skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I feel like if instead of deferring to the EPA, the Chevron case was deferring to police departments interpretations of the law when the law was ambiguous, we would be cheering this decision as a return to sanity.

In the original context of the 1984 Chevron case, environmentalists were arguing that the EPA had redefined "source" in an overly narrow way, much narrower than Congress had originally intended in passing the Clean Air Act, thereby enabling companies to emit more air pollution. The Chevron decision was seen at the time as a loss for environmentalists and win for the corporate sector and conservatives.

It's funny how the tables have turned – a decision which was originally praised by conservatives and condemned by liberals and environmentalists, eventually ends being condemned and overturned by conservatives, while being defended by liberals and environmentalists. Both the 1984 case and the 2024 case had a conservative majority, and were perceived at the time as furthering conservative political objectives.

I think what's really happened: in 1984, the federal judiciary was widely perceived as liberal-dominated, while the federal bureaucracy was seen as relatively more conservative, so liberals wanted the judiciary to be more powerful than the bureaucracy, conservatives wanted the opposite. In 2024, the situation is reversed: now the federal judiciary is perceived as being increasingly dominated by conservatives, while the federal bureaucracy is viewed as being more liberal, so now liberals want to defend the bureaucracy's power against judicial encroachment.

It looks to me like the only thing that's constant here – on both sides – is "the ends justify the means".
Here's the America's Most Wanted segment about the guy, James Clark, from 1988:

https://youtu.be/e56gA8NBXuQ?t=1204
Their point is that the "power" of the court is words and respect for its rulings. If the executive branch defies the court, the court can't actually do anything about it.
Three letters: IAC.
Agree.

I’m not gate-keeping what is and isn’t engineering. Where I live it’s a protected term anyway. People get sued for calling themselves software engineers.

I’m using the Wikipedia definition of, “over engineering.” Solving a problem in an elaborate way when a sufficient and simpler solution can be demonstrated to exist. In many cases you could rsync a binary to your servers and let the monitor process reload your web server. Or you can build out a build farm, dependency cache, and… spend $2, as you say, where someone who is practicing engineering could do well (or better) with $1.
China calls on scientists of all nations to study lunar samples, except the US
Obviously not. Those customers would have to line up as unsecured creditors, so the "penalties" are only theoretical and exist mainly for PR purposes.
If anything in the US, it is the duty of the press to express themselves independently in elections. And protected under constitutional freedom of speech.

If anything they have been often derelict in their duty for quite a while now.
Microsoft has their own botnet.^1 It's called Windows Update.

1. "If we can't stop Windows botnets, we will just create our own."
What is your measure of efficiency? I ask because the cost of sunlight is nominally zero so 10kWh/$0 is a really big number :-).

Note that the article said that as a thermal plant it operates 24/7 by storing heat in a high thermal mass fluid. Another shot at this is
Terraform Industries (https://terraformindustries.com/) which is doing something similar with direct PV -> Fuel (rather than using CSP)

The "magic bean", the "trick", the "secret sauce" here is that there are huge swathes of land that are currently both high sunlight receivers and not used (can't farm them, no one wants to live there, think deserts) That could be used to crank out liquid fuel that has no issue being losslessly transported over long distances and for applications that are unlikely to run on batteries any time soon. Making fuel for those by taking CO2 out of the atmosphere is a double win.
>"You know, maybe it's time to overturn Marbury v. Madison."<

"Why, the very idea..."
I did this with a tiny service I run on my home network that just calls yt-dlp on the passed URL and puts the result in a samba share that Emby uses, works amazingly well with all the services that yt-dlp understands.
> If they release 100 versions, and each is safer than the last, it’s silly to think that one can’t be confident in the safety of the 101st without some gov’t software approval/validation process.

That's just the thing. Each release is not always safer than the last. Even ascertaining that with any reasonable level of certainty requires a lot of technology. In a company's hands alone, this "trust me bro" amounts to a ticking time bomb since companies have a tendency to trade safety for profit.

> If they had driven billions of death-less miles and then a software update killed a child, I would obviously let my kid ride Waymo. It wouldn’t be close.

You don't think the outcry at Boeing applies to Waymo?
You're right, I shouldn't be having this conversation if I didn't have a basic understanding of the fundamental structure of the US government. Since I have a relatively advanced understanding of that topic, however, we shall continue.

So, the US Constitution distributes political authority among three distinct but co-equal branches of government. Legislative authority is assigned to Congress, executive power belongs to the president, and judicial power is the purview of the Supreme Court.

The Constitution makes no mention of administrative agencies -- these are entirely creatures of statue law subsequent and subordinate to the Constitution, and did not begin to exist significantly until more than a century after the Victorian
Constitution went into effect.

There is no explicit authority for Congress to delegate legislative power to any other institution, and whether this is entirely legitimate remains a master of some debate.

The Constitution further explicitly assigns judicial power to the Supreme Court, and in no way obligates the court to delegate its inherent duty of statutory interpretation to executive branch agencies, least of all to defer to those agencies in establishing the boundaries of their own statutory power.

Finally, the Constitution enumerates the scope of the legislative power assigned to Congress, and explicitly reserves all non-enumerated powers to "the states or the people respectively". There is no basis whatsoever in our system of government for any single institution to unilaterally "regulate every facet of American life", least of all at the federal level.
It’s possible in many even heavily regulated domains, because there’s enough data now for regulators that it reduces risk.

Releasing multiple times a day in itself isn’t the point though.

The point is — adopting good practices to ensure trunk based development is pain-free. It’s about ensuring the release process is as automated as possible (if you’re releasing once a month, you are exercising your deployment process 12 times a year. When you’re exercising your deployment process 12 times a day, it really encourages you to work the kinks out.)

It’s also ensuring that your monitoring and alerting can keep up. Essentially it’s a signal to the entire org that “We will move fast. Deal with it.”

There’s data out there from even large non-FAANG orgs now about how this approach reduces sevs instead of increasing them.
I doubt it, but I'm sure they can "interpret" them to consistency.
Anime style Rosa Parks biography in Japan
Related:

Fischer–Tropsch process

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_proces...
>> Now, if you have a population that doesn't want to elect lawmakers who will actually pass laws

The population as a whole _does_ want lawmakers who will pass laws, however that collides with the structural misrepresentation built into the US electoral system.

The fundamental problem with this statement is that it assumes both sides of the coin are the same. However, it's far easier to block legislation in the current system than it is to get it passed. Combine that with the hyper partisanship of recent years and you have a recipe for legislative paralysis.

Now, if we didn't have the filibuster or senators were assigned based on population, it would be a different matter. Suffice it to say that we already have a pretty big check on govt power via these mechanisms, so the conservative talking point of preventing 'overreach' by government rings hollow.
> Do you really need to feel appreciated by a hundred random coworkers to act like a decent human being?

No... ? Where did you get this impression?

Anyway I think we're approaching a learning moment in work culture differences.

Anyone who does heads down work expresses appreciation through competence and willingness to help. When you're in a tight spot and need a solution, getting that help is better than all the smiles in the world. That's teamwork. You can genuinely smile after. I'm not against smiles. I'm just saying they don't mean anything in and of themselves.

Maybe you rubbed a raw nerve because you made me think of those cheesy appreciation e-cards I remember from a previous job a while back. That's about as soulless as it gets.

Smiling usually doesn't, and shouldn't, get you anywhere.
There were netscape.xxx internal news groups.
Wouldn't "Compiler LLM" be a more accurate name than "LLM Compiler"?
"Why the very idea..."
It's the vibrations and noise for me. The first thing I notice when riding in a gas car is the constant vibration especially when stopped at a light.
Having worked in a couple of safety critical companies, there are things you definitely HAVE to do, but some companies do it better than others.

Some companies have process and development practices down pat: things go smoothly, and meeting the qualification process objectives is easy, because the work has been done right the whole way.

Other companies have less established or less consistent process. They generally meet the process objectives and deliver a working product, but the development process is often more of a struggle, and there is often a lot of "cleaning up" of missed pieces at the end of the release process.

This is just to say: companies and products in the safety critical space don't necessarily have some intrinsic quality, just a higher minimum bar.
In defense of an old pixel (editor)
We were just recently discussing how fraud might be used to go after scientist misconduct. Here is one. "Indicted for “defrauding the National Institutes of Health (NIH) of approximately $16 million” in grants".

And the usual riders: "Wang is charged with one count of major fraud against the United States, two counts of wire fraud, and one count of false statements."
I have spoken to my congressman and both of my senators before. It turns out you probably can, too, if you have something worthwhile to say. Political parties have existed forever.
> I almost guarantee that they will do the bare minimum to claim these, then shut the factory down.

Came here to say this! I've been watching the news reports about the blast furnace debacle the past couple of days and they just don't care. Hopefully the new incoming Government will sort them out.
> Though it’s hard to imagine today, there was once a time when making a telephone call meant going home, asking to use someone’s phone, or plunking a quarter into a freestanding pay phone

Pfffft, what about the classic: "You have a collect call from PICKMEUPATBILL'S" ?
I never got to submitting my own patches but the Linux kernel is nice.

Where I work now I get to work in Haskell. And that’s been a pleasure. Recently rewrote over 1k lines. Deployed to production with one reviewer. No issues.

Just good test coverage and a great type system with no-nonsense code. Refactoring in Haskell is a heady drug.

If this was C++ or even Python there would have been much more intense reviews and probably some fail-forward patches to fix things we may have missed.

But I dunno. Maybe not. Maybe I’m just that good. /s
Just fix the random seed :)
Squatters take London's housing crisis into their own hands
I must question why one would want mitigations when they could've instead used a safer language like Rust, Go, Java, C#, D, PHP, Python, BEAM, Zig, or Node.js. Sure, in some cases you must use C/C++ for $reasons. But most problems, especially public facing services and tools of any real complexity.. no. Exception being maybe postgres?

All the current popular runtimes come with memory safety out of the box.

https://dconf.org/2017/talks/bright.pdf was right on the money.

Still, something is better than nothing.
The Senate was always supposed to be part of passing laws. I'm not sure where you got the idea that the Senate would only handle special things. That's what the House of Lords does, but the roles are not supposed to be the same.
You're completely right; my thought experiment was half-baked. A challenge to an agency's use of delegated power is necessarily a constitutional challenge. So, unless Marbury were overturned, this wouldn't fly.
“After the report became public, CUNY put possible discipline against Wang on hold to review how it had been leaked to Science.”

Wat.
Now it might be, but let's remember that back in the day Physics was mostly used to derive laws from observations. Only with the advancement of calculus, notation, etc. we could make predictions that later we confirmed. Granted, at the time of the black holes prediction this had been going on for a while so it should not have been too surprising, but also I don't think it'd be such a strong point as it is today.
12 year current Googler here. You are absolutely correct about "Google has its own version of EVERYTHING". Midway through my current career, I started to get existential dread about the fact that I wasn't "up to date" on any current development practices or frameworks.

Partly, this was assuaged through participating in open source projects in my free time. That's how I learned Docker, Github workflow, React, Vue, Bootstrap, Tailwind, etc.

But at the same time, I think it is a mistake to consider working with tools/languages/frameworks to be the only "hard" skills. Galaxy brain is realizing that anyone can learn a language/framework/workflow in a month or so. The real work is applying sound principles to the design and production of meaningful artifacts within those systems.
> Using an RDBMS is an option, but makes scaling harder

Modern Postgres scales vertically quite well on modern hardware.

> you still need an audit trail, review processes, etc,

But you need this anyway for the RDBMS in your architecture. You need an audit trail for when engineers need to get into the production database, and to show that their changes passed review, etc. My point is, if you anyway need to build this for your RDBMS, then you can build on top of that for your feature flag system if you throw that into your RDBMS as well.

> my experience is that production systems hit almost all the edge cases quite quickly and flagging/experimentation systems are forced to evolve quite quickly to actually account for these issues.

I think that's more an argument to use a commercial feature flag platform (like LaunchDarkly) instead of a FOSS option. A commerical platform is anyway what I would prefer to recommend! But, with the context of "choose a FOSS option", it seems to me like building on top of RDBMS, rather than GitOps, makes more sense.
> while cars are ofc different i think the same learnings apply

They are very different. Unit tests and stress tests can be conducted on pure software. You can monitor them and if there are failures you can retry.

Robot software needs all the stuff you use for regular software, but then you have this huge space of counterfactuals that can only be verified using large scale simulation. How do you know the simulator is realistic? That it has a sufficient level of scenario coverage? That the simulation was even run? That the car didn't catastrophically regress in a way that will lead to a crash after 1M miles of driving (which in a scaled service will happen quite frequently)?

Oh and a fault can result in a death for Waymo, but not for Google Search. So that's kind of a major difference.
> The court decided this on statutory grounds because that's what this court likes to do: base decisions on the narrowest grounds possible. But it mentioned Marbury quite prominently and it's pretty clear that the court will not sustain a law that codifies Chevron.

I'm not convinced you are right. If you look at the conservatives on the current SCOTUS, they aren't monolithic. Thomas and Alito are hard conservatives (with Thomas the hardest), [0] and I'd expect they'd likely do as you suggest and strike down any statutory attempt to reintroduce Chevron as unconstitutional.

But I'm not sure Roberts would be willing to go along with that. As the most moderate of the conservative justices, he was comfortable striking down Chevron on statutory interpretation grounds, repeating that on constitutional grounds might be going too far for him. And he only has to convince one other conservative to go along with him, and with the support of the liberals he'd have a majority. Kavanaugh is only modestly more conservative than Roberts, so he'd be the most likely candidate. I think, if Roberts was to overturn on constitutional grounds a statutory attempt to reinstate Chevron, he'd prefer to do it in the narrowest way he could – striking down that particular attempt, but leaving open the possibility that Congress could have another go at it.

The other thing you have to keep in mind, is ultimately the justices are individuals with their own idiosyncrasies, and they don't always vote the way you'd predict if ideological leanings were the only factor driving their decisions. A good example of that was the Fischer v United States case [1] from the other day, in which SCOTUS sided with January 6 defendants: Jackson joined the conservatives in that, whereas Barrett joined the liberals in dissenting.

I suppose Jackson siding with the conservatives was not entirely surprising; as the most moderate of the liberal justices, she is the most likely to join the conservatives in any case. Barrett's dissent was somewhat more surprising, given she's not the most moderate conservative, with Roberts and Kavanaugh siding with the liberals more often than she does.

[0] https://www.axios.com/2019/06/01/supreme-court-justices-ideo...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer_v._United_States
You tell them to count their blessings every day of their lives that they:

-don't currently suffer from a debilitating mental illness that prevents them from holding down a job or an apartment,

-weren't kicked out of their home by their parents for being LGBT,

-didn't incur a financially crippling medical debt which forced them to choose between housing or their lives

Or one of the myriad other reasons why someone might become homeless through no fault of their own in late-stage American society.

There but for the grace of God go all of us.
Having worked in both kinds personally, it's different.

You spend more time on less topics: the variety of work is much lower, which some people love, and some people are frustrated by. There is often much less "drastic innovation", or when there is, it takes much longer than you might be used to in other industries. Favor is given to proven, predictable technologies and choices, even if that leaves some opportunities on the table.

That being said, it's something I often miss. The ability to have such solid confidence on the things you've built, and the ability to drop into nearly any piece of the system and have everything be consistent and predictable is a quality in itself. It makes debugging (often VERY rare) issues much more tractable, both at a higher systems level, as well as digging deeper into the code itself.
Etymology of Biden's "The Very Idea " (not just old lady airs)
The Dutch Salten Age
>The whole ecosystem around it is an example of Conways law

This is such an inaccurate take.

>we need to stop using containers as bags

Containers and container orchestration are a NEEDED and REQUIRED piece of the technology stack in the current reality. That doesn't mean people need to be ignorant of the details that make them work.

As someone who's been around for a while we are in a better place than when we had "dedicated operations people" that just gatekept everything.

What you hate are teams just parroting what other people are doing with the tech, not the tech itself. But let me tell you, if you're going to have teams of people pretend to know what they're doing wrapping it in a standard "bag" sure does make it a hell of a lot fucking easier to unfuck when things go wrong.
I'm genuinely not sure how other companies do this.... But how is your team handling SOX controls WITHOUT at least one DevOps person?

I work at a medium size publicly traded company and our SOX compliance controls would take literal months to generate and/or prove to auditors without our CI/CD pipelines. It's just an extract from GH Actions with a report of who modified, who approved, and who actually pushed to main. All of these actions must be siloed (if you can commit to repo, you cannot push to main)

Potentially this is a consequence of micro service infra, my team alone manages nearly 25 separate git repositories.
The main issue with CO2 is that the concentrations in air are pretty low. A couple of hundreds of parts per million. So, most synthetic fuel generation is bottle necked on getting enough CO2.

If you are processing a kg of air, you'd be getting only a fraction of a gram of CO2. So if you want to produce say a ton of fuel, you are looking at processing many millions of tons of air.

That's why a lot of synthetic fuel generation is often paired with carbon capture schemes or bio mass (like this one). But of course a lot of those carbon sources aren't actually that clean. Biomass sounds nice until you realize that farming is a big emitter of CO2. And generating fuel from carbon capture of course defeats the purpose. You capture it at great cost and then you create a fuel. Which you then burn and dump in the atmosphere.

This particular scheme in Germany exists because of the influence of car manufacturers there. Companies like BMW are dragging their heels getting rid of their ICE car manufacturing operations and pretending that there are unicorn solutions like hydrogen, synthetic fuels, etc. are great excuses to keep their factories going for a few years longer. Of course EVs are eating their lunch at this point and they are now actually producing lots of those as well.
By random chance I recently had a flight seated next to a coach for a young player who was in the women's Future bracket. The coach had been a Future player once too.

I've never really understood, at an emotional level, why pro sports exist. So after a while of conversation, during which he mentioned a few times how difficult life was for them, I finally felt like I could ask:

"If it's like you've described, why do it at all?"

He stared into space for a good few seconds, then responded:

"Glory."

I've wondered a few times since then whether the girl he was coaching would think that glory was enough; she had a look that, following the article, I'd describe as glassy-eyed loneliness. But maybe in a few years, she'll be the coach for someone in the next generation. For myself... I still don't really get it.
They can still delegate. They just need to be more specific in what powers they are delegating and to whom. The people they delegate to cannot give themselves more power than they were originally given.
It's basically a fork of VSCode.