largbae

> We tried to take advantage of Richard's talent for clarity by getting him to critique the technical presentations that we made in our product introductions. Before the commercial announcement of the Connection Machine CM-1 and all of our future products, Richard would give a sentence-by-sentence critique of the planned presentation. "Don't say `reflected acoustic wave.' Say [echo]." Or, "Forget all that `local minima' stuff. Just say there's a bubble caught in the crystal and you have to shake it out." Nothing made him angrier than making something simple sound complicated.

I wish this idea would take hold in academia. So many papers seem to bury simple and often powerful ideas in jargon.

I wish that an unhandled error would crash its way up the stack automatically returning error if the next function up can do so, until it is either caught into a variable or can't be returned (panic if error can't be returned).

This would get close to python try/catch with even lighter syntax.

This would cut so much boilerplate hand carrying error up the stack.

This may not be optimal but it works for me: everything that I promise to do, even to myself, goes on the calendar. If I am really going to do something, I should have a plan of _when_, and that plan is in the form of a calendar invite to myself.

This does 4 good things and one bad one. Good: 1. It fills up my calendar, which gives me a better chance of getting time to do things. 2. It teaches me to say No to something when the calendar is full, or at least acknowledge the trade-off from saying Yes. 3. It helps me negotiate with people who I am willing to show my crazy to. "Ok which stuff on my calendar is your ask more important than?" 4. My phone reminds me to do all this stuff.

And the bad: 1. Every single night I have to rearrange items that I inevitably miss.

Rearranging is self-punishment, but it has a value. I rarely drop a commitment, and I am better at managing what commitments I make.

True, but unlike BSL you can fork the last Apache commit the day they do.

Wouldn't this just hot swap one monopolist policy for another?

The All-In podcast predicted this exact strategy for keeping OpenAI and other upstarts from disrupting the existing big tech firms.

By giving away higher and higher quality models, they undermine the potential return on investment for startups who seek money to train their own. Thus investment in foundation model building stops and they control the ecosystem.

Also the wallet had "please return me, cash reward" written on it. (Bug bounty advertised)

I wonder if LLM language conversions will lead to a consolidation of languages. Suppose that you could prototype in any language and autoconvert that resulting functionality to Rust or another language with the right runtime features, would that be an appealing dev model?

Well for one thing they can start figuring out who is not yet registered on Signal but would likely be in the phone contacts list of a rich person's number that they know. Social engineering attacks succeed with less.

To be fair, once one assumes FTL communication is available, relativity is no longer relevant or necessary.

Why not both? Planting trees doesn't stop logging, but it definitely helps mitigate the damage.

Call it.... Sustainability engineering if you will.

I much prefer Kanban to Scrum. It gets straight to the point which is "what is the next most important thing to do", and let's management/stakeholders worry about what's next while engineers focus on the current top of their heap.

Where Scrum wiggles its way into relevance is schedule. Most businesses need to be able to commit to some deadline with customers or coordinating teams, and scrum lets managers convince themselves that they can project 3-6 months of work into sprints.

The reality of course is that the requirements and deadlines are constantly moving and never match what was predicted, but you need _some_ prediction to coordinate large projects. So scrum just ends up being a hack to generate time pressure on the component tasks.

What's the right solution? So far in my life it comes down to Kanban and focus for engineers, plus an experienced leader that can guess reasonably well, pad for uncertainty, and renegotiate requirements to make that guess come true.

Is it possible that the overall increase in flights, areas served, and data collection is simply giving us more coverage?

In Kurzweil's version, Moore's law is not a metric of transistor capacity per dollar, but instead is an exponential growth of the amount of information that humans can leverage. He claims that this has been going for thousands of years and continues (quite vertically) now.

He is Australian right?

Sarcasm? I hope?

This article has so few details in so many words. A committee decided 40 people wasn't enough to call it an epidemic, but there is no information to suggest that malice is involved. Have they declared epidemics for smaller clusters? Then there are claims of the number being 350. Is _that_ a lot? Over what time period were the 350 or even the 40 identified?

The GNU effort was driven by dissatisfaction with the license on the prior implementations, and was probably considered disrespectful by the copyright holders of those too...

Interesting contributions! Based on his roles in government I expected his famous last name to imply relation to the later presidents, but Vannevar does not appear to be related to them.

If I hadn't found your comment I was going to say this is the best HN I've seen in months.

I always wonder if there is a circular logic flaw in survey studies of recreation and dementia: could it be that the folks who are chasing Viagra or running marathons don't get dementia, because the ones with dementia don't pursue these activities?

Might cars that stand out more might attract the wrong kind of attention from police as well?

Is this theory going to give us a warp drive?

I think we are roughly in agreement here. Even a "default filter" can be ok as long as it can be _turned off_ by the user.

The problem with deplatforming and censorship is that even the savviest users are unable to discuss what they have no way to ever see.

There is absolutely a middle ground: have multiple choices of user-selectable filters on open platforms.

Subreddits are the closest thing to an implementation of what I want today. Let me go to moderated subsets of the content on a platform without taking away my right to expand my view at any time I wish.

Twitter et al allow you to do some moderation with blocking and follows. But opaque recommendation engines and new accounts present challenges for both.

This is excellent. Like the Dyson sphere, predicting signals for technologies that we can imagine but not yet construct seems like a great way to guide our search for other life.

Now we need a team of smart folks to identify tearing or other processing anomalies in universe-scale simulations.

"There was a spillover effect," said Kevin M. Esterling, a UCR professor of political science and public policy and a co-author of the study. "It wasn't just a reduction from the de-platformed users themselves, but it reduced circulation on the platform as a whole."

I believe the term that you're looking for is "chilling" not "spillover" effect. This not a novel effect of censorship by deplatforming.

You can feel it when you're doing what gives your life meaning. For me, I am at my best when using my skills and resources to serve my family and friends. It could be as simple as hosting a get-together or helping someone move.

The article spends a lot of time painting it as mystery before this seemingly obvious paragraph: "Portegies Zwart favours a different explanation, where Jumbos form in the same way as stars, directly from the collapse of a cloud of gas. Known as in-situ formation, this would require us to rethink how low the density of a gas cloud can be in order to trigger such a collapse. But for Portegies Zwart, "I think in-situ formation is the only one in which I don't have theoretical problems," he says. "It is the most promising."

Why would a nebula not produce _every_ possible size of object over its billions of years?

Maybe this is how stars actually form, gas accretes into chunks of icy matter similar to what happens in Saturn's rings. Then those small objects gravitationally meet and sometimes coalesce into moons, then small planets, big planets, brown dwarves etc. finally when enough stuff has coalesced, the gravity is strong enough to cause fusion and boom you have a star.

It is not perfect, but most airlines will try not to swap plane models as it breaks all the seating assignments.

I think the older Boeing planes through 737-900 are as safe as ever. 737-MAX+ and 787 seem to be where the design process went awry. Even then, there seem to be known workarounds to the bugs.

For what it's worth, I still fly on them all, I just remember to tell my family I love them before takeoff when the safety card has MAX on the label.