skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No idea what they actually log but it seems like performance data from the propulsion system under a wide range of conditions would be useful when designing the next generation of such systems.
obligatory https://xkcd.com/927/

Honestly: we're in this situation because we keep trying to band-aid solutions onto ancient protocols that were never designed to be secure. (I'm talking about you DNS.) Given xkcd's wisdom though, I'm not sure if this is easily solvable.
This makes me wonder if you would do well working in an internet cafe, or even an open office.
That's not bad, right? Feels pretty close to the 2% target we keep hearing about?
I think you probably understated the importance of a culture of refactoring.

In one of my roles, the focus was solely on velocity. That meant no technical releases and an incessant rush to get the features out while still blaming people for issues. All that did was to instill a fear of breaking things and encouraged blind copy/paste and doing the bare minimum. One repo had scores of scripts that were several hundreds of LOC each while the difference between them was maybe 10-100 lines. People copied with misalignment/typos intact. When I attempted to refactor some stuff out to a library, the tech lead gave me a scolding citing the discomfort to Support team due to "lack of familiarity" (even though there wasn't any objection from Support team themselves) i.e. better propagation of the familiar ball of mud rather than the unfamiliar cleanliness (the unfamiliarity is usually only temporarily, until people catch up, and eventually results in eminently more readable code and actually speeds up dev velocity). This was just one example of out of a much larger ecosystem that had all sorts of issues built up over many years due to complete disinterest in refactoring.

One of the senior managers told us to focus on speed and that it was ok to break some things and we could fix it iteratively while ignoring and/or being unaware of the ground reality that doing so requires:

- avoiding blame game (not the case in this example)

- having sufficient manpower (again not the case in this example)

- having a culture of fearless refactoring based on technical judgement (definitely not the case in this example).

Apparently it is easy to think you can copy Facebook's move-fast-and-break-things and reap the benefits without fulfilling any of the prerequisites.

Even today, the technically undisciplined management still keeps chasing velocity and keeps being more frustrated that deliveries are progressively getting slower.
Can the title be changed to reflect that CPI is up 2.5% over the last 12-months, driven primarily by a 0.5% increase in shelter? "CPI for all items rises 2.5%; shelter up" is not quite right.
Not sure exactly what they figured out; they landed were multitudes have before, even this specific market and product has similar dual-offerings. It's a very crowded space.
I just don’t see doctors or lawyers giving away their work for free. They are just smarter than us.

"For free" does a lot of heavy lifting here. Of the members of each field, only a fraction of these professionals are doing primary discovery & research in their area of expertise. The rest of them are leveraging the completed research/studies/trials/precedents of others from their fields, in some topics decades worth of it.
I think you may be onto something here. Taking apart old machinery I have often observed that the hardened part of a shaft is worn and has a noticable groove detectable with a fingernail. However the part that rubbed on it is often much, much softer eg a rubber oil seal. My theory is that the much softer material is so soft that microscopic inclusions of something much harder (grit?) are caught in the material and then abrade the harder shaft. Something similar may be occurring in the keys on glass case?
^ This. Physical media is continuously degrading. Large storage systems work by regularly reading, verifying, and replicating data - it is always doing backups and restores. If this isn't happening actively and regularly, your data will cease to exist at some point in time.

Whether we collectively need to store all these things is another question entirely. But if we want to keep it - we'll have to do the work to keep it maintained.
Reasonable print for CPI
The explanation and table in the Simple English page for this helped me grasp it better. (Although the diagram using green dots only confuses :) )

Greene's book is a fantastic read too!

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem
Preventing Computer Vision Syndrome
Yes, this is deep within the range of what the fed wants to see. Rate cuts coming.
Soon you need to waive your class-action rights when applying for a job.
> The all items index rose 2.5 percent for the 12 months ending August, the smallest 12-month increase since
February 2021.

Important context from the article
“Unplugging the AI would force us to deal with our problems” doesn’t sound like a reason AI is mandatory.

If anything, it reinforces my impression that AI’s true application is allowing institutions to kick the can down the road further, just with a novel excuse.

Isn’t the root problem here municipal debt, and/or societal debt?
Yes, that part is good.

But housing is higher than that, which feels like a continuation of "nobody can afford housing". That is less good.

(I mean, if the "basket of stuff" is balanced right, then as far as the net effect goes, it shouldn't matter which piece is high this month. But it feels like housing continues to be unaffordable.)
The issue is that it's very common for people to use weight when they're referring to mass. We get away with it as our weight doesn't change very much when on Earth, but if we start populating other planets, then we're going to have to become more precise.
211 points in an hour, and now page 4.
A little -

The requirements for federal government were put out a long time ago (some scientific role job descriptions date from the 80's). This prevented a lot of new grads who had degrees in fields that didn't exist in the 20th century to get denied or delayed as someone hired to be a sysadmin, or cyber analysis didn't have the correct number of math courses. Basically only a CS degree counted.

Don't know about state/local governments, but the ones I have heard about were all over the place: some just copied the federal rules, some just hired whoever they could find.

I would guess the beltway bandits will eventually change their requirements to match the federal gov't. They are already a little more lax in some areas (like the number of math courses). They really just want to say "our people meet your qualifications".
Everybody works on a fork on their own machine.

Since everybody pulls the changes of the others and sees if something collides with their own changes, its pretty much possible to do it manually. Thats how I started this approach.

It's really just a 0815 git based workflow. Just not for code but for a tasklist.

Meanwhile I wrote a bit of tooling around it. But using it is not at all a must.
Because it may be in another language or aimed at another audience beyond my kid’s reading level.
This news feels in stark contrast to apples announcements this week. The price of tech hardware is not keeping up with the target 2-3% inflation. Will higher pricing for software make up for lost (in real terms) revenue for hardware?
I miss it too.
I always thought the big elephant in the room for public vs private sector, especially the case for IT sector was the compensation leading to not being able to attract the best talent.

That is - regardless of people who already have 4 year degrees or not, in the private sector both categories of people who are already established and accomplished would have much more earning power.

Has this changed recently? If not I still think most of the best talent would be going to private sector. Sure with the recent amount of layoffs and what I've heard people saying is a general reduction in earnings for software devs and IT positions some people are looking for basically anything. While those are great people, the people doing the most impactful work likely weren't laid off in the first place in the majority of companies.
Because you get paid less and have to strike for a small raise.
Who checks dependencies other than the author of the library ? The only time I check them is when they break and that's not a good thing.

I see this argument as “it’s not my job” type of argument.

Most of the time you just install and use. If I had infinite time, I’d do it because it’s fun but I don’t so I don’t.

If there’s a trust chain and I know for sure certain libraries are reviewed I’d have a peace of mind. Alas, that’s not the case and we spend our days in back burner paranoia or blissful ignorance.
Could this be a generation thing? My dad used to be bewildered at my listening to music while I would do homewok when I was younger.

With Discord and Streaming being a big thing maybe you could build up a certain mind set where having a background narration helps?

I'm totally speculating, as YouTube videos completely wreck my focus. Though I drive while listening to them, or with podcasts.
This is such a good point. We rely way too much on technical solutions.

A better approach is to have hyperlocal offices where you can go to do business. Is this less “efficient”? Yes but when the proceeds of efficiency go to shareholders anyway it doesn’t really matter.
ORM: don't need, I can write SQL. Prepared statements sufficient to prevent SQL injection. Both PHP and Go have good database abstraction libraries.

Sockets: Don't use but if I did I wouldn't need a framework.

SPA: I don't write apps that way. Server-side, which is why we're talking specifically about PHP and Go.

Queue handler, scheduler: Can easily do in the database or with Redis.

Container: What? Do you mean something like Docker? That has nothing to do with the web app development language or framework.

Auth: OAuth2 and SAML not a big deal, but maybe worth introducing a dependency depending on requirements. Regular username/password/MFA auth easy to implement, certainly no framework needed for that.

Likewise with routing, "MVC" structure, etc. Frameworks can save some time beginning but eventually you have to debug them, or run into limitations to work around. And one day the framework gets updated and you have to deal with breaking changes.
See also: https://ibm.github.io/operator-for-redis-cluster/

We've been using it in production for ~9 months now without any issues, and it handles node failures seamlessly
This reads like an ad for Unifi, but I don't see it called out as a sponsored post. Would've been better if the post mentioned why he chose that stack from a technical standpoint aside from "sourcing issues" and "seeing the UI showcased at a friends".
I wanted to look at the pay study, but all it did was link me to another page with the same pay blurbs, but no actual study.
Thank you for this resource.
A decent article, but there’s a ton of misunderstanding in the comment section.

For one thing: LDOs can be more efficient than buck converters, especially at very low current consumptions. If you’re drawing sub 1 mA, like a battery powered system, an LDO is going to be a more efficient step down converter, because it doesn’t have switching losses. Bucks are only better choices for stepping down voltage at higher currents because the switching losses become negligible.

Second: a ton of people here are vastly exaggerating the difficulty of designing a step down buck converter. Integrated designs from TI or analog devices will tell you all the compensating components, output capacitor values, inductor values, etc. for common step down output voltages. Most will include reference layouts with a four layer six layer or even two layer stack up for optimal performance. It’s really not that hard to get a one spin win out of most common buck designs.

Don’t be afraid. Just follow the manual. You’ll be fine.
System insights with command line tools: lsof and lsblk
Not all languages have this limitation
> Who are they to judge how big tech treats their employees when they pay their own so poorly?

The journalists (and tech workers) don't decide their own salary.

You conflated "they" as both management and the people being managed, to make it "ironic."
I've got a serious bugbear with recipes using "cups" as a measure - it infuriates me. Who in their right mind uses a volume measurement for foods that can vary hugely in their size according to how long they've been sitting around?
I like HOCON, although it's a bit obscure. It's a JSON syntax superset with the same data model, designed for human written config.

It doesn't have schema support however you arguably don't need one, because the software that reads the config specifies the type of keys when the value is read and casting takes place then. If the software expects a string, it reads the value as a string, if it expects a number it's parsed as a number and so on.

HOCON has hierarchical merging, include files, a more convenient syntax, ability to read environment variables, substitutions, comments and a few other convenience features. In Conveyor, a tool for packaging desktop apps I wrote that uses it, it's also extended so you have "hash-bang includes". Those are includes that specify a program to run instead of a file, the output is then included and parsed at that point. This lets you escape from declarative config to a fully dynamic computation if you need to. You can disable this feature with a command line flag if you don't trust the config you're parsing (and also env var substitution).

You can also render the whole config to regular JSON if you need to.

I find that set of features to nicely balance config complexity with read/writeability. The main issue is that the main library is not well maintained, and the best implementation is for the JVM. You could give it a C API these days with Native Image but nobody has.

Main downside vs yaml is that IDEs and editors can use YAML schemas to give auto-completion whereas they don't do that for HOCON.
It's also surrounded by FUD which is why a lot of enterprises, i.e. Google, won't touch AGPL with a ten-foot pole.

OSS startups use this to their advantage to push enterprises to purchase commercial licenses.
Everything. Someone could bring a lawsuit up years later, and logs would be necessary to determine if they had standing.

The aforementioned optical media storage was specific to the nuclear reactor and electric plant; I think everyone else’s were stored differently. Not positive.

EDIT: sibling comment below mentions performance data. Yes, that too. I graphed (nuclear) fuel consumption on one underway, and was surprised to find it didn’t match expected. My Captain was also surprised, and thrilled, because it meant he got to be more important (fair enough; who doesn’t want to be listened to by their boss?)
The vibes of the early internet are still out there, you just won't be directed there by Google or any of the other "social" silos.

Gemini (https://geminiprotocol.net/) is almost entirely made up of personal blogs where you can email the author and get a response.

Perhaps Gemini is in its early days, like the web used to be, but maybe the format (NO styling whatsoever) is inherently resistant to commercialisation and commodification.
> Like someone at your work had all these great ideas, started implementing them, then quit when they realized it would be too difficult to complete.

The problem is, in many of these fields actual real-world politics come into play - you got governments not wanting to lose the capability to do DNS censorship or other forms of sabotage, you got piss poor countries barely managing to keep the faintest of lights on, you got ISPs with systems that have grown over literal decades where any kind of major breaking change would require investments into rearchitecture larger than the company is worth, you got government regulations mandating stuff like all communications of staff be logged (e.g. banking/finance) which is made drastically more complex if TLS cannot be intercepted or where interceptor solutions must be certified making updates to them about as slow as molasses...
The Golden Age of Offbeat Arctic Research
Cloud Computing's Hidden Hero: The Untold Story of OpenBMC
Yes, and it always has. If you do a second build, it will not rebuild those dependencies again.

> even the same ones.

Rust supports multiple versions of the same dependency, so that may be what you observed.
Taking botany was up there with physics and chemistry as one of the best and most impactful courses I've taken.

It feels like a real phenomenon, there's knowledge that can be learned, and certainly has a Eureka moment once you start seeing it.

Social sciences and mathematics feel more about learning stuff other people said, and the latter more about preparing to do useful stuff. The natural science just have that undeniable factual knowledge that is transferred and my brain just accepts never to let it go, as it doesn't come from humans, it's not political, it's truth.

And it's not one of the boring subjects like geology or edafology, there's an undeniable psychic problem with talking about, sitting in a lecture listening about, looking at and thinking about rocks that plants just don't have. Ok, sorry minerals, I still don't care.

To me plants where just always green stuff, I doubt I could have even surmised a fraction of the knowledge just by observing them carefully even if I tried.

Thank Linnaeus et al
Lots of things in here which kill me a little:

1. You don't get a voltage spike when you disconnect an inductor. The field collapses and induces a current. If you measure it across a high impedance then it looks like a voltage spike. If you measure it across a low impedance then it's not necessarily much of a spike. Ergo depends on load impedance.

2. SMPS designs are not necessarily noisier than linear power supplies. It's always a design trade off. In fact you see SMPS in all modern RF test gear which is generally far more sensitive and has far more bandwidth than anything back when linear supplies were common. Also there is a lot of noise coming off the diodes in a basic bridge rectifier as well! Noise is a whole-system design consideration that has to be made.

3. Don't use any LLMs for designing circuits. Please go read a book on it designed by experts, not stuff scraped from thousands of idiots. I've seen some horrible stuff out there.

4. I'm sure I'll come up with more over time.
A letter to founders: join the Local-First movement
Earnings $311,509,052 over 16,680,000 tickets

Average: $18.68 per ticket
Git Bash + Windows Terminal = one luv
If you read some of the linked articles off of the one posted a few comments back, then you will see that the recent cuts have disproportionately affected minorities, minorities are making less, and that minorities are receiving lower evaluation scores. So it seems they do have a diversity problem.
La Baye ARéa (Midjourney 6 and Runway Gen-3 and Udio)
All BD-R use the same inorganic recording as M-disc. It's only worthwhile for DVD and CDROM.
Cloudflare seems to be pushing eSNI and HTTPS (SVCB) DNS record type.

for a while there was a lot of research coming out form various institutions on congestion control, that's how we got CoDel, no?
The current salary cap for any programmer (or any non executive level roll) that is a federal employee is currently $191,900. I’m glad the hiring requirements are being updated but I’m concerned that making the lower bands easier to join without competitively hiring more senior people will make the federal workforce less effective.
I run a online form for public consumption where I catalog old school wardialers and other phreaking related programs that were written (mainly) for 8 and 16 bit computers (atari 800, c64/128, Amiga, etc).. Currently I'm using jqwidgets to grab data from an XML file. This could make both the cataloging as well as the display of the data much easier. Will be looking into this soon. I'm curious though if there is a way to skin the output or am I restricted to the aesthetics that are built into the app?

If anyone is interested in the site I mentioned feel free to ask..
> On the other hand, buck converters require you to actually do some actual engineering. You can't just haphazardly throw in a single IC and expect it to work flawlessly on your first try.

It used to be a hassle a few years ago - but these days you can haphazardly throw in a R-78K3.3-0.5 - which has the pinout of a classic three-pin 3.3v linear regulator, but it's actually an 80% efficient DC-DC converter with 500mA output and an input range that goes up to 36v.

That's enough current even if you've got something like an ESP32 that needs 250mA - and for any type of hobby project, the $2.40 is fine.
I stopped at roadside plaza and was completely cultural illiterate on how to order food.

100 miles from my home.
Having worked on several projects in the past where the clients had either their own frameworks, and or proprietary languages I think familiarity is highly overrated in most (but not all cases). If you're building something trivial or basically throwaway then familiarity does play a role, but if it's non-trivial all the other costs outweigh any initial learning.
Federal contracts have staffing requirements, so the government does hand down education and experience requirements that the contractors must meet when staffing. If you search jobs at federal contractors they often state the position requirements from the government, it's common to see things like "Requires bachelors degree with 10 years relevant experience or 6 years with masters degree", which come straight from the government.
> It must be because if anyone abuses these issues, someone might wake up and care enough to fix them

If anyone knows they are being abused, anyway. I conclude that someone may be abusing them, but those doing so try to keep it unknown that they have done so, to preserve their access to the vulnerability.
I don't think it's possible to make the federal workforce less efficient.
Government can still hire contractors or products from the private sector no?
It’s “true” only according to a custom definition of diversity common in newsrooms and universities - but not, apparently, the Times’s own diversity report - where some groups which become too included no longer count as diverse. I think this standard, whereby I’ve had a non-white yet non-diverse manager for 95% of my career, deserves an extraordinary amount of scrutiny.
Sounds like talk radio could work for you too.
The USPS has an embedded law enforcement agency [0] whose full time job is to track down people who are using the postal service to commit crimes. Tor is very specifically designed to make an equivalent impossible.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Inspect...
How come no kWh selection?
"The state" is not a monolith. Anti-fraud enforcement is handled by agencies with limited budgets and resources. Often they are deliberately underfunded and understaffed precisely so they cannot cause too much damage and embarrassment by going after really big targets.
I'd imagine it trickles down.
> Also wtf is a lava taco

Taco Bell's cheesy name for "spicy" -- although if one truly enjoys actual spicy these are just mild as far as "spice" goes. Runs more along the line of "they tried to add some pepper flavor, but forgot to add any heat".
Lower salaries and treating everyone like a cog.
Government pays IT fairly well compared to 95% of all IT jobs. It’s not paying FAANG wages, but more time off, less overtime, and pensions make direct salary comparisons misleading.

Honestly if I was starting over as a fresh graduate I’d probably try and get a government job. Job security makes a huge difference in lifetime earnings and several of my early jobs sucked.
Considering we have 3 major tech companies (Microsoft/Apple/Google) controlling 90+% of user devices and browsers, I believe this is more solvable than we'd like to admit.