marktangotango

There was a classic science fiction story with a twist on this idea; a low tech species was about to be discovered by a more advanced species. And according to the rules of the more advanced species, any planet that wasn't capable of space travel would become a client or vassal, and a planet with space travel would be seen as a peer. The protagonist built a pusher style rocket using an explosive, and launched the lightest person he knew into orbit, who happened to be his girl friend.

I keep thinking this was a Larry Niven story, maybe someone here is familiar?

Edit; another classic story was the novel Footfall by Niven and Pournelle which featured launching the USS Missouri into orbit on an Orion style pusher to battle the invading aliens.

This is my understanding too. Is it possible to use an fpga without built in diff pairs and serdes, and use the io's that are built with a suitable high speed clock domain for a "diy" differential pair? Maybe not as fast, but still faster than any other io on the fpga?

This is an interesting phenomenon, how some people focus on the design of the page rather than the content. We see it quite regularly on HN related to blog post such as this. One wonders if the sibling commentors here have ever heard of "bike shedding"?

I personally appreciate the content, so thanks for that!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality

I wonder how this reads to Germans who have what amounts to a national holiday of tossing things out before tax time. I recall the first time seeing what appeared to be brand new furniture and electronics sitting on the side walk; it was quite a surprise. Can anyone from Germany comment?

The fundamental reason is producing ethanol from corn requires quite a lot of energy; for cooking the mash and distilling the final product. If the cycle was entirely ethanol "all the way down" it could be carbon nuetral although using ethanol for production would detract from the "total efficiency". Invariably other fuels are used in production.

I went through the math a few years ago from the perspective of "micro power plants" for powering BTC mining. Coal is the winner from a cost perspective; but terribly dirty obviously. And capital intensive. Burning corn as fuel to a high efficiency boiler is actually more efficient than ethanol.

To me the biggest obstacle to this endeavor was creating the pixel art; even with something like Rpg Maker. I believe Rpg Maker has stock assets but at some point you'd want to customize. And that can be a lot of work. Does anyone have experience with this aspect?

I spent two years modernizing one of these IE only apps (moved to chrome/firefox). Sometimes the offending activex control is simply a xml component (literally parsing, xsl, xpath, etc stuff) of a newer version than what was built in at one time. Firefox and Chrome don't handle xml nearly as seamlessly as old IE did. But other times these apps require IE11, but it's actually executing the page in IE6 or 7 compatibility mode. That was the case with mine, Microsoft DHTML Behaviors, the horror, the horror....

> robust to a 50% layoff

That's an interesting metric worth considering.

The old "oops laid of the wrong people" gag. Never gets old!

I say that jokingly, but wow does it suck. I've been on both sides. I think it's actually worse to be not laid off and left picking up the pieces for incompetent management. One time I had to get admin rights and log into a "shadow IT" developers machine (who had been laid off) to get his Eclipse workspace directory and get the code and decipher what the state of his 5 apps were. Good times.

PolyML has a lot more "stuff" build in like threads, multiprocess, and sockets. If I were to use SML in anger I'd use PolyML. Sadly I've never had the need.

https://www.polyml.org/documentation/Reference/Basis.html

If Star Trek taught me anything, it's that Aliens don't want to interfere with lesser lifeforms! Unless it's for our own good, then they will but try to hide it [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Watches_the_Watchers

That's interesting, also a possible insight into what the X-37b mission is. Retrieving payloads, but what payloads?

This seems like an implementation of Sugiyama algorithm, how is this different?

I think the notable thing here is; this is really a Redhat layoff since IBM "subsumed" or reverse merged or whatever it was with Redhat. My take is that IBM has been a barely warm carcass for > 20 years already and the Redhat deal did nothing to change that. Here I'm certain that the layoff will be onshore, and the continued hiring will be offshore. That's what they've been doing forever, and their lack of growth and innovation continue to reflect it.

Memory hard crypto POWs such as Equihash or Autolykos spring to mind.

I'm hoping he makes a video detailing the pcb design and layout. Very impressive project using Kicad!

Ninja Rockstar 100x primitive builder here, I agree!

Seriously, I don't begrudge these people one bit. They saw an opportunity and seized it. Admirable in my opinion. Specifically, the videos are so clearly fake it's hard to understand how anyone can be fooled to believe they're real. I mean "throwing" 50 tons of dirt out of a hole to build these things is just too much.

I have been interested to see some factual discussion about the current environment around layoffs compared to previous down turns in tech, but this isn't it. In fact this reads a little wierd. Example:

> Could there be a tech recession? Yes. Was there a bubble in valuations? Absolutely. Did Meta overhire? Probably. But is that why they are laying people off? Of course not. Meta has plenty of money. These companies are all making money. They are doing it because other companies are doing it.

When stock prices and earnings are down one of the surest ways to boost earnings is reducing head count. This has been true forever. It doesn't matter how much money Meta (or whoever) has, it's the quarterly numbers that matter to investors, and companies act accordingly.

I'd even go so far to say this ask is a sign of ill health of the company. Requiring everyone to do what are essentially marketing activities is a red flag imo. If the products and services aren't connecting with the market such that customers or potential customers aren't independently posting about it, that's a problem. Or if the product isn't discoverable via traditional methods, that's another problem.

It was a nice troll, gave me a chuckle.

A lot of organizations have this problem, not covered in the article:

> Anxiety, low abilities

I was once a software engineering manager at a company in the financial services realm. This was a low margin business that had suffered a decade of layoffs when I joined. It was a morass of low effort, punch the clock, do just enough to get by teams and leaders. Making any sort of forward progress was nearly impossible. I gave it my best shot though, and managed to find like minded people throughout the organization. We had a good couple of years and made some real progress. Then the next round of layoffs saw some of these key people let go.

It was very disappointing, but I too left after a time. After the layoffs, 75% of my remaining team quit for better pay. My boss, a director, gave me some support people who could spell "java" and told me to train them up, because we weren't hiring (no one would work for the company anyway, horrible reputation). Yep, that was it for me, I resigned.

All that to say, at some point it's a business problem. I hope others in similar situations don't stress as much as I did.

Edit: words

> This is a very relatable feeling. I often find myself getting trapped into thinking about problems I am unlikely to solve.

I have this problem as well. The most disturbing thing is retracing old paths to dead ends without realizing it. Here I mean internal mental models, but also applies to previously known results I just wasn't familiar with, and don't turn up unless specific phrases are known.

The paper this links too is free access:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3575861

You should duplicate this test against postgres inserts. I did the same thing for sqlite; in go using a mutex on inserts, and sqlite still out performs postgres on inserts (on the same machine).

I suggest you run some simple load tests that do inserts, you'll find WAL is not sufficient for concurrency. Multiple reader, single writers handle this well though.

This project looks really cool. Maybe someone reading this can answer this question. I've been wondering what the in-browser options are for easy to use low poly modeling? Are there any application you'd recommend?

You are being down voted because this is a shallow view. The expression of interest tied to an identity has value. For proof see Google, Meta, Amazon, and Facebook earnings.

> Most companies can do it.

Compensation is a Huge lever on earnings. There would certainly be a consequence on the stock price if margins diminished due to overly extravagant raises, which they most certainly would in a most if not all cases.

The phenomena been written about as "Who moved my cheese?" A lot of people value comfort and reliability over chasing higher salaries and more reward. But the "cheese" gets depleted over time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Moved_My_Cheese%3F

There's also an aspect of the "Dead Sea Effect". The people who stay and settle for the below market salary also tend to be the less talented and/or motivated. I've seen this and done this. In low performance teams and organizations it's easy to "rest and vest" and keep a good work life balance.

http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-d...

Last week my fourth grader came home and said him and his friends wanted to build a web site for trading a certain type of collectible card. They had been doing some Scratch in school so he had that background. I pointed him at neocities, he signed up and worked though their html tutorial on his own. After that he asked ok now how do I do other stuff? I started talking about apis and databases and when his eyes glazed over after a couple of minutes I stopped. Seems like a lot of work doesn't it? I asked. Yeah he said. I advised him to work on small parts at a time, learn a little at a time. Like a page that shows his most valuable cards. I'm waiting to see if he goes back to it before I push it anymore.

I personally think geo/neocities are awesome, I used geocities to learn some frontend stuff back then. I really miss the days when self publishing was more common.