CoffeeDregs

OT but: If you're interested in first contact stories, you might check out Peter Cawdron. For a quick writer of pop-sci-fi, he's pretty good. He's taken on first-contact from 20+ different starting points and has a bunch of books on Kindle Unlimited. To the lay-person, his fiction seems well researched and real-as-possible (given the requirements of the story). Sort of Peter Watt's "Blindsight" without the fireworks/flourishes

Non-affiliate links...: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08MXCG244 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07W2WP5F3

I agree that it could get fairly complicated but these seem like the two propositions to me:

Un-normalized: $6T + interpretation + understanding + doubt that it's really $6T.

Normalized: $60k (get the GAO to provide a standardized number) + interpretation + understanding.

I get that it's imperfect but I have a hard time understanding how the "un-normalized" version is more-perfect or more comprehensible than the "normalized" version.

I suspect politicians would hate my suggestion: they've acclimated us to nonsense numbers. Per Dirksen (maybe): “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money." Again, I'm not pro/con high-speed rail but: CA probably has 15M taxpayers; estimates of high-speed rail ranged from $30,000M-$100,000M; how in the world was a CA taxpayer to recoup $3,000-$10,000 of cost? Put in those terms, it's a lot easier for me to think about the proposition.

I definitely think a Covid bailout was necessary. I do have some questions about where my $60k went...

Putting aside the good-plane/bad-plane discussion, this program is the poster child for one of my pet wishes: that the costs of government programs would be expressed in $/tax-payer. There are about 100M tax payers in the US; this program is expected to cost about $1,500,000M; so the F35 program is expected to cost about $15,000 per tax payer. True: that's over 50 years; still, un-discounted, that's $300/year/tax-payer.

The Covid bailout last year was about $60,000 per tax payer (https://www.covidmoneytracker.org/). How much of your $60,000 did you see?

I'm not arguing for or against these programs; I'm arguing for expressing them in comprehensible terms. $6,000,000,000,000 societal total; or $60,000 for you. Do you expect to receive $15,000 of value from the F35 program? I'm not sure I won't: perhaps it'll keep oil/energy prices stable and I spent well more than $300/year on energy...

I think I agree but with the point "Isn't this a solved problem?" I'm not sure if the first library should be written in C, Rust, C++, etc but it seems as though very similar libraries-but-in-different-languages are being repeatedly written.

I certainly get that a good library yesterday might not be good today or that an existing library's style might not meet this language's style but I doubt the need to rewrite existing libraries so often. Even with the much-maligned PHP, libraries were frequently bindings to other libraries.

Sure but you can't shebang all of the deps... Unless your `normal executable` embeds a Python dependency-manager.

Just in case someone RTFA and gets worried: this is breathless FUD and could be handled much more usefully in some other fashion that invites discussion of pros/cons (such as is happening on HN but I doubt the gist will be updated...). Wayland is an 0.99:1.00 replacement for x11. I would appreciate a succinct "Wayland changed X, Y and Z and that will affect applications A, B, C" but TFA isn't that.

Much like systemd, Wayland sounded as though it might have some serious wrinkles but those, as with systemd, never really materialized for me (a power user on a powerful machine). Most issues I experienced were transient as applications caught up with the switch (mostly screen sharing). Even though it's not too important to me, games (wine and native) are working better than ever on Linux (and Wayland).

I think the two persistent "issues" I've seen are: graphical ssh (X-over-ssh); and, maybe, others screen drawing on my screen in Slack calls.

I trust the arguments from the x11/Wayland developers and, AFAICT, Wayland has been a Good Thing but some eggs were broken to make the omelette...

I'm baffled that any developer uses a Mac. I know, I know... BSD, 3-finger swipe, but-they-wrote-the-ux-guide. But I've been running Debian Testing for 15 years now with nary a problem (on thinkpads, latitudes and desktops) I guess I'm weird in that I think gnome 3 is swell.

CI handles xCode. Otherwise, my 2x 42" 4k monitors, Gnome and works-here-same-as-the-cloud self reads these articles on puzzlement.

I can't count the times I've helped developers deal with oh-yeah-brew-is-weird-about-libpq. Now this? It's the avocado-toast of developer workstations...

This is a good, balanced article. I've been of a similar mind for over a year now.

The chances of the CCP releasing a self-harming bioweapon in order to harm the US seems silly. But an accident involving a well-intentioned gain-of-function experiment seems quite possible and was something that the US was concerned about with its own gain-of-function research.

In any case, this, like so much of this other nonsense around Covid [lockdowns in Contra Costa County when the major hospitals were empty-ish; no gradual escalation of lockdown given mid-January knowledge of Covid], seems pretty amenable to a calm, clear analysis...

    Hypothesis                    | Evidence                               | Likelihood
    ------------------------------+----------------------------------------+-----------------
    CCP Virus                     | [That'd be 360 degree dumb of the CCP] | *low*
    Gain of function lab accident | [Existing concerns and experience]     | *moderate*
    Zoonotic transfer             | [No likely vector for extant virus]    | *moderate-low*

Doesn't seem too difficult...

This looks a bit like the old (2000s) work of Leopard Logic or Tensilica. Exciting stuff.

One important note (based on some comments here): generally, these in-CPU FPGAs have very fast reconfiguration. Not sure if it's 1, 10 or 100 cycles but it's not milliseconds. Actually, (in past examples) configuration might take milliseconds but it would load a number of planes of configurations: plane 0 might be MP3 audio device; plane 1 might be MPEG2 video device. Then reconfiguration is: switch to plane 1.

This AMD proposal looks like it's much more tightly integrated into the CPU so it's got to be even faster. Combine that with the deep knowledge of processor internals you'll have to have to code for this thing and I'm having a hard time seeing you and me having much luck tinkering. This is probably 99.99% data center with gnarly NDAs and field support.

Okay. I just bought Bucatini off of Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00YQ7CYWU (only 1 left, blah, blah)). I'm not much of a pasta eater but, damn, that was a fun read...

I wouldn't have shorted the market based on that but I've not been sanguine about the US economy since then. Financial engineering, not productivity[1], has really been the driver of our economy...

[1] https://voxeu.org/article/industry-anatomy-transatlantic-pro...

"Instead of drawing down our gold reserves, however, we gradually draw down our domestic manufacturing base and it gets replaced piece-by-piece in foreign countries."

To me, this is the money shot. I hadn't seen this expressed before and it makes perfect sense. I'm baffled that we (the US) caused this to happen to the US. I'm (unhappily) registered Republican but I argued vociferously to a Dem friend in 2000 that our inability to manufacture critical components was going to kill us. Kind of literally: AFAIK, the last LCD panel manufacturer in the US closed around then and we could no longer manufacture LCD for our military vehicles... (Even if this anecdote is untrue, the point remains valid...) I argued that, even in the presence of free trade, a country should have the ability to tariff imports to the extent that that country could maintain a 25% (or something) domestic market share.

Finally. I made a very similar suggestion to the ECS product manager about 5 years ago. We were moving from Mesos to ECS and I was losing the ability to manage Docker containers on our on-premises servers so I suggested allowing us to run the ECS Agent on our on-premises servers. This would allow us to centrally manage those servers and would get AWS into our on-prem infrastructure...

Technical debt is like credit card debt: it's high interest; it's not a huge issue if you use it wisely; and you have to track its usage and level against your total code/assets.

Like credit card debt, too many people turn around and they've got $20k of credit card debt or 20k LOC of tech debt.

I don't have too much of a problem with tech debt as long as: the benefit is clear; the debt is well understood; the payoff date/cost is planned. Just last night I was talking with a developer who works for me: "This way will require 5 queries instead of 1. Can you help me figure out this whacky ORM API to do it in 1?"; "Just do it as 5 right now and, as we learn more about the ORM API, we'll fix it later..." Tech debt: we get the product done faster; we've got a 1-5 line change to make (when we know how to make it); and we'll do so in a few months.

Commenters are arguing about U-3 versus U-x but the question is really: how should our population think our economy is doing? The rhetoric on the news since 2008 has been: oooh, look at those low unemployment numbers! But reality doesn't seem to have matched the claim that low-unemployment-means-people-are-doing-well... Unemployment was near record lows and wages weren't increasing much (even with a suitable time lag)? Whatever measure we're currently using, it doesn't seem to be serving the population well. Certainly is serving politicians well. How is labor force participation down so much over 20 years if we're doing so well?

(As raised in the comments, it's good to use universal-ish standards so that countries are comparable.)

And I'm not classic "liberal" or "progressive" (I lean (proper, not movement) conservative). This is intended to portray a fairly balanced view of BLS stats...

[OG] Based on discussion over in another thread, I checked out code.gov. Interesting stuff. Lots of challenges, hassles, etc, but why not try to use or contribute to Gov stuff? May as well use and improve it...

I'm not sure about the hater-ade in this article (old, dead languages?). I've built infrastructure for multiple companies on top of AWS Lambda. Usually bog-standard REST endpoints in Node or Python. There are a few weird bits and a few "huhs" (DB connection timeouts after a Lambda wakes up from sleep) but that's true of most systems.

True, we were only doing a few req/s but Lambda was easy to setup/use and was mostly maintenance free. As is said so often on this site: it's a tool; use it for its intended purpose.

Our development environment was very reasonable: Express or Django locally; aws-lambda->Express/Django on the lambda.

Putting aside is-this-right-or-wrong?: this is unsurprising: lawyers (many in my family), police, doctors, sales people, etc represent mechanisms to reduce more problematic inefficiencies in our society. No one (including lawyers I know) wants lawyers; but a world-with-lawyers is better than a world-without-lawyers. Doctors: why do you go to the doctor? To improve your body? Almost never; it's always to reduce problems or prevent them, a cost you only incur because of the fallibility of your body. Sales people: imperfect information in society. Police: lovely folks; would be much better if we didn't have people being assholes so that we needed police.

Then add in all of the secondary effects of exploitation/corruption of these not-productive-and-shouldn't-exist positions...

Further for every $1 you spend on an attorney, someone else has to spend $$ and the society has wasted that $$$ plus that time, none of which is productive.

On the other hand, get rid of lawyers and you're going to spend $$$ on mercenaries...

Hadn't noticed that but that's a good point. "Way higher": I would have guessed the same as you but, upon further thought, I guess I'm not surprised: creating a crawler is 100 lines of Python so I would guess that there are actually tens of thousands of bots running around grabbing web pages. Humans are an ever diminishing portion of the "web", especially given the (old) focus on "semantic web" and machine-friendly-ish formats...

Random: just don't use Bookshelf (ORM, based on Knex) unless you evaluate it well: when we used it, it did individual SELECTs for any included, related rows...

Agreed with sibling. References would be great (I'd love to view them).

From TFA: "Democratic regression is particularly visible among the G-20 countries". This is the money-shot. I went back after I speculated that the big deal would be if existing, strongly "democratic" countries were sliding and found this quote. Strong democracies are sliding which is a much bigger deal than young, weak democracies doing so.

I'm in the US (so this comment is US-centric). As with so much else over the past 6 months, the tension between federal powers and state powers is being thrown into relief. In particular, the popular idea that democracy is good/right has long been suspect: https://www.history.com/news/electoral-college-founding-fath... .

This is the effect of the Internet and of the "Long Tail": the monetization/politicization of the "long tail" is in segmenting and then aggregating bits of the long tail into larger and larger groups of marginalized members of the population. With poor communication, "the fringe" is only a fringe locally; with near-infinite communication, the fringe is everyone: FB and the various tailored news feeds drape a comfortable bubble over us and cause us to see our view as (manifestly) the only view (since it's our only view, it must be the only view).

As a "Republican", I point the finger at Republicans, a political group which has been a 10x political operation. Wedge issues have come home to roost and we're much worse off for it. And Republicans have played the state/local-politics game very, very well.

As others have noted, democracy is a game best played locally but our pervasive communications systems are forcing it to be played globally and this is happening quickly enough that our political systems haven't come to grips with it yet.

   sql"SOME SQL";

This looks to be a "tagged template": https://basarat.gitbook.io/typescript/future-javascript/temp.... I'm a TS user but hadn't seen that feature before. AFAICT, the library is using a side-side-side-feature (tagged templates) of TS as the core abstraction [1]. Impressive. Might be a little brittle in the face of significant SQL or query composition?

Anyhow, I'm a heavier-ORM user but that's impressive.

--- [1] https://github.com/Seb-C/kiss-orm/blob/c4b6c9ad2f81337938a9c...

Somewhat puzzling post? I read it and appreciated it (but holy crap does it need a TL;DR... (basically, "benchmark carefully")) but had little idea what it has to do with `sled`, which turns out to be an embedded database written in Rust. Perhaps update the title? I was looking forward to some performance guidance for "sled" on "Rust (.rs)" and didn't really find any...

> React and ReactDOM total about 120 KiB of minified JavaScript, > which definitely contributes to slow startup time.

I don't doubt this but I'd like more info on the root cause. Is it loading 120KB of JS (which I doubt) or interpreting/compiling 1MB of decompressed Js (which I suspect is the cause)?

Hopefully, a Scot?

Ha. I was involved with MIPS in 2004 or so and worked with them on their China strategy. They were very worried about going to China and losing control of IP. My counterpoint was: MIPS was basically an also-ran to x86 & ARM and survival was the big question. The chances of survival without presence in China was basically zero so: MIPS should maintain their market in the US and fight for presence in China; if they got into China, then they could focus on the larger war and on defending IP in China...; if they didn't get into China, they were dead anyways.

Putting aside the arguments about that is/is-not monopolistic behavior and assuming the market setup remains as set-up, how might this market evolve?

I'm an Android user and don't really think Apple is doing anything wrong. I'm not sure why anyone should care about how much Apple charges to play in its walled garden (no one seems to care about XBox/Playstation/Nintendo?). If anyone cares, they can use Android, no? If they do care and they don't want to use Android, then they've wandered into fanboy territory. (Here I expect downvotes but I'm not sure why anyone views Apple differently than unethical diamond purveyors: when the seller operates outside your ethics expectations/wants, then you don't buy from them...)

Would be a super-useful to have a sciencecode.com service which is a long-term CI system for scientific code and its required artifacts. Journals could include references to sciencecode.com/xyz and sciencecode.com/abc could be derived from sciencecode.com/xyz. Given Github Actions and Forks, the only thing holding this back is scientists doing it (and, possibly, the HN community helping).

And I get that it's not fun to have your code publicly critiqued but it's also not fun to live lives based on (medical, epidemiological) unpublished, unaudited, unverified code...

EDIT: hell, just post a "HELP HN: science code @ github.com/someone/project" and I'd be surprised if you weren't overwhelmed with offers of help.

First, this is not an argument against posting this post...

This is an excellent post (I've shared it on). It'd be a great service to the HN community to do these as an AMA-type-thing. Deva is on here and is very generous with her time but it'd certainly embiggen the impactyness to have a "Deva will be on from 10AM-12PM PT on 2020-08-24 to answer questions. Not medical advice, etc." and "Deva's out." sticky notes at the top.

[In which I suggest someone else undertake an obligation for the community... Aware of that. It's just lovely to have such a person/resource in the community and it'd be good to set expectations (none/some) around her involvement since people are dropping in questions and (I assume) hoping for (free) advice/counsel.]