headmelted

It might. If your office is in your home you may have more flexibility to get things done on an ad hoc basis if that were necessary (like something takes down production or someone needs something urgently).

If that were the case when everyone was at the office it just couldn't get done.

To extend this, more useable time with family.

For many people with younger children (and therefore early evening bedtimes), having or not having a commute is not a difference of an hour or two of your day - it's the difference between spending time with your family during the week versus not at all. I've heard this from many friends (and some family) across different industries - hardly any have wanted to stick their heads above the parapet and single themselves out as being a problem.

I already empathised, but this whole thing has really thrown a light on what working parents (specifically those with primary care responsibilities like school pick-ups and drop-offs) in the workplace have been dealing with this whole entire time.

tldr; A great many people have had an increase of 150% of the time they care about the most by working from home - this proposal takes that away from them.

I’m not advocating for surrender, I’m simply pointing out the reason why it’s complicated.

This seems like an incredibly bold assumption to roll the dice on, you know, given you’re talking about almost all life on Earth.

I’ve also never heard of a defence system that can pluck that many missiles out of the air. The closest I’ve heard of is the Iron Dome - which would not be able to stop what you’re talking about at all. I would think the nation that has that capability would make it known for geopolitical reasons.

They have nukes. They’ve indicated they will use them.

I’m not arguing for or against, I’m just pointing out that trading the possibility of data loss in the few seconds after a power cut for a difference of this magnitude actually makes sense in a lot of use cases.

My point above was that the same “cheat” (to use your word) could be applied to the unbranded SSD too, with similar performance gains.

I’m not giving Apple a pass for low flush performance, I’m saying there’s nothing I can see here that’s uniquely available to Apple that would prevent others from deferring flushes in the same way for similar performance gains - which would make sense in many cases.

Honestly I don’t know. The order-of-magnitude performance difference in deferring the flush feels worth it to me if the risk is mitigated to sudden power loss.

I would think when the last of Apple’s hardware moves to ARM they’ll ensure there’s enough onboard battery to ensure the flushes happen reliably across form factors even if there’s a power cut.

If anything, now that the reason for the performance difference has been identified, I’d hope to see numbers for Linux and Windows storage access come up to par with these numbers as they go down this road too (e.g. via the NVME flush toggle mentioned in the article).

Also Europe here, and leaving aside what others have said about how everyone is invested in the stock market whether explicitly or not (which is entirely true), this rings true for me as well - it's also backed up by data.

In the US, the majority of adults are invested in the markets (https://news.gallup.com/poll/266807/percentage-americans-own...), whereas in Europe the number of people invested has historically been lower (https://www.ft.com/content/31c4d453-498e-4cc2-b14f-d7e8b17b9...).

This makes sense when you think about it - in the past you would have built habits and understanding from relatives and your community (e.g. "Don't invest in stocks that's gambling and they always crash!"), whereas since the Internet came along people have more access to data and perspectives from more places.

All of the above said, the last few years, and especially since the lockdowns, the behaviour in the markets has been really alarming. The FT.com link above touches on this, but the rush into [stocks/cryptocurrencies/leveraged funds/options] is something I've never seen before in my lifetime. I don't think the world has ever seen anything like this level of amplified speculation. Bitcoin, Leveraged ETFs, and Options didn't exist in the 1920's. The Netherlands had futures contracts towards the end of Tulipmania, but I haven't seen anything to say that they were leveraged.

In the late 1990's it was clear and readily apparent to everyone that the Internet was a massively important step forward. We agreed on that. It wasn't a controversial or widely disputed viewpoint. The market still imploded because of the sheer amount of rampant speculation, so to think something worse won't happen to a multi-trillion dollar market based on a technology many people think only has value for running Ponzi schemes seems to be pretty irrational.

To top it off, the wall of hype seems impenetrable at this stage ("have fun staying poor!" etc), so it remains to be seen what happens when the plates stop spinning this time.

tldr; Your grandparents might be proven right after all.

Facts.

Your GP isn’t a genius, and they’re more often than not just reading the solution from webmd the same way you might look it up on stackoverflow.

I know this because my GP flat out told me this is the case.

It’s certainly a job that requires a lot of skill, knowledge and experience so as not to do harm, but that’s true of software engineering too.

Wouldn’t it make a lot more sense to have ICs that aren’t space-constrained be modular in these applications?

In a phone or laptop, obviously it would take too much physical space to have such components be changeable, but for vehicles and machinery couldn’t you regulate that common boards/chips/memory be easily accessible and interchangeable to a standard? (Kind of like how you have a fuse panel for your car or a fuse box for your house).

I get that this wouldn’t solve this issue, but it would certainly help by making parts that are susceptible to supply shocks be easily recoverable and reusable.

Not disagreeing with this (although my understanding is that there have been studies that show vaccination has been more effective), but how would you seperate the unvaccinated / previously-infected-and-recovered cohorts?

Even by reconciling PCR testing data (which I imagine is incredibly patchy at best), you still would only know historically how many people tested positive (ignoring what is in all likelihood a majority of the cases that never got tested) and be able to reconcile it against numbers of vaccinated, which tells you nothing useful without being able to intersect the two sets (which you can’t do without uniquely identifying every PCR test and matching it to an individual universally).

i.e. the better data you would need doesn’t exist.

Increasingly I feel like this is one of those pieces of metadata that we should be moving out of the page.

I would suggest moving it into the browser (i.e. read a meta tag or header) but the obvious problem is that they’ll just be forged and it would almost immediately become pointless.

Search engines could help here. If Google were to provide a last cached date (or a date of the last significant change) in the search result that would be far more useful. They certainly have this information from crawling, and it would be difficult to forge as constant substantial changes to game the system would be both expensive for the author, and harmful to the page’s ranking.

This article is quite frustrating in a few ways because I feel like it misses the point on both sides of the fence:

Google’s ethos was clearly to throw a bunch of teams at the problem and see what sticks. From a planning perspective it might seem sensible but for the user it’s deeply confusing: they just want to know from Google which one app is blessed and will be supported for the long haul so they can get on with their day.

Apple OTOH absolutely nailed this. Messages is there, it’s always been there. Sure the i was removed from the word but it was still the same app. Simple, direct, everyone on the same protocol without any confusion.

In terms of the complaints about things like tapbacks - The last thing I want is more than a single row of reactions. The point is for them to be simple and universally understood instantly.

I get this with regards to Van Gogh, and I assume a thousand Van Gogh’s we never got to hear about or appreciate. I wasn’t suggesting at all that he should’ve given up if he wasn’t making money.

I’m just saying that there are easily hundreds of creative activities people do every day just for the love of it. Each of them could be artistically appreciated later. Narrowing in on this one subset, especially with taxpayer funding, seems not only unfair but also uninformative at large (we learn little about the economic impact of UBI as the U is missing here).

As others have said though, this appears to actually be an artist’s grant labelled as UBI, which makes the whole thing moot (these have been around for a long time with allocated funding).

I mean, OK, but one could also argue that the reason a given artist is struggling is because their work is not highly valued in the first place.

Maybe the artist is making under-appreciated contributions, or maybe their work is just not good. It's subjective, which means criticism is subjective too, but it seems a poor place to start with any UBI scheme executed in good faith.

I would think it would have more value as an experiment to start with some of the poorest people in a society and then measure their quality of life and economic contribution throughout and after the programme. If you could show a net-positive economic contribution during the programme, and a net-negative contribution before and after (as unlikely as I suspect that is to achieve) it would make it substantially easier to get popular support for UBI.

Because you just picked a randomly favourable date from an escalating speculative asset?

You might as well say that the team that enjoys a beer and meets up to watch the game on a Sunday is ignoring product quality.

You’ve no basis to point to social causes or anything else and say “something is causing a stink round here and it’s that!”.

Software is built by people. People have viewpoints. There will inevitably be overlap in those viewpoints. There’s no reason to think any of this has anything to do with the thread.

I don’t think conflating inclusivity and/or diversity action with specific product issues is helpful or comes off well here.

There’s so much nuance to it though.

Sure, each of the “big three” work well enough these days for most tasks, but there’s more to it than just compatibility.

macOS has pretty unobtrusive systems in place for code signing and only running software from known vendors.

Linux has code-signing, in that it exists as a technology, but it’s not ubiquitously supported and you don’t get a centralised service vouching for recognised vendors out of the box (which makes sense as it kind of goes against the libre ethos - but it’s not a great situation for many users).

Windows supports gaming and most desktop software, but the security system (last I checked - please tell me if I’m way out of date on this) isn’t granular enough to cater to what you may or may not be comfortable with - so a lot of software will just trigger a UAC prompt for carte-blanche admin rights, which is as dangerous as you imagine.

So very much this.

We’re now at a point where the widespread and rampant destruction that’s been wrought in the name of agile is so bad that it’s not reasonable to say “oh you’re not doing it properly”.

That excuse could be used to avoid responsibility for literally anything.

Hype bros use that to defend token scams (“you just don’t get it”).

There’s an increasing mountain of evidence that shows agile just doesn’t work, makes things actively worse by forcing the creation and then concealment by neglect of engineering problems, and (as discussed above) actively reduces documentation so that agile cheerleaders can pin their incompetence on the engineers that inherit their mess when they cruise on up the ladder oblivious of their failures.

All of this and not a shred of empirical evidence, ever, that it actually achieves anything other than obscuring management stupidity.

Is it factually incorrect, though?

They may not have a legal duty to maximise profits, but investors will expect them to do so - and negative reactions in the stock price would be expected if they were to support unionisation within their business, as it would (rightly or wrongly) be expected to reduce profits going forward.

Boards don't like unhappy shareholders.

I'm not defending an anti-union stance - I'm simply saying that company leads will most certainly see it as a threat to their job if they are unable to increase profits or keep margins fat in perpetuity.

The highlighted explanation in your link supports this assertion.

I love that this was written like 8 years ago, and that if it gets further up the page it will get the HN lovehug.

The author won't know why or what's going on, just that there's a lot of news.ycombinator.com referrer traffic for an old article from nearly a decade ago that hardly anyone read. Then he'll maybe drop by and say hello on the thread.

This is downvoted, I assume because people are maybe disagreeing with the principle rather than the validity of what you said.

A lot of large companies clearly do look at unions as something that forces them to pay more compensation for less work, which they'd have to justify to shareholders and the board. Even if the board would be cool with it, and they could make it fly with shareholders, leadership bonuses and stock grants are tied to performance. I really don't see where this is an incorrect statement to make.

I’ll go out on a limb here and just guess that this boss lives to bash the self-confidence of subordinates.

I realise there’s not a lot of evidence in what you said, but:

1) This is your first job, you’re not expected to know better. Your boss has clearly been in this career for a while to be in charge, so already knew this before criticising you.

2) Your boss telling you that you misunderstood a comment made by your manager is nonsense - he wasn’t there so he has no way of knowing. Not a fan of this word because it’s thrown around for everything, but that to me is transparent gaslighting.

3) You’re more-or-less solo, on a project that they clearly care about enough for it to be a problem - as a first job out of college. That’s just bad management, and no-one competent would expect that to work out - and yet from what you’ve said it has. Good job!

tldr; the problem is very likely not you, but watch out for this dude as there’s a lot of red flags here.

headmelted tried to think of how headmelted would even phrase an answer to this question either way and quickly got very confused.

I’m picturing Richmond from The IT Crowd and it really makes me wonder what happened to Sten.

Sten has been through the dotcom bust. And 2008. And the crypto mess. And a pandemic.

Sten’s blog would be mesmerizing.

Compatibility really is the killer feature here.

Also, foveated rendering means dramatically improved performance depending on how good their implementation is - at 120hz I'd expect it to be pretty decent.

This.

I always sort of hoped that Apple would either enter the market at some point or acquire DuckDuckGo and try to build out to a larger user base. I realise this is pretty unrealistic, as I'm sure there are far more people out there who would much prefer DDG to remain independent of a megacorp.

I assumed the reason Apple haven't entered the market is that there's likely no way to make money at it without becoming Google, so it would cause them to have two diametrically opposed privacy stances in their business (and because they'd have a long road to build a worthy competitor).

The Ponzi comment above was a poor attempt at humour. He was a con artist who knew he was a con artist.

I do not believe the majority of people in the cryptocurrency space are attempting to harm anyone.

Imagine paying someone for a sandwich and being obligated to give them access to view your bank account balance (past, present and future) in perpetuity.