killjoywashere

I see a number of responses about "I want less". I come at this from a different angle: I have been around. Like, a fair bit. Lived on a tropical island, transited the Arctic by ship, multiple multi-month stints away from wife and kids. I just submitted my travel estimate for this quarter, I have 9 trips. This quarter. And that's with pruning.

Every time I go somewhere, something breaks. Not the machine, but some element of VPN, satcom, everything (i.e. no network, and definitely no internet), latency is insane, bandwidth is trash, whatever. I responded to Fukushima and my Cr-48 (the original chromebook for beta testers) became bookend despite having wifi and built-in 3G.

I know my life is better with the machines and the networks. I mean, I have tested and lived that too many times. But there's definitely some (a lot of) love-hate in the relationship.

The story of Polars seems to be shaping up a bit like the story of Python 3000: everything probably could have been done in a slow series of migrations, but the BDFL was at their limit, and had to start fresh. So it takes 10 years for the community to catch up. In the mean time, there will be a lot of heartache.

It's also self-inflicted pain: if you keep inflating wages you keep inflating home prices, which makes it even harder to attract people in. Google is doing everything it can to cut costs, closing daycares, tracking who eats, but they have literally acres of empty, brand-new real estate. I suspect another round of layoffs may be coming. And I doubt they'll do the "random selection" again. The smart ones at the fringes started bolting for the doors in December.

Labcorp?

There are ways to set up classification schemes for fee payments: a small fry has to pay a $1. A big fry has to pay an escalating value. Sort of like truckers have to keep much higher insurance policy values than your typical personal auto driver.

So, I'm seeing a lot of chatter in the thread about LaTeX and converting that to HTML and PDF, so LaTeX should be the superior single source of truth. Please keep in mind that many areas of science think of latex as an allergy. I even have a colleague, a plasma physicist, who strongly encourages his team to not use LaTeX because a) collaborators get confused and b) it can be a massive time suck.

Do you mean the app or the physical store? Maybe I'm a luddite for going to the physical store but I go to 4 different Costcos in the Bay area with some frequency and a couple others in SOCAL and I find their interstore layouts different but their intra-store layouts extremely consistent over years. One in San Diego I can confidently say is consistent over a decade.

I barely use the app except for the card and an occasional lookup for something not available in store.

I saw a sign in a cubicle farm one time: "In every group, someone's the weakest. If you don't know who that is, it's you." Fuck that.

#keeper

piezoelectric cooling has left a history of ruins because it doesn't account for condensation, particularly in small, consumer-grade applications where drainage paths are hard to design for. You need one drop of water in the wrong spot. Not a game I'd play with a metal-cased laptop, personally.

Artists need to know the rich. My brother is a technically superb artist, but has achieved artistic death by becoming the chair of an art department. He took me to visit a art school classmate. She flings paint at 10' square canvases with her back to them. He studio is a warehouse in the now-nice part of town. He said the main difference was she made a point of focusing on the social aspects of art early in her career. Her 'art' is a reasonable approximation of the Pacific Garbage Patch, but she knows people and can convince them her slop on canvas will demonstrate their advanced art appreciation. And their b-school friends are non the wiser, so it doesn't matter. She gets paid, my brother doesn't. Sure, he has a pension. She's in half the major collections in southwest. And the in-joke that gets her into those collections is the insecurity of the b-school kids.

Modern art exists for the rich. They use it for mind games with their colleagues and to launder money. If you can figure out how to scale the production of money-laundering schemes without being an auction house, LMK.

We moved overseas (military) and our son wasn't going to be able to keep up with his state-side peers so we homeschooled him through Oak Meadows, with my mom, a recently retired math prof, handling his math education. Oak Meadows was solid. An actual teacher reviewed work and tests with him. This was in a remote outpost many timezones from the US, before the pandemic. 10/10 would do it again. But we also shopped really hard, like, for years.

My general experience with private schools is similar to yours: drama. So much drama.

Comments like above are why I keep coming to HN. Dam it!

> ideal for polar satellite comms

Indeed, Svalbard can be a handy keyword if you want to find articles on ionospheric disturbances to satellite comms, like GPS.

> surprisingly large Thai population

Hmmm... that sounds suspiciously like fisheries-related slavery/indentured servitude. See also: Dutch Harbor.

> McKinsey

Oh, fuck me. Fuck the McKinsey kids in particular.

How do you propose testing real world ethics in a controlled environment?

As someone with a degree in physics, who's mother is a math teacher and helped build a state level math curriculum, it's hard to convey how much I hate Common Core as a parent. My son mercifully avoided it entirely by being too far ahead and then hopping out of state during the worst of it. But my daughter took it with both barrels between the eyes. Teachers who don't get it blaming students who ask their parents who try to explain and get told, by everyone, they don't understand. Batshit crazy conceptual jumps (If you have 17 triangles and divide them into 3 equal groups, how many sides are in the remainder?). And then moving out of the California school districts, the new district didn't recognize those courses at all, so when she aced precalc and they didn't have enough kids to take calc, they had her take ... algebra 2. WTF?

Then when she went to back to California for college, they made her take precalc AGAIN! Can you demolish someone's motivation any more? Fuck common core and the entire privileged shitshow of East Coast math professor elites that came up with this crap.

Any professional program instills way more than just knowledge to pass a test. The fact that you survived long enough to pass the test is often a big part of the test's function. The graded practice thing is actually even more intimidating. Not only do you have to do well, you have to do well live in front of people, and you have to have had the requisite experience in those hours of practice to get an adequate portfolio together. This portfolio development component can be brutally harder than all the tests combined.

Feature request: Any chance of a "back in time" slider? I'm going camping this weekend for a bike race in Utah. Even there I don't recall being impressed by the stars there, compared to my childhood in Kansas, where I could see the Milky Way from my front yard. It would be interesting to compare this to what it looked like 30 years ago.

People who think cloud computing is the future of all things don't understand where their chips come from.

I first saw some sort of cooler screen in a grocery store in Bangkok, I think around 2019. The door was actually transparent, it was just the pixel layer, no reflectors or lights (light coming from the luminance of delicious products lit themselves by traditional in-cabinet lighting). As I recall the imagery was a loop of a pleasant airline attendant-looking lady offering a coke bottle.

Not sure I have been to a drug store of any kind in a few years though. Are these different? Truly screens so you can't see what's in the cabinets?

Hospitals make the lions share of the profits. Non-corporate hospital owners are famously poor managers and tend to spend the money not wisely until they go bankrupt, then a corporate system buys the hospital, restructures, and takes all the profit. See HCA, Tenet, Partners, Mayo, Stanford, Anthem, etc. Fun fact, HCA was cofounded by Bill Frist's father. Bill Frist became a cardiac surgeon, then a US senator for Tennessee. At one point he built another healtchare system and sold it to Anthem.

You'd think the medical schools might remain independent under their universities, but that often turns out to not be the case as well. Turns out asking for handouts from the endowment looks a lot like bankruptcy, and the rest of the university takes a dim view of it, especially considering how home addresses of their physician colleagues (hint: very large houses in the best neighborhoods). See Tulane, Georgetown, etc. The state school systems, like the UCs, tend to do better, or are at least shielded by the state budget.

If you point to Mayo, Stanford, and Partners as exceptions, I'd say they're the exceptions that prove the rule. Mayo has always been a self-sustaining business. Stanford and Partners have ready consultation with the strongest business schools in the US, if not the world, and the endowments to match.

Benson Leung was doing this for a while. It does seem like something Consumer Reports might take on, but they'd have to sub to Benson or someone like him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benson_Leung

Outside the consumer space, I suspect any serious business relying on USB is going to have an EE or 10 who are happy to inform the buying decisions.

> India

Ok, so, I have a friend who works big tech and he has no chill for Indians (SWEs, PMs, etc). Is there a grain of truth to the “lazy Indian” trope? I always assumed, especially first generation immigrants, would be working balls-to-the-wall. Am I wrong? Is there some sort of incentive misalignment in the H1B program? Is it cultural (e.g. like “island time”, which I’ve learned is at least partially attributable to the futility of working harder under the tyranny of distance)?

I’m not saying Indians are Lazy. I’m asking is there a perceptual issue due to some factor that’s obvious to the typical Nth-generation American?

Telling that this has 7 points and no comments. Sort of proves the author's thesis that start-ups have fully integrated this and their business culture will be a dominant business culture in 10-15 years as they become medium and large businesses.

I seriously think the most effective way to get everyone to TAI would be for Apple to do it: make it part of their WWDC keynote. Every political leader would learn about TAI within 24 hours, from a politically neutral, technological source they consider a lodestar. They would ask their people, who would document the ask in a formal inquiry to the science and technology people in their government, who would then respond with an executive summary of a detailed plan to implement TAI on all government systems.

Exactly. China sees the current sale price of Russian petroleum products as just such an opportunity, and is using the Northern Sea Route to move the products (1). The Russians have recently passed a law to further assert their control of that route (2). Interestingly, the US countered by conducting what amounts to a freedom of navigation operation in the area (3).

(1) https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-24/russia-s-...

(2) https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/new-russian-law-nor...

(3) https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/arctic/2023/10/uscg-healy-...

> debt holders get pissed

To understand what this actually looks like, read Hank Paulson's Dealing with China where he describes speaking with Chinese leaders during the 2008 crisis. The Chinese are massive holders of US dollars and did not find TARP or quantitative easing amusing.

https://www.amazon.com/Dealing-China-Insider-Economic-Superp...

> There is no spoon

Reference is to the Matrix, the young monk in the waiting room who is bending a spoon with his intent.

https://screenrant.com/matrix-movie-no-spoon-phrase-meaning-...

edit: why the downvotes? I saw the original movie in theaters, I still didn't get the reference. Some of us are old.