biological reproduction.

For a couple generations, maybe. But if the meme is extremely detrimental to the evolutionary fitness of its hosts, eventually adaptations conferring resistance to the meme will become common. Like how sickle cell is more prominent in places where malaria is common, because it confers resistance.
There's also video encoding reasons. Modern video compression uses p-frames, predicted frames, that are based on previous frames. With longer scenes and less movement, you want lots of p-frames for good compression.

This makes being able to arbitrarily inject an ad video at a random point hard if there isn't an immediate full complete frame immediately after. You can't just fill the video with them, as that would make compression worse. You don't want to fully re-encode the video either, that takes up CPU time.

I've run into this myself using ffmpeg to cut out clips of videos. You can use the option of "-c copy" to copy a stream without re-encoding it, and it'll pick the previous full frame and be less accurate.

There's also web reasons with CDNs. Embedding in the video stream would require serving from the same server as the video. That would raise the costs of your CDNs. With targeted ads, you don't want to show the same ad to everyone, and you don't want to be limited to ads on that server when you do an ad auction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_compression_picture_type...

https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Seeking#Seekingwhiledoingacodec...
> The 18th Amendment was passed by a majority of Americans

No, it wasn't, that's not how Constitutional Amendments work.
Pgbackrest probably?
My last fridge literally had the ability to press some buttons to get error information as an encoded sound. An app is used to decode the audio to obtain something that can be read. Sadly it was a break in a component that cannot be swapped out.

I've fixed appliances, and the best source of information about what is wrong is usually the microcontroller. Sometimes it's just a hex error code, and that's enough. A firehose of text like MacOS currently produces is unusable.