As somebody who gave two honest attempt at building a PRNG... no, not quite. Building complexity -- especially one that isn't trivally reducible -- is quite hard.
5,397 karma · joined April 6, 2009
8½
return -ENOCOMPREHEND;
Dean Baquet, the executive editor:
>That criticism I firmly reject. The project fell fully within our standards as a news organization. In fact, 1619 - and especially the work of Nikole - fill me with pride.
Any dissent got quashed from high above.
"It says a lot about an organization when it breaks it's own rules and goes after one of it's own. The act, like the article, reeks."
The tweet was condemning an op-ed by Bret Stephens[2], that applied mild criticism to The 1619 Project's playing fast-and-loose with history.
--
Presumably through Vortex'[0] similarity to the Symbolics PN 365407[1][2] keyboard, with its very distinctive design that manages to capture at once both futurism and timelessness.
Disregard the 2020's clunky cherry switch keyboards, acquire the OG Best Keyboard.
--
[0] https://mechanicalkeyboards.com/shop/images/products/large_V...
[1] http://xahlee.info/kbd/symbolics_keyboard_pn_365407.html
[2] http://coder.zoomquiet.top/data/20130716102310/index.html
Nonetheless this condemnation, once legislated, have removed the very practical ability to purchase important services or goods when they matter the most to you. Instead we end up all over-buying just to ensure we have it at the key junction.
European here, let's talk personal experience. The americans have a very unhealthy situation wrt unions, and i'm not surprised people with do-it-yourself and can-do attitudes common in tech are soured up to them. And my impressions are relative to polish culture, where unions are traditionally quite strong.
I was responsible for selecting several tech conferences for my boss to visit, both in USA and Europe, Middle East, and Asia. Having read most of the documents proffered, I was shocked to find the amount of red tape that was specific to union arrangements in USA, and USA only. Stands, decorations, electrics, cargo large and small. The rider of one american general contractor was the longest document I had to process across 3 continents. We're talking "young institutions" - tech conferences, organized mostly by, and for, "do it yourself" kind of people.
Were the problems insurmountable? No, certainly they were surmountable. Did it have a sour taste and impression of a lot of wasted effort on both sides of the contract? Yes, certainly it did.
1. removing the commercial interests doesn't stop even half the trouble. Aside of commerce, there is activism, there is politics, and there is social tribalism. You can't even meaningfully remove those. Given that those three stay, the commercial part allows a counter-balance to the ideological and tribal concerns.
2. the healthiest communities are the ones that don't shy away from gatekeeping. With communities and gatekeeping being the key words. Check out IRC, the Eternal September seems to be fading away and already half way gone. Heck, even HN is a half decent example of a community that self-improves through gatekeeping.
Also, here's a link that hopefully handles the infamous 'egg' surprise jwz prepared for HN users :-)
Luckily the high power level is maintained at reliably high speed [0], ensuring airflow for cooling.
Even better, aircraft by its very long-range nature will have much larger battery:engine ratio. For example this 2018 article [1] discusses airplane with 9x the Tesla's battery capacity and 3x the Tesla's engine power, in other words, its batteries would need to handle only 1/3rd electrical load as much at peak load (per unit). The lower power density[2] of the battery pack again provides for easier cooling; perhaps even passive cooling or air cooling instead of forced liquid cooling. Whereas Tesla's sustained performance is limited by battery pack thermals.
Lastly, it's worth noting the ICE aircraft engines are "overbuilt" as compared to the roadgoing ones, mostly for sake of reliability.
--
[0] aside of the engine run-up and initial acceleration, but both of those are short anyway
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18602771
[2] not to mix it up with energy density
Through hiding, feature discoverability is hampered.
>Our second change introduces a maximum line width
I resize my browser for the optimum line width on my computer, taking into account monitor DPI, viewing distance, visual acuity, and other individual factors. Please don't make content on computer monitor as badly cramped as it is on mobile. One size does not fit all, and there's a reason computer is higher productivity than mobile.
This is at the same the truest and the wrongest sentiment.
True, because experience teaches that db rollbacks are exceedingly rare for production. The cost of maintaining them is larger than the costs of doing it by hand. Moreover, since the rollback path typically is much less tested and validated, you run significant risk of a blind rollback messing up your schema or data even further. With GP programming we typically choose to hide new functionality behind a feature flag and toggle it instead of relying on downgrading the software version.
Wrong, because there should be ability to perform provably lossless schema and data transformation. A lossless transformation would by its nature be amenable to a safe rollback. Just like a unified patch(1) patch file is a lossless transformation of a file and thus can be reversed, a lossless database change could be. The database engine could even offer an explicit support for checking, validating, and enforcing lossless (reversible) transformations, in similar spirit to the foreign key constraints guarding against mistaken deletion of relational data. Come to think of it, it would be very similar to a long-running transaction that encompasses both data and schema change, and that has side-effects visible to other transactions before it is closed and has its metadata discarded.
The gist was, a bare messaging+microblogging platform is, by its own nature, morally neutral[1]. Of course if the operator starts doing editorial decisions - like algorithmic timelines, or propping up/pushing down content, or manipulating user mood - then the operator clearly is making moral judgements & decisions.
Funny how respecting user privacy does, at least partly, absolve the operator from a lot of risks related to making moral judgements on a mass scale in a hurry.
--
[1] with the only caveat that, if somebody believes facilitating communication to be evil or good, then it would be considered respectively evil or good.
It used to be that people and organizations making unethical purchases were the ones we considered, and held, responsible. For a long time we've had good, positive movements centered on informing the buyer. We added expiration dates, ingredient lists, nutritional value information, crashworthiness scores and reliability ratings, country of origin labels, even ethical sourcing labels. Perhaps too much of a good thing caused information overload and resulting numbness? Somehow, between the Prohibition, the "war on drugs", and the supply side moral regulations, we've lost the spirit of "well informed free agents making decisions".
Most of the services (FB and the likes) we're discussing here are morally neutral by their nature, and it takes concerted efforts to make them non-neutral[1]. It is the particular use they are being put to that is moral or immoral. Let's not shift vast moral powers from the wide society to a narrow cadre, shall we? The economy is a neat distributed system. It's the popular democracy before democracy became popular. Let's not give it up.
--
[1] example of non-neutrality: the current trend of algorithmic manipulation
--
[2] https://github.com/miscavage/De-Mainstream-YouTube-Extension...
According to the current scuttlebutt lore, Youtube makes a concerted effort to steer users towards authoritative sources (typically the big media brands), especially on spicier subjects. This is in response to the recent slew of articles accusing Youtube of user radicalization.
At this point, even the awareness of recommendation bubbles and their shape & size can help quite a bit. It's a valid research.
It grates me that Mozilla seems to take very one-sided view on the politics of it, but hey, it's a start. Hopefully others will follow to counter-balance the Mozilla's slant.
This is not quite right, legally speaking. Currently Youtube and other platforms enjoy the protection of Communication Decency Act Section 230 [1]. In particular, the passage "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider".
This passage has two side effects. One is, those platforms enjoy a liability protection - they cannot be sued for the content published on them, as they are not 'speaker/publisher' of the content (the original poster is). The other is, those platforms should not enjoy the freedom of speech protection - as they are not, legally speaking, the 'speaker/publisher' of the content.
The 'freedom of speech of Youtube' argument runs counter to Youtube's best interest - immunity from civil liability, as granted through the Section 230.
--
That is hardly an advantage for the victim. Come to think of it, that's a (rare but realistic) threat for normal, licit commerce.
Doubtful, given how popular it is among people and ogranisations that carefully measure the RoI of their marketing & outreach operations, and constantly adjust balance of their efforts among 2, 3, 4 different communication channels (YT, Insta, mail, in-person events, topical forums, old style media, etc.).
A more fitting hypothesis would be, "Twitter opened up a couple new paradigms of influencing people". The paradigms are complex, opaque, and subtly inter-related; quite hard to grasp for people that aren't fully "in the loop". That's why there appearance of chaos and, at the same time, we see highly organized action emerges from this chaos.
There's however one key, pivotal change that happened during the wartime - scaling out the manufacturing and logistics. Primarily USA, and largely Great Britain and USSR, scaled out production of weapons, vehicles & materiel, subassemblies, and certain raw materials by factor of 10x or even 100x. Same with the related logistics. This was a huge undertaking[1], required high level of engineering, manufacturing, and managerial expertise. If people like GP only got into weapons & materiel production in the wartime, they'd still contribute greatly to the military effort.
--
[1] building and relocating whole factories, rearranging production lines, and adjusting designs & manufacturing techniques for streamlining. Example, a ship was built in under 5 days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Robert_E._Peary
--
[1] https://jigsaw.google.com/issues/
[2] for example https://boingboing.net/2019/08/14/white-aligned-english.html
Yes, the find -type f focuses on files; nonetheless it's easy enough to right-click-select the relevant directory to open it rather than the file.
#!/usr/bin/env rc
if (~ `{find -type f | 9 grep $1 | wc -l} 1)
plumb `{find -type f | 9 grep $1}
if not
find -type f | 9 grep $1For me, Tar + compression is optimal for most of my use cases - transfer over network, software package distribution, long term storage. In case of transferring over fast network, uncompressed Tar is pretty good [0], and Lz4 compressed is pretty fast too. In case of distributing software, XZ compression is optimal (expensive, good level for small projects). In case of long term storage, Rzip compression is optimal (very expensive, good level for large projects).
Besides the pragmatic considerations, as a software developer & maintainer, I honestly enjoy composability.
Funnily enough, just yesterday I've read the specification of SQLite Archive Files[1]. A pretty cool format and yet - my first question was, "Why is there no support for other compression methods? Like Lz4 for high speed, XZ for high compression?" Please note that, unlike with Tar, extending this standard is pretty much a no-go. Meanwhile a .tar.gz / .tar.xz / .tar.rz / .tar.lz4 is a self-documenting file. You know what to do, and it's easy to write a tool that does the right thing automatically.
I've been implementing a toy project recently, and one of the network communication protocols in it has grown into a poor man's re-implementation of Tar. Having realized that just now, I'll probably yank out several dozen lines of code and replace them with one call to tar on each side. However crufty Tar it might have gotten over decades, it's certainly less buggy than my hand-rolled code.
Lastly, Tar is a much richer format than one might ordinarily expect. For example it supports multiple versions of the same file[2] - and you can add newer version(s) incrementally (append-only file; a much safer operation than re-writting/replacing files). Think a poor man's Git/SQLite/Wiki/whatever. Self-contained, self-documenting, all very nice.
--
[0] uncompressed Tar supports fast seeking. If you expect working with an archive for a while, just create an uncompressed copy. Or a text file index, we don't judge.
[1] https://www.sqlite.org/sqlar.html
[2] https://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/html_node/multiple.h...
due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_Nationality_Ac...
In all seriousness, impressive work - and very pragmatic delivery, queue system and all.
----
Easy, reliably DoS -- and the user has no means of fixing this vulnerability, other than rooting the phone and hacking around. Which is made ever less feasible.
1. The crazy ideas jacquesm decries have a limited influence on one's life. Those are (predominantly) singular topics rather than all-encompassing ideologies. They are more of conversation starters than life guides. Aside of some rare dangerous ones (COVID-19 theories perhaps?), their impact places somewhere between stamp collecting and junk food consumption. All the flat earthers, the 5G's, the moon landing hoaxes etc., - let people have weird hobbies. We can handle them as a society.
2. Given how prevalent conspiracy theories are - across times, cultures, geographical locations, social niches - I posit our propensity towards them is not a random fluke of human psyche. No, I posit the conspiracy theories play a role in some other societal processes. I posit that trying to eradicate or suppress the underlying mechanism, without understanding the mechanism in the wider context of all societal processes would cause unforeseen negative consequences.
While I can't speak for Go's authors' mindset, here's my view:
One array of records is about as simple interface as possible, and it's good enough for many use cases. Contrasting with that, reading the directory with repeated readdir()'s or equivalent is fraught with hidden pitfalls. You end up being responsible for sorting, for resuming syscall in case of a signal or other interruption, for handling changes to the list of files during read... and probably other concerns above and beyond that.