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Going up is what an endowment is supposed to do; you spend some part of the return on operational needs, while also growing the base so you have greater (nominal, and hopefully also real) capacity for that downstream.
If, over the long term, an endowment isn’t growing, it’s being mismanaged.
> The only time exponential backoff is useful is if the failure is due to a rate limit and you specifically need a mechanism to reduce the rate at which you are attempting to use it.
Exponential backoff is applicable to any failure where the time it has so far gone unresolved is the primary piece of available data on how lilong it is likely to take before being resolved, which is a very common situation, which is why it is a good default for most situations where you don’t have a better knowable-in-advance information at hand and the probability distribution ofn time to resolve, and where delays aren't super costly (though knowledge of when delays become costly can be used to set a cap on exponential backoff, too.)
My favorite ex-library book was "Engineering with Nuclear Explosives", discarded from the Stanford engineering library.[1]
[1] https://archive.org/details/engineeringwithn00plowrich/mode/...
~40% of cargo tonnage is moving fossil fuels (coal, oil, gas) around [1] [2]. I would expect this volume to decline as the global energy transition continues to ramp. China's economy and EVs are already depressing global oil prices [3] [4] [5], for example. Also consider global decoupling and repatriating of supply chains [6] [7].
My analysis: We're potentially going to require much less marine transport capacity in the future. How much of that can be electrified is the question, imho (versus "green ammonia" produced from low carbon energy [8]).
[1] https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2022/01/12/almost-40-...
[2] https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/rmt2019_en...
[3] https://www.iea.org/commentaries/china-s-slowdown-is-weighin...
[4] https://theprogressplaybook.com/2024/09/18/chinas-ev-and-hig...
[5] https://www.energypolicy.columbia.edu/chinas-slowing-oil-dem...
[6] https://www.axios.com/2024/11/14/companies-global-trade-chin...
[7] https://www.bain.com/about/media-center/press-releases/2024/...
[8] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Quite a few sites are slow for me right now, including Amazon.com and Bluesky (hosted on AWS). Feels like an outage brewing.
I always felt public APIs were as much about limiting access as it was granting it. So often I see an API which is designed to preclude doing anything interesting, like coaching in the case of Strava.
It's why my first step to an integration is often an "IPA" that works on a web interface; it's really amazing how you can often reuse an old selector-based HTML scraper and have the integration done before the people who went the API route were able to log in. When I hear "API" I think about what they took out before I think what they put in.
Bluesky's search is down, and Amazon.com is super slow for me. Feels like an AWS outage brewing.
Making a metric an objective is an effective if often very costly way of testing the hypothesis that it is coincident rather than a proxy (which in cases more complex than racing is frequently a matter of dispute.)
How much of this is what Google is doing, and how much is what this guy wants Google to do?
The 1980s AI "boom" was tiny.
In the 1980s, AI was a few people at Stanford, a few people at CMU, a few people at MIT, and a scattering of people elsewhere. There were maybe a half dozen startups and none of them got very big.
Zotero [1] like GUI Internet Archive client.
It is growing like crazy right now, so there's a burst of activity. Like anything that gets suddenly popular, that will end, and it'll subside.
It’s incredibly difficult to structure these rules in a way that doesn’t discriminate against small businesses while not opening a giant loophole for the rich.
It is a powerful capability for executing arbitrary user provided code in a secure manner. You can then repatriate to OpenFaaS on Kubernetes if an exit strategy is required.
When I toured Jacques Littlefield's Tank Ranch they had, what I believe to be, this exact tank. They told the story of how it had been lost in the river and sat there and they went to see if it was still there and arranged to get it removed and returned to California where they restored it.
If someone was so motivated, they could probably go back to the internet archives of the auction that happened after Jacques died to find a picture of both the restored tank and its providence.
There is more than one kind of quality.
When I drove from New Mexico from New Hampshire I thought roads in the US South were remarkably good. I settled in New York where major roads seemed pretty good but go to Pennsylvania and it seems there are two kinds of roads: bad roads and roads under construction, you never seem to find a good road that was just constructed. A lot of people thought it was frost heaves but this article say it isn’t.
My quality problem in NY is that atlas maps and GPS maps show numerous roads that aren’t really passable or if they are passable are too risky. I never saw ‘minimum maintenance’ or ‘abandoned’ roads before I came to NY and I wish they were so marked in GPS maps. There is a road near me which is sometimes passable in the winter if you have the right kind of vehicle and if you know the road goes downhill and won’t require that much traction… People who don’t have the right kind of vehicle will get led by GPS down this road and think it is OK because there are tracks but halfway through they panic and try to turn around now they are in trouble. That road is passable in the summer except for when it gets washed out.
Also NH is in a class by itself with its motor-oriented infrastructure (in 1980 they rerouted route 93 to go around Manchester and nobody goes there anymore) which is tree-structured as much as possible so you have many levels of hierarchy which can and will jam up. Want to walk? You can’t get there from here. I can go for years in NY without updating my GPS maps but if I drive to NH I will see the road I am got rerouted and there is a shopping center where there used to be a road. And this is in a state that doesn’t have income taxes so I don’t know how they pay for it.
As the article points out, it looks like the fabled MI300C.
Impractical as it'd be, I'd love to see a workstation based on one of these. It's more or less a computer on a single chip.
Lenin talked about rural stupidity but I sometimes see urban stupidity. If you grow up underclass in New York City the skyscrapers seem to hang in he air without physical support —- or financial support. Without visibility of the invisible economic pyramid underneath them the whole economy looks like a scam or a power trip right out of Foucault. So no wonder a state rep from the Bronx will insist that we subsidize off-track betting to save jobs.
In this classic book
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Thermonuclear_War
Kahn points out that if the cities of the US were destroyed we could reconstruct them in 40 or so years based on resources from the countryside. If it was turned around the city people just die.
We’ll build it back up. This too shall pass.
This is one of those ideas that I've seen kicking around for at least a decade now, but manifesting it in real code is easier said than done. And that isn't even the real challenge, the real challeng is keeping it working over time.
I've seen some stuff based on treesitter that seems to be prompting a revival of the idea, but it still has fundamental issues, e.g., if I'm embedding in python:
sql = "SELECT * FROM table "
if arbitrarilyComplicatedCondition:
sql += "INNER JOIN a AS joined ON table.thing = a.id "
else:
sql += "INNER JOIN b AS joined ON table.thing = b.id "
sql += "WHERE joined.
This is just a simple example; they get arbitrarily complicated, quickly. This is one of those things that when you think of the simple case it seems so easy but when you try to bring it into the real world it immediately explodes with all the complexity your mind's eye was ignoring.
We are kind of getting back there - a modern server (and mainframes before them) has a bunch of slave processors for all kinds of specialized work, not only GPUs, but DPUs, crypto acceleration, and so on.
The C64 went a bit further than that, in something that reminisces of a Plan 9 network of a workstation and one or more storage servers (the drives).
If I like Amaro, but haven't been a fan of Fernet, is Malort worth a shot?
Related:
Russia bans crypto mining in several regions to address electricity shortages - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42185827 - Nov 2024
Russia's War Economy Is Hitting Its Limits - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42152373 - Nov 2024
Russian Food Prices Skyrocket in Growing Concern for Kremlin - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42139964 - Nov 2024
> Using a full-featured RPC framework for IPC seems like overkill when the processes run on the same machine.
That is exactly what COM/WinRT, XPC, Android Binder, D-BUS are.
Naturally they have several optimisations for local execution.
> In any case, surely the 'punishment' should be directed at North Korea?
The problem is at least as much Russia inviting NK as North Korea positively responding, aiding Ukraine works against all the belligerents aligned against it, NK as well as Russia, and the North Koreans in Russia are not protected by the Armistice the way North Koreans on the Korean peninsula are.
The difference is that it's impossible to wind API features back: as an open protocol, they literally cannot do that. "The future company is an adversary" is a slogan the team uses to help guide decisions.
While your parent is not, that Graydon is here: https://bsky.app/profile/graydon-pub.bsky.social
> This just proves how entrenched this country is in car centric transportation
How? We’re big, rich and sparsely populated. I’m not saying that means we must have this system. But the longest road network doesn’t prove that’s wrong.
I think DOGE does exist, it just is a non-government entity advising the incoming administration with a deceptive name that makes it sound like a government agency rather than a privileged private lobbying group.
>He was paid a one-off fee of £6.
Suboptimal asset class having existential crisis.
“Discover”, “What’s Hot Classic”, and “Popular with Friends”, of the Bluesky-provided feeds (there may be others) are different versions of that concept, but there is not one shoved down your throat like on many other social media apps.
It's not just that it tastes bad. Elisir Novasalus tastes bad. Lots of things taste bad. Malort tastes like something you are not supposed to be drinking; like solvents, like something leaking out of the engine of a car. Not in a good way. It tastes like a bad product.
> reason algorithmic ordering is so common is because that's what gives the most runway for advertising
You’re both right. Algorithmic feeds boost engagement, both by surfacing the most-engaging content and removing the burden of trimming one’s follow list, and also aids in serving ads. (Both by making them easier to sneak in and in the same engine that surfaces engaging organic content being useful for serving engaging ads.)
This is basically a form of the "Sufficiently Smart Compiler" claim. It is generally false, barring a definition of "semantics right" that simply includes a presumption that the "semantics" will be chosen for performance in which case the claim becomes circular.
At this point in the collective journey we are all on understanding programming languages and what they can do, the evidence is overwhelming that there are in fact plenty of useful semantics that are intrinsically slower than other useful semantics, relative to any particular chunk of hardware executing them. That is, what is slow on CPU or GPU may differ, but there is certainly some sort of difference that will exist, and there is no amount of (feasible) compiling around that problem.
Indeed, that's why we have CPUs and GPUs and soon NPUs and in the future perhaps other types of dedicated processors... precisely because not all semantics can be implemented equally no matter how smart you are.
The author appears to be defining it in terms of the effort put in to the language, basically, person-hours.
Go may be a small language by some definitions (and as my phrasing implies, perhaps not by others), but it is certainly one that has had a lot of person-hours put into it.
Seeing a Ruby Sinatra project after a long time.
> Do you expect sites you do visit, like "google.com" or such, are going to serve up malware?
Absolutely. One of the main reasons to run an adblocker. Malicious ads slip through regularly onto entirely reputable sites.
> Russia have for a long time been saying that such action would be tantamount to a NATO attack
They say this every time. When Obama sent non-lethal aid, they used the same line.
Why do they object? What's objectionable about Mozilla knowing what features someone anonymous uses?
If you can "spark outrage" with such a post, then no statement is safe.
Such a post is a canary in the goldmine for censorship.
> sound like IIT has dealt with the very large number of students who want to study CS by trying to limit it to the overall academically strongest students?
It might also be a check against rote learning.
> Achieving that level of technical and artistic refinement is such a huge factor in its success.
Yep, the article talks about how they built their way to success, but the actual method they used is "have a team of two superheroes make the game".
If it's copying anything it's the United Colours Of Benneton series of ads from the nineties.
Shitting on people when they do something good for not going further is a surefire way of stopping them from doing anything else.
I guess on the flip side, how many of those comments are from anyone in Jaguar’s market? Jaguar is a luxury brand. It doesn’t seem dismissibly stupid for it to act like other luxury brands as opposed to Toyota.
CG Boost‘s apple basket course (free) or their Blender Launchpad course (cheap).
Which is why having cybersecurity laws and liability in computing is so relevant.
This is PR to remain relevant while engagement grows elsewhere.
Further in the newsletter.
Apple is focused on licensing its movies to other companies, such as foreign TV networks and stores, where viewers can rent or buy them, according to a person familiar with the plans. The company isn’t [yet] planning to license its original TV shows to third parties.. Apple has already started selling TV+ via Amazon in a bid to increase the audience for the service. Licensing to third parties will generate additional revenue and introduce Apple movies to people who don’t yet pay for TV+.Wild Moose (W23) does this for everyone.
Edit: Lol at myself, I thought this was a blog post from Meta and I was pointing out that there is a YC company that does this for everyone.
Now I realize that this was an ad for a different YC company that also does (although WM is a year older).
I think is forgotten here that one of the benefits of nominal typing is that the compiler can know that data layout at run time so performance benefits.
There has been so much ink spilled on the question of what kind of type systems help programmers be productive but there is not such controversy on the performance side.
Yes. It's a good success story. And a cute little game.
Title on article
Using Lua for Embedded Development vs. Traditional C Code
No it's not, it's perfect.
You want to be able to do side-by-side diffs on your laptop using a normal sized (not tiny) font.
You want to be able to paste snippets into design documents and emails and blogs without accidental wrapping or truncating or scrolling.
80 is nicely legible. It works really well.
> think they want to recover it for investigation purposes
These are V1s. Not worth the effort.
They’re much smaller and don’t have to move/deploy.
As someone who has used Riak in anger once in his career and who has a blossoming interest in FoundationDB I'd love someone to contrast the two systems. My knee-jerk reaction --- which I'm calling out as such! --- is that FDB has decreased the relevance of systems like Riak.
In my direct personal experience, for me it was 1969 during my first major gig. I remember one project, called the March 1 system, that slowly came into being sometime that October, if my memory serves me correctly. There was tension, of course. This was exacerbated by having to work nights to get access to the system to continue development.
I eventually learned, when asked for a "quick" estimate, I would give something drastically longer than I knew would be accepted. I said "But I can give you a better estimate if you give me a few days to do a better plan." This always got me the extra time to provide an estimate.
~17M people in the US alone suffer from long covid.
https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/as-reco...
Seconded, Zulip's model is fantastic. It makes it a breeze to catch up or coordinate.
I’m bearish with AI reaching the peak of the hype cycle (“this magic isn’t magic!?”) but bullish with geopolitical conflicts increasing defense investment and spending, along with global decoupling forcing investment into local supply chains. There is always money to be made with volatility, position yourself accordingly.
https://www.axios.com/2024/11/14/companies-global-trade-chin...
What’s everyone’s take when this part of the country continues to fight over a dwindling supply of water?
So uv caused a bit of an issue with me installing PyTorch over the weekend.
When installed with brew on my MacBook, uv currently has PyTorch 3.13 as a dependency, which is fine. But PyTorch does not currently have a stable wheel that's compatable with Python 3.13! This resulted in very confusing errors. (Solution was to point to the Nightly index)
That's technically PyTorch's fault, but it's indicitave why a specific page on installing PyTorch is necessary, and it's good to know the documentation specifically calls it out.
They contacted me. My take was it fit the criteria for
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance-fee_scam
BTW, this is a "author didn't take his writing seriously so he posted to medium so I just read the first paragraph" case. If you want people to read what you write, try a different platform.
They announced a no-go while it was still boosting towards space, so it won’t be a relight issue.
No. Not in the context Rayiner meant it, where there's policy discretion about who gets it, the way you might apply work requirements to SNAP.
Yes, I agree. The SWAT-ter attempted to kill people. The police did not. I'm not sticking up for the accused; I'm saying the facile "this is a police problem" argument doesn't apply in this story.
Useful. This demonstrates that coin flipping merely amplifies noise in human manipulation.
A classic example in the old PSSC high school physics curriculum was a little catapult-like device which tossed a coin, spinning it a few times in mid-air, and repeatably landing it on the same side. It's a demonstration that Newtonian physics is repeatable.
Something like that is inside some automatic transmissions.
Sperry UNIVAC once built a 4-bit fluidic ALU as a demo, but it was useless.
Pot, meet kettle? It's usually the industry that's leading with "write inefficient code, hardware is cheaper than dev time" approach. If anything, I'd expect a long-running physics research project to have well-optimized code. After all, that's where all the optimized math routines come from.
The whole point of testing (and making) deadly nuclear weapons is to ensure they are never used again. The Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine has kept us alive through the darkest pf the Cold War (also keeping the Cold War cold). In order to credibly threaten anyone who tries to annihilate you with certain annihilation is with lots of such doomsday weapons. We have lived in this Mexican standoff for longer than we remember.
> what "Inertial Confinement Fusion" is
The experimental fusion approach used by the NIF [1][2].
It's conveniently simultaneously an approach to fusion power, a way to study fusion plasmas and a tiny nuclear explosion.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_confinement_fusion
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility
>Listening to people who probably proclaim themselves "anti-imperialists" give full-throated defenses of imperialism never gets old.
Yeah, nothing like nato when it comes to anti-imperialism...
Has there ever been a serious effort to play chess by "rule-based" methods as opposed to search?
(... other than the evaluation function being based on handwritten or learned rules)
The downhill slide was already underway by the 1990s. Readership was in a slow decline and the publishers turned to various marketing gimmicks to maintain solvency. More pictorial articles, more po-sci articles, cover wrappers suggesting that it was worth subscribing even if you didn't read the whole magazine etc. I stopped reading around 2000, when I bought an issue and noticed I had read the whole thing in under 4 hours rather than the usual 5-6. A comparison indicated they had changed the font size and line spacing slightly, so as to maintain the same page count but with about 15% less content.
I had Fortran-style arrays (rank 2) the first day I was programming in Java.
It's complicated.
Some store brands are legendary in quality and value like Aldi's house chocolate bars.
Many store brands are identical, equal or close to the name brands.
I'd say the P&G cleaners like Tide and Dawn are a bit better than most competitors (all the claims that they make on their TV commercials are backed up.)
Brand extension is a major phenomenon for big brands: I don't know about the Mac and Cheese space but look at how many variety of Cheez-It there are now or how many kinds of Coca-Cola you might find at the gas station now.
For a long time I preferred Annie's Mac and Cheese to Kraft because they had not switched to the yucky milk protein concentrate that Kraft and most of the store brands did and I remember it as an affordable premium brand in the 1990s and since. I just saw this news
https://www.thedailymeal.com/1667720/review-annies-now-chees...
which I think is interesting because even if the reviewer liked it it's pretty clear that they reduced the dairy content and made up for it with salt, cornstarch and lactic acid.
You need a full 3D scan of the environment of everything the black hole can "see" from the position you want to put it in, not just the traditional "augmented reality" that sits on top of a current camera feed, because black holes are also essentially 360 degree cameras that from some angle will let you see anything around them. Not impossible, but harder than "just" taking an augmented reality feed.
testers that don't flip properly
Clearly the coin flips at the beginning of sports fixtures need to be assessed by a panel of highly skilled judges who can pronounce on their validity. We'll also need local, regional, national, and international organizations to train, select, and maintain the quality of coin flipping judges and to maintain the integrity of the discipline while moving forward as new coins are minted and different sorts of flipping styles are proposed by. Membership of such organizations should be limited to those afilliated with the Ancient Order of Coin Flippers.
> the express purpose of eliminating all human life
That’s a funny way to spell the longest period of interstate peace on a per-capita (globally) basis since the interwar period prior to WWI.
Never saw that site before but gee am I getting a good deal on Photoshop
https://www.vendr.com/marketplace/adobe?product=b853f05c-e15...
My first take is that this site could be A.I. slop. What do I care if the median Salesforce customer is spending $50k a year? I've had my own company and bought basic seats for me and my salesguy; I've built solutions for Salesforce orgs that have 9000 seats at a higher tier. It's a different world, similarly
https://www.vendr.com/marketplace/aws
is in a class in itself for complexity in pricing at the very least (e.g. you could build a great business out of controlling AWS spend in itself.)
Note Photoshop, Salesforce and AWS all have AI as a major part of the offering and I don't see any of those products/services going away soon.
Her "parting rant" didn't appear in SciAm, a point even the article makes clear, but which you obscure here.
Usually you can go back and then cut and paste the file to a text editor and then resubmit later.
Of course my friend YOShInOn does a lot of posting for me but even then error recovery is a bitch. There was that time HN went down and was giving everyone 500 errors and dang sent me an email mentioning that my script had tried to post something 900 times. It reminds me... I need to implement exponential backoff!
Since I haven't seen this yet in the comments, a startup I worked at in a previous company set up Discord channels for small teams, and it by far replicated the closest to "folks are sitting next to each other in the same room" experience that I've seen before.
I see lots of advice here about documenting everything, discouraging 1-1 conversations, etc., and while I agree with that up to a point, this advice can also drastically slow you down if you require a level of formality for everything. The thing that was nice about having Discord channels is that if I needed to get a quick explanation about something, I could ask quickly without needing to schedule a meeting, etc., and everyone else in the channel can listen in (if desired). Discord also has good "deafen" features, so if you're heads down and don't want to be bothered it lets people know.
Again, I think this only works well with about ~8-10 people max per channel, but that's about the optimal max size for project teams anyway in my opinion. I highly suggest you try it if you haven't - when I first tried it I thought "How is this any different from Slack Hurdles?", but the small usability improvements in Discord made it feel to me like it approximated the in-person work experience much better than Slack (note we didn't use Discord as a complete replacement for Slack, just for small "working group" teams).
Reminds me at the time when the Uni at my library was a Sun shop and I had my own
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray
and a Sun server under my desk. We were hoping we could use Sun Rays instead of Windows for computers that patrons use to access the online catalog but after the collapse of Netscape 4 and before Mozilla rebranded as Firefox you could not get a modern web browser to build on Solaris.
Network Computer says hello!
What majority?
I haven't touched Fedora in years.
China is going to kill oil with their manufacturing capacity.
There are few slogans I hate more than "trust the science", primarily because it aligns scientific results with faith, which is exactly what science is not about. Science is fundamentally about skepticism, not trust.
Now, obviously that skepticism can be misused by some rando with no qualifications or even time spent researching telling you to be "skeptical" of people who have spent decades trying to figure shit out. What I really believe we should be teaching people is "what are the incentives?". That is, it's become very clear that many people are susceptible to provably false information, so we should train people to try to examine what incentives someone has for speaking out in the first place (and that includes scientists, too).
This is why I hate most conspiracy theories - even if you take everything the conspiracy supposes at face value, conspiracists don't explain how their conspiracy is somehow kept so secret when tons of people involved would have extremely strong incentives to expose it.
I'm saying this as someone who lives in Emacs: it's all fine until you want to show the notebook to someone else.
Email is arguable thanks to the dominance of Gmail.
Sure you can set up your own email server but if you are on a cable or DSL network just try connecting to port 25 somewhere. Even if you find a place that doesn't have port 25 blocked you will find deliverability is a problem. You might send an email to one normie and have it get through but try sending mail to 100 normies and you might back 28% or something.
Email clients have a lot of pathology too which I think has to do with the influence of Outlook on the industry.
> Russia is responsible but not alone. This war could have been prevented by not pushing Ukraine into NATO
The war is what caused Ukraine to restart its previously-repudiated attempts to join NATO, so this isn’t just wrong but entirely backwards.