skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
None of the layers of abstraction are perfect. You have to deal with the whole mess all the way down.

We've had individual EC2 instances go bad where I currently work, with Amazon acknowledging a hardware problem after a ticket is raised. The reality is, quickly resolving the issue means detecting it and moving off of the physical machine.

Naturally our tooling has no convenient way to do that, because we have layers of things trying to pretend physical machines don't matter.
a friend told me about a facility that didn't allow phones. Then there was an active shooter incident and they changed the rules afterwards.
You don't. I can recommend my daily driver, a naturally aspirated charcoal furnace and several large blocks of copper.
You think the Navy would want a re-run of Bligh and Christian?
The highly trained, nuanced, capable scientist you are describing is unfortunately only a small part of the bigger "system" I referred to, which also involves regulators, insurers, phone line operators, hospital staff etc (as described in the article). I don't think that the person who designs and evaluates the trial can control or correct for the biases introduced by all these additional factors. The only thing they can hope for is that the many errors average each other out, but the situation described by the article looks as though all errors point in the same direction...
I don't get it. A webcam driver should be dead-simple. Why is it taking such a huge effort to get it upstreamed?
Adnauseam clicks aren't charged to advertisers. Google's click tracker is smarter than that.
One of the most pivotal moments in my software engineering career came from reading the leaked NT source code (6-7 years ago) in conjunction with reading the Showstopper[1] book. The NT leak is particularly fascinating because it included all of the author history, so you can see exactly what files Dave Cutler worked on. The book goes into detail about how we ended up with things like kernel modules having pageable sections -- which is fascinating in its own right.

The book describes Cutler coming in and revamping certain assembly routines and you can see exactly what routines are being talked about in the actual source code.

Cutler's code was (and I'm sure still is) absolutely beautiful C code. It really impacted the way I write NT-style C code.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Show-Stopper-Breakneck-Generation-Mic...
This seems obvious, but choosing a poorer EU country when the commenter already left room for exceptions when the said “pretty much” to compare to the US is not an argument in good faith.
Judges are quite used to take this into consideration.
My guess, it’s a safety check in a loop because it’s unsafe to drive if that hatch is up.

https://www.motortrend.com/uploads/sites/5/2016/02/2016-Suba...

It’s understandable for them to be checking for the hatch to be down, given that both your brake lights and reverse lights are on the hatch and only seen if down.
> ”When the First World War came to an end, the USS Recruit stayed put for another two years. However, as Christenson explains, 'By 1920, the United States had the largest Navy in the world in terms of sailors, and there was less of a need for them with the end of World War I.' As such, the ship’s flag was lowered on March 16, 1920, and she was decommissioned and dismantled."
This article isn't even negative! It's pointing out that passkeys could make most security keys obsolete because they lack the storage to store resident passkeys for lots of sites.

It even provides recommendations to work around this problem.
Musings on long Covid and the epistemology of medicine
> Hmm. It sounded to me like you were saying a straight sum, or maybe a weighted sum. That’s not what I’m getting at.

Doesn't matter how you aggregate these metrics. In statistics you have all kinds of arbitrary aggregations that attempt to form a blurry "summary" of what's going on. These "aggregations" like the mean, median, mode, standard deviation, weighted average... etc... are made up as well. It's arbitrary and essentially just summaries of what's going on. You're just proposing another aggregation and obviously a blurry one too.

You're not picking out the "angle of incidence" or the "length of a side". More like out of 1000 triangles you're picking out all the sides and averaging them to get some summary of the length of sides of all triangles. You can see how this statistical metric is different from say euclidean geometry right?

A concrete formal theory involves definitions. What is the formal definition of a module? What are the formal rules for how modules compose? Can we put a formal algebra together that allows us to implement these rules and for theorems around these things? We want a formal theory of program organization that is akin to euclidean geometry, not some data sciencey aggregation.
I believe the dollar amount savings figures, they’re big and worthy of a congratulations to the engineers involved!

IMO, engineering man hour savings are a lot less trustable. This may eliminate or simplify some engineering processes but IME massive migrations like this simply replace them with a different set of processes; because they’re different and theoretically addressable they’re not counted against the hours saved as they can be bucketed into bugs/to be addressed by the roadmap/legacy behavior migrated from the old system (which is now dangerously-fragile-legacy and not ol-reliable-legac). Eventually someone will come along and decide this too is an inherently flawed platform that needs to be entirely replaced at great expense, and the circle of life continues.

This is still a massive undertaking not just from an engineering perspective but from an organizational/process one though. Whoever pulled this off essentially had to coordinate (or figure out how to simplify/explain things well enough to skip coordination) with almost every engineer and likely almost every production service in a company with thousands of engineers. Those in startups may balk about this kind of thing taking two years, but having done my own two year projects (at a smaller but comparable scale) in a big company I can say two years is what I’d consider a highly optimistic and unlikely outcome for a project of this magnitude.
I saw the comment you're talking about, but I'm not sure I understand what it meant. What does a screen reader do other than skipping an image without alt text?

Either way, that person was also explicitly saying that they don't want mandatory alt-text, that they believe an option users can toggle on their own account to be reminded about alt-text is better, so I don't think they would qualify as "complaining about missing alt-text".
Maybe he has spent some of the money. There are a bunch of bitcoin considered Satoshi's that have never moved but who's to say he didn't mine some more on the side under another account? He seems a smart guy after all and that would be kind of an obvious thing to do.

I'm wondering if as the guy gets old if he'll set up a charitable foundation with the main lot.
Well thanks for replying. :-). I will try to be a little less acerbic next time (am actually putting most of these "software literacy" thoughts into a book so grateful that i'm to sparking a thought in you too)
I wish the articles would use bytes as an information storage measure.
Last job I left I did say semi-sarcastically, “and now you can blame any bad thing on me for a while!”

And they did from the numerous reports I got. It was amusing.

I guess it’s soothing in a way.
Engineering Privacy and Protest: A Case Study of AdNauseam [pdf]
Pushing the idea that vanity is feminine does no good anyone.
The heaviness of maintaining systems
No dismissal intended! Was agreeing with you on the premise of a barrage of difficult situations (=‘fires’) in the job. The kinds of challenges you list are to be expected and normal business as usual, but imho doesn’t have to make the role more taxing or difficult than any people-facing corporate job with some accountability. It’s luckily not a boring job either (ymmv, boring = unchallenging). Most situations line or middle manager faces have been solved countless times before, and either have reusable playbooks / mental models to start with, or can benefit from applied common sense and creativity. It’s mostly fun.

The point I badly tried to make was around EMs mental state & health - managing emotional coupling creates space, necessary for the EM to find pragmatic solutions, or workarounds for things far beyond control. (Not that occasionally the problems don’t keep me awake at night, but that was also true for technical challenges as an engineer.)
> The volume of people making the crossing doesn’t signal that it has somehow become less treacherous.

It does. Most migrants use guides / "coyotes" to guide them through. Kinda like the sherpas of Everest. This wasn't so easy back in the day. Now it's pretty cheap - one guide for a group of 30-50.
He's talking about YouTube. If no one watches ads or pays for premium, how will YouTube make money?
It’s been resilient to boom and bust cycles, it’s stable and safe for those who live in third world countries with hyperinflation, it’s extremely hard to eliminate or control since it’s decentralized.
Actually it's a warning against making lazy assumptions, trite dismissals, and generally being an asshole, because of the human consequences. There's no appeal to authority, because that is an argument to support a claim, and no claim has been made. This here is rhetoric, subtype pathos: I merely ask you to imagine yourself in the shoes of someone that competent. If you've never met someone that competent and thereby doubt their literal existence, then I'm sorry for you.

Make your own statement, sure, don't twist the words of mine to say something they didn't.

Edit to add, more bluntly: the assumption of incompetence seems to me as much a fallacy (perhaps of the general class of attribution bias) as any argument from authority. I will now be so bold as to make a claim, or even a series of claims: that humanity continues to push back the boundaries of ignorance, and that is what we call science, via the process of research, and it is a process driven by people, often well-meaning people many of whom put their heart & soul into it, and notwithstanding the myriad inefficiencies and inequities in the system, it is not depressing at all.
"Just" seems like a nice virtue, but to me it's largely a question of whether we allow ourselves, our future, to be active agents in shaping & crafting the world around us, or whether far-off powers-that-be get to dictate everything about how our mechanicized/techanicized world about us works.

We owe it to our species to create a situation where people have some power, where volition matters.

The current trend has been sapping that little blip of agency at the heart of the promise of the personal computer. Computing is becoming unhip; it's undergoing a large slower thermocline of trust as it asserts itself over us. And while that means less interest & creeping dispassion, I think it also hints at a potential underdog movement. It creates space for a new incarnation of engaged pro-human computing.

We risk creating a disaffected culture. We risk losing humanity's greatness and vibrancy, risk losing a world of empowered people. General purpose computing costs so relatively little, and provides so many potentials and avenues for exploration & growth; it can and ought to be a pinnacle of man-as-toolmaker, inspire us individually & collectively to keep reaching & exploring. Justice or no, I think we are far lesser if we dont find leverage to liberate computing from the far off would be masters at the other ends of the fiber.
Well it's not exactly Massachusetts but it seems to be on par with Florida, Vermont, Michigan, Maine etc. if you look at GDP per capita (relatively). I don't think Czechia is somehow exceptionally poor (of course on the whole the EU is much poorer on average).
How about we address problems with laws after we have a problem?

You’re using an edge case of a doctor in another continent to illustrate why we shouldn’t allow telemedicine appointment in the same country’s medical system across regions. That argument is classic false equivalence.
I imagine prohibitive cost might act as a filter without explicit discrimination.
Worth pointing out the same is true in other countries - in the UK, a sole trader business doesn't need to notify the government they exist at all until tax return time.
Upload resume for 100 companies ML-matched to industry/skills/levels (see note)
Use code OCTO2023 after sign up to see all results for 14 days (no credit card, nothing to cancel)
Minesweeper, Solitaire, and a '90s Moral Panic
Paris Hilton. She plays the vapid fool, but isn't.
I didn’t mean to denigrate cleaners, I have friends who clean air bnbs and they are charging more than $45/hr, I just saw that advertised. Anybody can pick up $50 worth of cleaning products and start scrubbing without any special education or training so we might disagree on how much skill is required, but my Airbnb cleaning friends definitely have motivation, and a positive attitude and outlook on life despite the challenges they face in other areas.

Either you rent for your whole life or you buy something and have to compromise on some of the variables. I see lots of people working hard, mostly in jobs they don’t love, and making those compromises and choosing to buy somewhere.

> despite literally not having a job, any prospects, or the possibility of owning a home at any point in my life, even as a software developer

I hope things turn around for you! I meant to point out that home ownership is possible, but it sounds like you have already evaluated the variables and if you are set on only living in some specific area then home ownership might not be possible in that location without a couple of well above average incomes.
?Rail, Banks, Oil and Gas are the consistent winners, all well-connected and deeply rooted, and rare is the startup that becomes a star on the TSX

Do you reckon there is room for innovation here?
A timed cut won't matter when you refresh with reader mode enabled before the refresh. None of that logic can execute in reader mode.

That's why it works.
Price increases are just one way you can get screwed. You can also lose out when your provider doesn't drop prices or pick up operating efficiencies that other providers have.
Fun fact, the reason we don't tie the bottom button in a suit is an heritage to some fat English king who couldn't close his suit so people pretended it was a new fashion and it spread.
I recovered stuff from memory dozens of times, I imagine it's common for technical people...

Anyhow for browsers I long learned to first write in a reliable editor any text longer than a couple lines, you can lose them for a million reasons if you write directly in the browser (to the point that I don't know how people not doing it maintain their sanity...)

And by the way the reason sometimes is that the text gets deleted (e.g. StackOverflow comments....), so I often also leave around in a file for at least some time the stuff that took more time to write

(in the meanwhile genius me tried writing the first version of this message directly in a app, which crashed as I was finishing it :facepalm: )
I know tradies with massive houses and smallholdings within 50 miles of London. I've also lived with tradies in a 4-person semi-legal HMO.

The error bars here are huge.
Got it: I consider different objects or entities stored, indexed, and queried separately but with references to each other in the form of identifiers to really just be sound design. Relational data models typically come with more constraints that inhibit classes or online data mutations and scalability choices. I think it's easy to conflate multiple sets of tradeoffs.

The deepest question is whether it's useful to be able to model the world with first class structure in the form of embedded arrays and embedded sub structures that can be richly indexed. Does this involve certain forms of denormalization? Sure but do tables really represent how you think about the world?
>It is about how many successful companies are being born

What per capita metrics should be used for this?
I enjoyed the interview and Cory’s new book. He mentions Yanis Varoufakis’ new book, Techno Feudalism. I went to buy that book also, but it has not been released yet. I think it is coming out in February. I watch at least one Yanis V. interview a week on YouTube - I find him very reasonable.
That's a cool page but it's about Bézier curves, while this article is about cubic splines. They are not the same!

The most notable difference is that a Bézier curve is defined in terms of control points that do not (generally) pass through the curve, while a polynomial spline is defined by the points it passes through; there are no additional control points.
Medical ethics isn’t black and white like this though. Nor is the only purpose of trials to find treatments or cures. They have medical ethics review because they need to balance the risks and studies have controls by nature so you can get in to a study and not receive treatment.

There are four pillars of medical ethics:

- Beneficence (doing good)

- Non-maleficence (to do no harm)

- Autonomy (giving the patient the freedom to choose freely, where they are able)

- Justice (ensuring fairness)

All of those factors need to be balanced.

If we’re honest this is optimized to kill people, especially poorer people or people without strong advocates.

It’s murder by the state when the state prevents you from receiving care that would otherwise be available to you, but for the law.

What conceivable purpose could a blanket ban on telehealth in the same country serve but protectionism. States can’t even opt in to allowing it — that is an ethics failure and desperately needs fixing.
I think the "fighter" rhetoric is specific to individualistic cultures that place a high premium on personal agency. Westerners in general and (liberal, college-educated) Americans in particular have a really hard time dealing with the idea that something might be largely or wholly out of their control. The opposite extreme would be fatalistic cultures, where one's death or survival is in the hands of god - deo volente, besiyata dishmaya, inshallah.

I think a reasonable middle ground starts with acknowledging that being seriously ill is just a shitty situation, that over a long enough time frame death is inevitable, and that outcomes are often determined mostly by dumb luck. Not being in control can be very distressing, but the struggle to try and retain control often just compounds that distress. Willing someone to "fight" a cellular process within their body probably isn't going to help them in any meaningful way, but there are lots of things that can be done to make them more comfortable. Hope is valuable, but false hope is a kind of cruelty; we all need to be better at accepting the limits of medicine and recognising the threshold of futility.
I cited Wouk's books elsewhere in this thread.

Since it's fiction, he has the opportunity to show what people thought then without benefit of hindsight. And he takes full advantage of it. Even the fictional German general Armin von Roon gets plenty of space to give the German perspective.
Higher vehicle registration fees. Higher taxes on electricity producers. Taxes on mileage, etc, etc.

The states have six ways to Sunday to extract money from you. Taxes never get reduced, they always go higher. Only Death is more inevitable.
Lol I had a girl steal my crypto and the cops literally did nothing about it.

Personally, I feel pretty suspect about this. Even if you try to "wash" crypto you can trace it. The university next to me has a team of people who do that.
Firing someone "because they walked in with a red shirt" would do damage to your company's reputation, and call into question the competence of your management team.

And you can still get sued.
really absurd that we continue creating things no one's body evolved to tolerate that we continually ingest. And we wonder why chronic illness is skyrocketing in incidence and weird seemingly unsolvable health problems becoming ever more common
I disagree, there's plenty of ways of doing that without breaking up companies
Blue jeans aren’t very salable in the sense that you have to find a blue jeans buyer in order to exchange them for something else.
What are the key differences between CPUs now are CPUs twenty years ago? Sure we can pack more transistors into a smaller space, but clock speed has plateaued. Are all the innovation purely in pipelines and branch prediction?
I have similar doubts as well. Especially considering that digital signatures and encryption do not protect against impersonation attacks, like phishing via facebok.com or other similar sounding domains, in either the case of websites or email. But without widespread use you don't even have the option.
I wish I would have more spiritual and material insights onto how the 24/7 grind mindset became widespread in USA, possibly via Calvinism and the Protestant work ethic. The foundations do prescribe regular perusal of relief valves.

8 Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.

9 Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work:

10 But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates:

11 For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.

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

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus%2020&ver...
Because it has become a lazy thought terminating cliche since people say it and then contribute nothing else of value.
> cross-jurisdiction telemedicine makes certification very difficult

No, it makes certification by State governments very difficult. The solution to that "problem" is obvious: stop the monopoly that State governments have on certifications. Let patients decide based on whatever information they deem relevant whether a doctor is "certified" to treat them. There are already many private sources of information about doctors.
Fantastic book that had a huge impact on me. I reached out to the author on Twitter way back to tell him how much I liked it, and he was really nice.
Lots of small steps like this get patented and have to be challenged in court before they're released.
People expect comments to not be a personal take?

Linear things destroy your mind, because you become a passive consumer.

Producing is the only meaningful purpose in existence, but not for someone else, for yourself.

Now it's too late, people are used to sitting on their ass and be entertained and pay for that by "working" for an "owner". Down votes without comment!

Get off that couch and into a chair with a keyboard and mouse, then download a compiler and get cracking! It's not hard once you figure out that only Windows and linux can do it. And only linux on Risc-V is meaningful in the long term.

We only explored 10% of the action MMO so far, PUBG has been the limit with it's janky controls and buggy/slow performance.

Imagine a 1000 player 3D Mario, it's totally doable. Just do it!
If the telemedicine app can geolocate your IP address it can independently determine what state you are in.
> If you need to buffer why not just dump to s3 or similar data store as a temporary storage array.

At that point it's very easy to sleepwalk into implementing your own database on top of s3, which is very hard to get good semantics out of - e.g. it offers essentially no ordering guarantees, and forget atomicity. For telemetry you might well be ok with fuzzy data, but if you want exact traces every time then Kafka could make sense.
This would end up spectacularly badly, people are never informed to make good decisions on this
There is a design for routing in the repo (and tor-like circuits). However it is not implemented yet. I'd love to grow the community and have more people collaborating on this.