sema4hacker

Yes, some things might be impossible, but there might be approximations that are good enough. I can't fly like a bird, but machines let me fly faster and higher than a bird. Maybe my computer can never be conscious, but perhaps it will eventually be able to do whatever I need from it as if it were conscious. Plus, history is full of naysayers later proven wrong, so please keep your "Can't" predictions to yourself.

Yes, when it comes to intelligence and education, I've always felt like our population was essentially a bell curve, and one half of that curve was correspondingly gullible, dumb, and insufficiently educated.

I'm a boomer. I've always been willing to work 40 hours a week. For the last three years I've been hiring and employing retail workers in their 20's at salaries ranging from $27/hr to $40/hr. Not a single one has been willing to put in 40 hours, and they usually don't want to do even 30. I have no sympathy when they complain about prices and expenses.

The title contains the first of 25 question marks you'll find in this two-page article. Like much of philosophy, you won't find many answers.

> Let us summarize. Orion is: Superfluous... Insanely expensive... Delayed well beyond the point of sanity... Irredeemably unsafe...

An amazing critique. I've never read anything with so many "wtf?" and "omg!" moments.

In the 80's Lisp was already over 20 years old.

I think when programmers are introduced to languages, most grok procedural ones easier than functional ones, hence Lisp and its derivatives have struggled in popularity for decades.

I wish I had the abilities of the engineer, plus the time he could devote to the problem.

> I’ll try and write a followup with benchmarks.

That would definitely keep the story from being all-hat-and-no-cattle. I can't recall reading something with so many alternate versions of how to implement something but with zero benchmarks.

I don't see anything unique here. These are just reverse osmosis units and solar stills.

I've only purchased solid foam for a number of years now. There's some kind of compression/firmness scale for comparing, but I forget what it is.

"Here's How the AI Crash Happens:" https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ai-crash-happens-215009627.ht...

> That handful of code took me almost a year to write.

Formatting can be tough. See Knuth's extensive bug list for TEX from 1987 at https://yurichev.com/mirrors/knuth1989.pdf to see the kind of tarpit one can get trapped in.

The comments posted on the original article are not impressed.

> We still don't have a final report on what happened.

More details should eventually arrive at https://azure.status.microsoft/en-us/status/history/

> We have a lot of avenues to save these days.

Consider investing your time, not just your money. In other words, do careful research, start a business, then put your labor into offering a product or service that fills a need, instead of simply working for someone else. If you fail, you'll still learn a lot for another try. And if you succeed, the payoff can be much larger and faster than anything else you might attempt.

Anycast, Argo Rollouts, Aurora Serverless, AWS, BGP, Ceph, ClickHouse, Cloudflare, CloudFront, DWDM, Flux, Frankfurt, Glacier, Helm, Kinesis, Kubernetes, Metabase, MicroK8s, NVMe, OneUptime, OpenTelemetry Collector, Paris, Postgres, Posthog, PXE, Redis, Step Functions, Supermicro, Talos, Terraform, Tinkerbell, VM's.

I wish you started out by telling me how many customers you have to serve, how many transactions they generate, how much I/O there is.

I wouldn't call that particular tweet "posturing". He's throwing out some facts that large number of followers read and many reply to. There's some legitimate give-and-take going on.

Decades ago I accidentally ran over a cat while driving fairly slow on a residential street. It dashed out between parked cars and I barely saw it at all. I'm guessing sensor-laden driverless cars are actually going to turn out to be better at avoiding those and other kinds of accidents than human drivers.

It's become obvious that drones will be the main factor in non-nuclear battles. HOWEVER, China is actually worse off without the USA, and the USA is actually worse off without China. Only an egomaniac, or some insane AI pushing the wrong button, can't see that and cause a stupid new conflict to start.

For any college, as long as you meet your diploma requirements and graduate, will anyone subsequently really care what your grades were?

48 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45174371

I really miss the old days, when any program I wrote only had to trust three things out of my control: the compiler, the relatively small runtime library I linked with, and the few simple O/S entrypoints I called. I could probably breakpoint my way through every possible byte of code within a day or two.

Now I can't seem to write anything that doesn't generate hundreds of megabytes from untold number of dependencies nested who knows how deep that would take me a lifetime to fully explore.

Sigh.

I think he's bemoaning cheating, not computers per se. Unfortunately, cheating can work its way into everything: sports, schoolwork, you name it, especially when status and/or big money are involved.

1,420 students from Jiangsu College of Nursing, China.

All you're really "proving" ("demonstrating" might be more accurate) is that elaborate garbage in results in garbage out.

My Silicon Valley years (Palo Alto and Santa Clara) were in the 70's. I remember being invited to dinner by someone I helped find a job. After dinner another guest pointed to a VisiCalc ad in Byte magazine and said "THIS is going to be big". It went in one ear and out the other. Soon after that our sales department bought an Apple just to so they could run VisiCalc instead of relying on their paper systems. I still didn't recognize the revolution happening in front of me.

I'm always amazed by how firms let their AWS expenses get so huge before doing cheaper homegrown solutions.

For any language as large and complicated as SQL, it's easy to come up with a long list of design problems. The difficulty is designing something better, and then even more difficult than that is getting people to use it.

I'm surprised the vast majority were taller than average. The table would be more informative if it also listed how much taller each president was compared to the population's average height.