sa46

Like many things in a large bureaucracy, the rules and norms are written in the blood and tears of previous generations. It has pros and cons. On the pros, you can usually count on everyone to not lose equipment. For the cons, you spend a huge amount of time dealing with inventories and maintenance.

- At most Army schools you will fail if you lose any equipment. Ranger school does a 100% equipment check at the end of every mission and will fail you if any equipment is missing.

- One of the more common ways for an officer to get "fired" (moved out of command early with a neutral or negative rating) is to lose property. This is harder than it sounds since even a Rifle company commander you might have a few million dollars of equipment. For mechanized units (tanks), it's much harder.

Yep, the lucky grunts in the weapons squad get to lug around the 7.62 ammo.

The Army doesn't use the M249 as a crew served weapon (unlike the Marines) so the automatic rifleman on each team usually has 600 rounds of 5.56mm linked ammo to carry around.

I'd be curious to see standard ammo load-out by conflict and country.

Ah, an article I can comment on. I was an Infantry officer for 6 years and did all the normal schooling and a deployment.

This is a pretty well done article. Here's some general ideas to keep in mind.

- Most dismounted missions are run from trucks or an established forward operating base, so you don't carry a huge rucksack most of the time because you can just go back to your base.

- Like the article states, even a day pack with body armor gets you up to 70lbs quickly.

- Ammo is really heavy, it being made of lead and all. 100rds of 7.62mm ammo weighs about 7lb. You want at least 800rds per M240B.

- Rucksack weights are sometimes inflated because it's a way to brag.

- The Marine infantry officer course requirement for 152lb load is excessive. At that weight, you can only do an admin movement on a road. All the anecdotes I found about combat loads that heavy were for an initial, short infil followed by a stationary mission.

I think the article nails the root cause towards heavier protective equipment. Public perception and the news cycle makes the death of American service member a bigger deal than in past conflicts.

It will be a long time before we get electronic mules in the Infantry. Adopting the mules adds a huge complexity budget to a simple movement. The Army decided some years ago to give every Company (~140 people) a Raven drone for recon. However, it's a huge deal if it gets lost (if the GPS guidance were to suddenly fail), so no one ever uses them to avoid the fallout associated with losing Army equipment.

You should really read the hacker news comments on that rather one-sided view of the topic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18188519

Yes, this is what I don't understand. I'd wager the most dangerous weapon used by the US military is either Microsoft Word or PowerPoint to produce operations orders.

It seems that if a product's utility isn't directly tied to a military outcome, then the outrage never materializes.

Project Maven caused outrage because of the direct link to military drones. However, advancements in AI and machine learning haven't caused the same outrage but can be used for the same purpose.

Everyone uses the more mild version of dehumanizing language, reduction to abstraction [1], because it's more efficient to consider groups of people and it removes emotions from decisions.

For example, when considering latency you might say:

The service is experiencing 3 seconds of latency at the 99th percentile with periodic timeouts.

You wouldn't say

Alice wasn't able to buy medicine because the transaction failed.

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

> Back in the Colonial times, sharp smart lads went to prestigious military schools and learned the complexities of how to subjugate conquered people. How to efficiently run a slave camp.

Source? My understanding was military academies focus on tactical leadership, military conduct and often an engineering background.

It also depends on what you mean by colonial times, military academies didn't show up in the U.S. until the 1800s.

> Maybe squeezing profit off of people

I think the parent's point was significantly more nuanced than this characterization.

What would you do differently than the Marines experiment? What's the appropriate metric?

I don't really see a better way than measuring task performance.

I'd be curious to read that study as it seems to contradict the article. I didn't see it sourced in the article.

What about non-obvious threats? Generally speaking, nations that fall behind technologically fare poorly against more advanced nations.

What about software that is adapted by the military for new use cases instead of tailored use cases? Should Microsoft be responsible for damage caused operations planned in Word and PowerPoint? What about iPhone with sniper windage apps? How many layers removed before a company is considered ethical?

Under what circumstances is it acceptable for a company to provide services or software to a military?

Drive by code review, you can end a line with the pipe (also && and ||) to avoid a backslash.

    some_command |
      grep -E 'some.*regex$' |
      sed -e 's/erase_text//g' |
      sed -e 's/erase_more//g' |
      awk '{ print $2 }' |
      cut -d ':' -f 1

Author here, OSC 52 looks promising. I didn't realize there was an escape code for clipboard integration.

You're the second person to mention /tmp for IPC is bad. Why is it bad?

[1]: https://medium.freecodecamp.org/tmux-in-practice-integration...

Why is /tmp not suitable for IPC? Is it because it's generally more open than a home directory?

Author here. I figured it was an easy enough hole to fix that it was worth including. The ZSH line editor will paste without sending the command so you don't really harm usability.

Installing dev tools via paste and pipe into sh is fairly common:

    curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh

The overall risk is probably really low, but there's no downsides.

Author here, this is a rather pleasant Sunday surprise.

I'm not sure I'd recommend the route in the post. The setup is fragile with a sizable set of moving parts. Simpler options are doubling down on Emacs with TRAMP or using the client terminal emulator (e.g. iTerm) to copy and paste screen contents.

Google's Spanner doesn't support foreign keys but does support interleaved tables to cover some use cases of foreign keys. Spanner sees wide use inside Google.

The usual routes for data consistency between tables are batch clean up or in-app validation.

It's true that booby traps are not allowed by the Geneva convention but that convention only applies to conduct in a war. I'm curious what law applies in the US.

Nice, I'd like to hear your story if you don't mind sharing. I have a similar background. Infantry for 6 years and switched to programming about two years back.

What does "less parsimonious" mean in this context?

The definition has "unwilling to spend money or use resources; stingy or frugal" but I'm not sure what you're describing as less frugal. Is it a way of saying the deist explanation is more likely?

Google Java format works if you're okay with the Google style guide.

https://github.com/google/google-java-format

A large chunk of third party usage is open source Google libraries like Guava. Anecdotally, I don't end up using that many libraries from third party.

As for JavaScript, the hassle of importing the entire transitive closure of an NPM library you want into third party means it's much more attractive to go with NIH syndrome. I looked at importing ESLint, but it has something like 110 dependencies.

The military leave system doesn't discount weekends. So 30 days is closer to 4 weeks. You also can't chain together a weekend at the start or end of your leave. You must use leave for the weekend.

Also, most line units have block-leave, meaning you can only take leave in prescribed periods which limits flexibility.

An interesting variation to this thought is:

When is appropriate to fire someone for making a mistake?

Some ideas:

- gross negligence / malice

- ethics

- publicity damage / internet pitchforks

Additionally, it doesn't seem like the forgive mistakes approach meshes well with the startup advice of "it's never too early to fire."

I don't see any pedantry. OP said they dropped all sugar which would imply natural sugars as well.

> I dropped all forms of sugar and corn syrup a few months ago. [...]

> I eat bananas, apples, peanut butter and chicken. Learned to cook a few things.

It's not clear to me why sugar from an apple is better than sugar from soda. Can you explain or link to a source?

You're right that fzf doesn't replace find. Fzf is just an interactive, filtering tool. You can pipe anything into it. find is a common way of populating it with data.

I suspect the GP meant that fzf replaced the pattern 'find |xargs $binary' for small interactive use cases. It's much nicer to do '$binary <invoke fzf>'. I use fzf the same way with key bindings to select directories and files powered by find.

American style (Chicago, APA, and MLA) specifies that a period goes inside the quotations.

British style, on the other hand, specifies that a period goes outside the quotations.

http://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2011/08/punctuating-around...

I notice a couple times a day. Any large mode will usually cause noticeable jankiness. My usual suspects are js2-mode, email modes like gnus, and evaluating org-src blocks.

There's hacks for some of these, but having threads natively will be really nice.

Known as Gall's law. From Wikipedia:

Gall's Law is a rule of thumb for systems design from Gall's book Systemantics: How Systems Really Work and How They Fail. It states:

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system. – John Gall

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gall_(author)#Gall.27s_la...

http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html is awesome for inspiration but it's a ton of information. I think your point about pre-packaged Emacs configs also applies to org-mode configs.

For building a productivity system, I think it's much easier to build it in small pieces, week by week.