peeters

Is there a way to do non-scalar multiplication? E.g if I want to say "what is the sum of three dice rolls" (ignoring the fact that that's not a normal distro) I want to do 1~6 * 3 = 1~6 + 1~6 + 1~6 = 6~15. But instead it does 1~6 * 3 = 3~18. It makes it really difficult to do something like "how long will it take to complete 1000 tasks that each take 10-100 days?"

I mean it's no less useful than a more precise, but less certain estimate. It means you either need to do some work to improve your certainty (e.g. in the case of this quiz, allow spending more than 10 minutes or allow research) or prepare for the possibility that it's 700 days.

Edit: And by the way given a large enough view, estimates like this can still be valuable, because when you add these estimates together the resulting probability distribution narrows considerably. e.g. at just 10 tasks of this size, you get a 95% CI of 245~460 per task. At 20, 225~430 per task.

Note that this is obviously reductive as there's no way an estimate of 5-700 would imply a normal distribution centred at 352.5, it would be more like a logarithmic distribution where the mean is around 10 days. And additionally, this treats each task as independent...i.e. one estimate being at the high end wouldn't mean another one would be as well.

So the context of the quiz is software estimation, where I assume it's an intentional parable of estimating something you haven't seen before. It's trying to demonstrate that your "5-7 days" estimate probably represents far more certainty than you intended.

For some of these, your answer could span orders of magnitude. E.g. my answer for the heaviest blue whale would probably be 5-500 tons because I don't have a good concept of things that weigh 500 tons. The important point is that I'm right around 9 times in 10, not that I had a precise estimate.

Still not sure a bill will give you that stability, since Trump has used loopholes to sidestep ratified trade agreements that he himself negotiated. Anything signed by this President isn't worth the paper it's printed on.

It feels to me like they poached some high-level product executive from an intrusive ad company, trained in the art of dark patterns, and pointed them at their paying customers. It's a truly offensive way of looking at your user base, as solely engagement metrics to be optimized. It's what happens when an entire business is built around gamifying one KPI.

"Extraordinary", such as a fictional fentanyl emergency at the northern border (despite the fact that a trivial amount of fentanyl enters the U.S. from Canada, and more enters Canada from the U.S.).

Of course, you have Congress to keep the President in check that these are real emergencies. Which is why the House will definitely be bringing S.J.Res. 37 to the floor, right? Because it's their sworn duty to act as a check on executive power, right?

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/119-2025/s160

On the point of air travel specifically, Canadians are being advised to use airports over land borders because if you are denied entry at U.S. customs at a Canadian airport, they cannot detain you as you are on Canadian soil.

So for Canadians still travelling to the U.S. it might actually increase their carbon footprint.

Knock, knock.

Who's there?

Me, can I come in?

I don't know, come in and we'll find out.

...ok

WHAT THE HELL WHY DID YOU COME IN YOU'RE NOT WELCOME HERE

...sorry but you said-

I DON'T CARE WHAT I SAID.

...OK fine I'll just be leaving.

OH YOU THINK YOU CAN JUST LEAVE? YOU CANT LEAVE! You'll be locked in my dank basement for the next five days while I fill out the paperwork for you to be dragged out of the house!

But I just said I'm willing to leave voluntarily!

Admittedly without knowing much about our dairy industry and supply management, isn't this flawed logic? If a 200% import tariff means Canadian dairy can also be sold at a higher cost, then it's still the consumers bearing the cost--they are being denied access to cheaper dairy altogether.

Sorry I was giving the company's size, not their spend.

So obviously this is an extreme, but I worked for a company that had long dismissed third party cloud providers as too expensive (customers would be routing all of their network traffic through our data centers, so obviously the bandwidth costs would just be too dang high). Then that company got purchased by a certain mega corporation who then negotiated an exclusive deal with GCP, and the math flipped. It was now far too expensive to run our own set of datacenters. Google was willing to take such a low margin on bandwidth that it made no sense not to.

So in this case, hundreds of billions. But the principle stands at lower company sizes, just with different numbers and amounts of leverage.

This was more a response to the comment I replied to, that cloud is always more expensive. And saying it more for everyone, not OP.

It's almost always less expensive at the start, which is super important for the early stages of a company (your capital costs are basically zero when choosing say AWS).

Then after you're established, it's still cheaper when considering opportunity costs (minor improvements in margin aren't usually the thing that will 10x a company's value, and adding headcount has a real cost).

But then your uniqueness as a company will come into play and there will be some outsized expense that seems obscene for the value you get. For the article writer, it was S3, for the OP, it's bandwidth. For me it's lambdas (and bizarrely, cloud watch alarms). That's when you need to have a hard look and negotiate. Sometimes the standard pricing model really doesn't consider how you're using a certain service, after all it's configured to optimize revenue in the general case. That doesn't mean the provider isn't going to be willing to take a much lower margin on that service if you explain why the pricing model is an issue for you.

The reality is when you get to another certain point (larger than the point you describe) you start negotiating directly with those cloud providers and bypass their standard pricing models entirely.

It's the time in between that's the most awkward. When the potential savings are there that hiring an engineering team to internalize infrastructure will give a good return (were current pricing to stay), but you're not so big that just threatening to leave will cause the provider to offer you low margin pricing.

All I'd say is don't assume you're getting the best price you can get. Engineers are often terrible negotiators, we'd rather spend months solving a problem than have an awkward conversation. Before you commit to leaving, take that leverage into a conversation with your cloud sales rep.

I think your understanding is that the Act must be the content. But the Act isn't the content, the Criminal Code, Civil Code etc are the content. The Act itself is more like a patch file, with some surrounding metadata (and its own meta version history as proposed legislation gets marked up throughout the process). It could add a new file, but it could also be an edit. But in neither case is it the effective content, it's a description of changes to said content. (The line does get blurred on the initial commit though, because typically the name of the resulting law is the name of the Act that established it).

So you've called out precisely why version control systems present such a useful analog.

When you have a President that fires, deports, sues, and calls for the impeachment of anyone who challenges him, why on Earth (pun intended) would you take the word of someone whose life is in his hands at face value?

Get on the ground, then tell the truth. The moment Trump politicized those astronauts they became political hostages.

> They liked the "Artemis Program" created by the Trump administration well enough that they simply kept it.

This cannot be overstated. Prior to Biden there was a long history of new administrations of both parties coming in and wanting to make their mark on NASA. Everyone wanted to be what JFK was to the moon race, which meant that whatever the previous guy came up with obviously had to be canned and replaced, so that the new thing would be their thing. NASA was jerked around for decades. You can't do 15 year projects if they're always cancelled after 8 years.

Biden coming in and simply continuing Trump's plan broke the trend. And yet Trump still needed to find a bone to pick to advance his cult of personality.

Sometimes I wonder if he's a secret genius that leverages his own stupidity.

E.g. he might be solely responsible for getting the Liberals reelected in Canada, something that a year ago you would have thought was absolutely impossible. But Trump is so deeply hated in Canada now that every time he mocks Trudeau it makes the Liberals more popular. Liberal support, which before Trump was elected was so low as to make a Conservative election win seem inevitable, has skyrocketed since Trump took office. It's now pretty much a dead heat, and that's before the Liberals have elected their new leader.

So I don't know, maybe he just really, really wanted the Liberals to get reelected and he pulled off the only way to make it happen. Maybe he felt sorry that Canadians seemed so internally divided, so he threatened to annex Canada to unite us.

Or maybe he's a moron that can't even understand cause and effect.

https://338canada.com/polls.htm

> to this pursuit for better "design"

Quotes appropriate, because I don't believe this is about safety, usability, or even aesthetics. It's about reducing the number of parts on the vehicle, i.e. lowering cost. It's car manufacturers deliberately making driving less safe to save a few bucks.

I was referring more to the fact that the user agent explicitly contained the answer, rather than suggestions that it was IP scanning. But you're right I do see one comment that mentions that. And many more likely assumed the OP already figured that part out.

There are a couple easy possibilities depending on server config.

1. Not using SNI, and all https requests just respond with the same cert. (Example, go to https://209.216.230.207/ and you'll get a certificate error. Go to the cert details and you'll see the common name is news.ycombinator.com).

2. http upgrades to https with a redirect to the hostname, not IP address. (Example, go to http://209.216.230.207/ and you get a 301 redirect to https://news.ycombinator.com)

It's rather hilarious that nobody mentioned this in 7 hours. What am I missing?

~5 billion scans in a few hours is nothing for a company with decent resources. OP: in case you didn't follow, they're literally trying every possible IPv4 address and seeing if something exists on standard ports at that address.

I believe it would be harder to find out your domain that way if you were using SNI and only forwarded/served requests that used the correct host. But if you aren't using SNI, your server is probably just responding to any TLS connect request with your subdomain's cert, which will reveal your hostname.

No I meant uMatrix. It might not have been updated since 2021 but it didn't need any active development, it was perfect in my eyes. It was still available as an extension.

Is there any kind of alternative to uMatrix in the ManifestV3 world? I'm assuming no. It's just a shame that my browsing experience went to complete trash overnight. I'll obviously be moving away from Chrome where I can, but not sure what to do with my Chromebook.

It's a shame most of that research is digital, I'm sure they would have preferred a public book burning like in die gut old days.

> Every American service -- Netflix, Disney, Prime, Apple services -- need to have enormous tariffs applied. We can handle without them, and every enabler of this insanity needs to suffer.

No need to wait for tariffs. I started cancelling all American services today. Netflix and Prime were first. I will not send money to a country that has declared an unwarranted trade war on my country.

And it truly is unwarranted. The current trade agreements were negotiated by Trump in his last term, and are well balanced. The only reason for any current surplus is that oil prices are currently high. In general, Canadian raw resources go to the U.S. to be manufactured by skilled labour into end goods that are then imported back into Canada at a large markup. Trump has cited fentanyl and immigration as sticking points while providing no specific demands or suggestions. Less than 1% of illegal immigration to the U.S. comes via the Canadian border. It's incredibly frustrating to be utterly betrayed by a friend in this way.

I've never seen a polar bear. Ergo they don't exist.

Answering my own question - I think generated, because (took me WAY too long to notice) the dude has three arms.

Haha I was secretly hoping someone would, thanks! Is this your artwork or generated? Either way I'm impressed!

> Wait, maybe the punchline is something like: "We don’t have any fish in the tea, but we do have a lot of krill."

Shucks, it was so close to coming up with a good punchline it could work back from.

I'm thinking set it in a single-cell comic. A downtrodden young man or woman sitting alone at a table, a pelican in the background clearly making drinks in its voluminous beak, and the walrus waiter places a cup in front of the person, consolingly saying "there's plenty of fish in the tea".

I understand your objection to the policy, I just don't understand where in this thread you latched onto anything objectionable. At most the OP said the slurs don't make sense (really they didn't even say that, they just clarified the subject of what they were saying made sense).

Are you saying the slurs DO make sense? Or is it possible you added some words to what the OP actually said and then objected to that?