meekrohprocess

It is an interesting bit of etymology, isn't it?

The quote doesn't really make sense if you use a traditional definition of "witch hunt", because the phrase comes from actual historic trials where the charge was something like "consorting with demons". The penalty was often death, even though people don't actually consort with demons in the real world.

There were no witches, of course, and the underlying causes of real witch hunts are a matter of speculation. Some people say it was a way to get rid of the elderly, some people say that ergot poisoning could have played a role, some people say that mobs are violent and irrational by nature. But everybody who was tried in a historical "witch hunt" was innocent.

Still, with the advent of the internet, it's taken on a new meaning. Today, "witch hunt" means something like "piling on". The target may or may not be guilty, but the phrase implies that their alleged guilt doesn't necessarily merit the amount of attention that they are getting.

It might be interesting to investigate when that change in meaning happened, and why.

I'm curious if the author has heard of sites like:

* https://repl.it/

* https://jsfiddle.net/

I didn't see anything like that mentioned in the article, but I think that you can easily write code inside your browser today.

Also, web browsers are already extremely heavy and complicated. That complexity is convenient for end users, but it also has costs, like making it very difficult and expensive to create a new competitive browser. Do we really need to add another standard to turn them into offline IDEs on top of everything else?

What's wrong with targeting ads based on subject matter?

TV channels and magazines know how this works. If the page is about fashion, sell ad space to clothing companies. If the page is about travel, sell it to hospitality companies and tourism boards. If the page is about politics or finance, sell it to people making catheters and stair lifts.

It's much less creepy than trying to spy on everybody who reads the page, and then looking for an ad that fits your warped understanding of their preferences.

Reminds me of a scene from Cryptonomicon that may or may not have been inspired by history. It describes the RAM from a fictionalized 1940s computer:

>The pipes are laid out horizontally, like a rank of organ pipes that has been knocked flat. Stuck into one end of each pipe is a little paper speaker ripped from an old radio.

>“The speaker plays a signal—a note—that resonates in the pipe, and creates a standing wave,” Waterhouse says. “That means that in some parts of the pipe, the air pressure is low, and in other parts it is high.” He is backing down the length of one of the pipes, making chopping motions with his hand. “These U-tubes are full of mercury.” He points to one of several U-shaped glass tubes that are plumbed into the bottom of the long pipe.

>[...]

>“If the air pressure in the organ pipe is high, it pushes the mercury down a little bit. If it’s low, it sucks the mercury up. I put an electrical contact into each U-tube—just a couple of wires separated by an air gap. If those wires are high and dry (like because high air pressure in the organ pipe is shoving the mercury down away from them), no current flows. But if they are immersed in the mercury (because low air pressure in the organ pipe is sucking the mercury up to cover them), then current flows between them, because mercury conducts electricity! So the U-tubes produce a set of binary digits that is like a picture of the standing wave—a graph of the harmonics that make up the musical note that is being played on the speaker. We feed that vector back to the oscillator circuit that is driving the speaker, so that the vector of bits keeps refreshing itself forever, unless the machine decides to write a new pattern of bits into it.”

Mechanical computing in general is fascinating. People also used to use precisely-machined drums and cams to perform complex realtime calculations.

No, I don't believe so. Any individual can easily create a website and publish whatever they like. It costs maybe $100/year and takes a couple of hours for an inexperienced user to set up a Wordpress blog with manually-moderated comments. Nobody's speech would be censored if Section 230 were repealed.

Instead, platforms would be treated as though they had consciously decided to publish every publically-available comment/file upload/post/etc. That would probably mean manually moderating everything, and rejecting a lot of it for capricious reasons.

But honestly, I am not convinced that that would be a bad thing. It would certainly encourage more people to create their own publishing mediums, and it might help break up the titanic oligarchs that currently occupy the market.

Put it this way: I would happily give up sites like HN to remove the business model that makes mass-scale social media viable. Sites like Twitter and Facebook have inflicted unconscionable harm on our collective humanity, and they have demonstrated a complete inability to self-regulate.

Transparency in how ads are targeted would go a long way.

Personally, I would appreciate a legal mandate that every targeted advertisement must include a link explaining which demographics or criteria are being used to target the ad.

Ideally the ad would also need to identify which criteria were applicable to the individual who was shown the ad, and where that information came from. That requirement might be onerous to implement, but maybe it could kick in at a certain revenue threshold for the ad network.

Imagine if people had to be told that they kept seeing embarrassing ads because their bank sold their interest in [product category] to a marketing agency. Or if you could inform your aging relatives that they shouldn't trust ads which target them based on their past multilevel marketing purchases. I can dream...

This is pretty cool. An Apple car could be amazing, and something like a small electric town car probably wouldn't be too expensive as a joint pilot product between companies like Apple and Hyundai.

But, here are the big questions. Will it work with my Android phone and my relatives' Fire tablets? And will it continue to work well in 20 years when it stops getting updates?

If the answer to both of those is "yes", then I'm excited.

Yeah, that - thanks. I'm not a nukular physicist.

Maybe. I'll believe it when a large-ish city runs off of it.

Good question, and the answer is still a matter of opinion.

I think the HN crowd is mostly excited because it is an ISA that fits two important criteria:

* You can build a RISC-V CPU into your own digital designs for $0. There are also a lot of free designs which use open-source buses like Wishbone if you don't want to build your own.

* Linux/GCC/etc. will probably support a compliant RISC-V implementation.

And the cynical/realist crowd is harrumph-ing after a few important questions, like:

* Many important features are not yet finalized, including things as basic as a nested interrupt controller. So, how compatible will modern RISC-V implementations be with future software?

* Will "good enough" performance actually be good enough? It's still not clear whether a RISC-V CPU will be competitive with ARM et al on power and performance on a similar process node. It might be, but the ecosystem needs to mature.

So it's one of those things that always seems to be 5 years away, like practical fission or the year of the Linux desktop.

But if we ever do get to a point where you can use something like LiteX to generate a RISC-V SoC with N CPUs and driver support for its major peripherals on Linux, that would be exciting. Fabrication on 45-130nm process nodes might also be affordable for small startups by that point, too.

It's kind of funny how so many people instinctively dislike season 2.

"Blegh. Unions. Politics. Yawn."

But it makes sense, right? Real corruption and crime isn't always about drugs and shotguns.

Yeah. It's always a bad situation, and really the best we can do is empathise when people have to go through it.

Voting with your feet is usually the best policy, but people with visa issues have an especially hard time with that. Sadly, asking our representatives for visa reforms to avoid putting people in indentured positions doesn't seem to accomplish much.

And some people will choose to demand justice even when it isn't the best move for their career or personal lives. I don't think it's right to admonish that.

A fun anecdote from my youth near a US seaboard was that our elementary and middle school buildings were designed by the same person who designed a few prisons around the area.

When I bounced around cities later in life, I was surprised at how many of my peers said the same thing as a conversation piece.

Maybe they used the same governmental bidding process. "Needed: a building. One food preparation and eating area. Hallways suitable for lining up and proceeding in rows with many small rooms. One yard with sporting facilities."

This might be a good time to mention Jay Carlson's excellent "So you want to build an embedded Linux system?" article:

https://jaycarlson.net/embedded-linux/

It's been discussed here before, but it's an impressive reminder of what an individual can accomplish with modern small-batch PCB manufacturing.

It also goes a long way to make large-pitch BGA devices and high-speed signal design seem less intimidating to newcomers. Definitely worth a read if you're interested in these kinds of devices.

Also, the Lichee Nano is one of the only freely-available English-language reference designs for the Allwinner FIC100s processor, which is nice.

Well, a company doesn't have to be big to be impactful. What's important in my experience is a productive environment which can foster the occasional side project.

This is actually something that I've struggled a bit with, because it feels like the most interesting and educational jobs are the ones that involve more than 40hrs/week.

Sometimes I wish that I could find a 20hr/week role with the potential to make big positive improvements in peoples' lives. But there are always other groups trying to do the same thing, and they're never happy to stop at part-time.

I think they mean that you should document everything, then express your concerns to HR in a non-confrontational way, then quietly bring your documentation to a lawyer if nothing changes.

The documentation is your "plan B" which HR doesn't need to know about.

I don't think so. I've worked at other FAANG companies which had these sorts of posts written about them, and I've witnessed plenty of situations that I would call "abusive".

But what I read in this article was beyond the pale. I never felt like anybody adjacent to any of my roles might have cause to fear for their physical safety. Reviews were used as political tools and occasional sources of psychological abuse, sure, but people still got marched out quickly if they stopped acting like empathetic human beings towards their peers.

Having also worked for companies that HN hates, of course it's much different on the inside. Nobody twiddles their mustache and cackles when they make decisions that screw people over. They find ways to make it sound benevolent and positive.

Keep at it! Big/impactful companies are great places to learn, and I don't want to tell you what to think. But your views on topics like benign intents and unintended consequences might change after you see enough of them firsthand.

Yes, but we're not talking about people who read the Bible here.

One example off the top of my head, Jeff Sessions once invoked Romans 13 to defend Trump's immigration policies:

>“I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order,”

If he had actually read that book, he would have reached Romans 13:8.

>Owe no man any thing, but to love one another: for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law.

Or Romans 15:1.

>We then that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak, and not to please ourselves.

At some point, you have to recognize that many people don't actually care what their holy books say. I maintain that a curse clause could work with those kinds of people.

I wish that modern oaths also had curse clauses. It seems oddly common for autocrats and kleptocrats to have no problem screwing over millions of people, while still being terrified of religious or superstitious wrath.

"So help me god" is not enough. How about, "And should I ever violate this sacred oath, in thought or in deed, may I be forever cursed and damned."

Anyways, the US military already takes those sorts of oaths to refuse and report illegal orders, but they still commit plenty of war crimes.

Where do you live that that is a viable option?

Outside of super-dense urban centers, there is almost no public transit, and taxi/Uber rides are prohibitively expensive because of the distances involved. Outside of cities, it's not unusual to drive >100 miles on an average day.

And that's on easy mode, when you don't have kids to ferry around.

We absolutely should. But we should also have alternative ways for John Doe to get around without a car, and we don't.

Car culture in the US has started to evoke that old saw: "If you owe the bank a thousand dollars, you have a problem. If you owe the bank a billion dollars, the bank has a problem."

Our society would be a lot better off if we regularly revoked the licenses of unsafe drivers. But the entire nation is designed around car ownership, so doing that today would be an unconscionable human rights violation.

That's always being worked on - modern medicine is nothing short of miraculous.

People are trying. We want to cure cancer, and find effective general-purpose antivirals, and help people maintain healthy bodies, and figure out how to repair hearts, and cure diabetes, and fix autoimmune disorders, and figure out general-purpose gene therapies, and work out what exactly is up with the gut microbiome, and make prosthetic ears/eyes/etc, and then there's the brain...

There's only so much that you can do with the technology we have right now. Advances in other fields will eventually help, but you can't just spend a trillion dollars and make people live an extra decade.

Anyways, wouldn't significantly longer-lived people exacerbate climate change? You'd have many more people on the planet, and individuals would accumulate much more total wealth to spend on wasteful consumer goods thanks to the power of compound interest.

Sure, but then what happens when you give your neighbor's dog RF burns for walking in the vicinity? Unshielded magnetrons aren't exactly safe...

It probably refers to digital design education, not software development education.

And it does seem like universities are rapidly starting to adopt the ISA for that purpose. A few years ago, those classes would use a custom instruction set written by a professor, or maybe a simple proprietary ISA like MSP430. I don't think ARM was very common.

For example, MIT used to teach computer design with an arbitrary CPU that they called "beta". Now they use RISC-V.

https://computationstructures.org/notes/pdfs/beta.pdf

https://6004.mit.edu/web/fall20/schedule

> For example, in RISC-V, the bits are 'jumbled up' when encoding constants; the argument is it, ultimately, makes the processing faster (due to the way sign-extension works).

It's not just sign-extension. You can naïvely gather several immediate bits without knowing what the opcode is, and the source/destination register IDs are also always in the same place. It does help to simplify the digital design, because your decoding logic can pluck out a few fields with no state dependencies.

I had the same response to the odd instruction format at first, but it's grown on me over time.

>And recently, RV supports big endian. Why?

Probably to support networking equipment. They still strongly recommend using little-endian.

They started using soy-based insulation in automotive wiring a couple decades ago.

Sadly, it turns out that rodents really like to eat that kind of insulation. So if you have a car made after ~2000, you need to keep pests away from wherever you store it.

Yes, I think it's a very exciting technology for sending all kinds of small packeted data around rural areas. Besides messaging, it's also good for having remote stations report their current conditions (e.g. electric fence battery, solar panel status, soil moisture, weather conditions, etc)

There are already several companies producing turn-key agricultural monitoring systems like that. But I also think that a big part of why it works well is the lack of congestion in more remote areas.

Load testing for cyclical holiday traffic spikes is not a new or difficult concept. Most retail companies do it annually around September-October, IME.

But the cause of the outage is still speculation. I hope that something else caused it, because Apple's customers are right to expect Apple to undergo that kind of baseline preparation.

HopeRF modules are a decent example of consumer LoRa hardware. Check the datasheet:

https://www.hoperf.com/modules/lora/RFM95.html

They advertise bit rates of up to 300kbps, but that doesn't tell the whole story. If you look under the LoRa modem section, you'll see that the actual data rate for that kind of modulation tops out at a little less than 10kbps with a high bandwidth and low spreading factor.

LoRA is also susceptible to interference. If two packets collide, the CRC will fail and all of the transmitters will need to back off and try again. And usually, higher bandwidth means fewer channels running in parallel.

So you might be able to get 1-10kbps between two nearby transceivers, but that probably wouldn't scale well to a mesh network and it's already very slow.

It seems like a good technology for pagers and intermittent text messengers, but a full-fledged network with streaming and file-serving seems like a stretch.