Hacker News Reader

williamDafoeon EU lawmakers snub Apple's pleas, vote to push for charging cable standard

I guess Apple has sold one too many $3 cables for $29.95 in the iStore ...

I see companies like Motorola, LG, Kyocera, and Nintendo as more abusive. Sell a few tens of millions of devices ,(not 100M a year) and still, use a custom proprietary charging cable and transformer, soldered together in 1 piece so it hits the dumpster in 1-2Y when the cable frays!

williamDafoeon Writing Runbook Documentation When You’re an SRE

There are only 500.

williamDafoeon Writing Runbook Documentation When You’re an SRE

This is not a very good article. Here are some improvements.

1. Runbooks go out of date faster than anything. Therefore it is absolutely crucial to have the whole book on a single page and alerts vector to the proper subsection. Also pepper each section with a good set of keywords. This will allow users and newbies to easily search for procedures or related alerts when links invariably break.

2. Group related alerts ("host xyz down") in a single section with many section titles. One for each possible xyz.

3. Go ahead and put commandline commands in the runbook, in shell-command or code highlighted boxes (NEVER inside sentences). User defined fields should be delineated with $HOST etc (never <host>) and sample values for the vars given beforehand with sample output afterward. Never use a copyable $ to delineate shell commands. This creates the best possible user experience for people reusing your commands by cut and paste so they can more easily change values and so they know what to expect.

4. Link all relevant consoles in very small links (CPU usage in clusters: ym qf ij) including historical links to console views for past problems and how they look.

5. Section templates might look like this:

1.8. Too many cacheservers are down

1.8.1 Definition. This means that 25% of the hosts (on average) have been down over the past 10 minutes

1.8.2 Severity. Our load balancer will route all requests to surviving hosts and clients will retry on timeout so normally this is not severe (there is only a performance impact). However it could cascade due to RAM exhaustion or a query-of-death or due to a config push of broken software so assess the service right away for these problems.

1.8.2 Remediation ... Rollback or resource scaling or bypassing the cache service on the command line ...

- Google search SRE

williamDafoeon Illinois governor signs law capping insulin costs at $100 per month

Just like the neighborhood drug pusher, big pharma companies give away free samples. Turns out that in the case of opiates, your neighborhood drug dealer and big pharma coincide.

williamDafoeon ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs

I was secretary for IEEE 802.20. It is a volunteer position as is the chair position, but some evil company usually has the "independent" chair on its payroll (I'm looking at you, QUALCOMM). There are no paid editors draft standards are written by committee or companies as are change proposals (I have standardized many) and the chair usually merges the changes, for free. The only people paid at conferences are the registration people.

williamDafoeon Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

See the trump difference? There is NONE:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12300060

williamDafoeon Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12300060

Clinton found a way to exclude all those pesky minorities. He renamed them from "minority" to "discouraged" workers and dropped them off the books! Pig ...

williamDafoeon Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

Unemployment is NOT very low. The government publicizes a fake unemployment number which includes a HUGE imaginary subtraction called "discouraged workers", which was originally imagined during the Clinton administration. To get a real idea about EMPLOYMENT, including those pesky minorities that Clinton excluded, see the employment population ratio, ages 25-54:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12300060

When Obama left office we were STILL in an economy destroyed by Bush, STILL at employment levels BELOW the bottom of the past 2 recessions!

Now that Trump has been in office employment has grown NO DIFFERENTLY THAN UNDER OBAMA, for the past 3 years the Trump difference is INVISIBLE.

williamDafoeon I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left

This guy is no saint. He stayed for many years after the company became terminally infested by "greed is good" Wall Street Thinking. He was in the best position to see this, and yet he stayed until long after the scandals had all broken. No sympathy for this guy who is the pot calling the kettle black. ...

williamDafoeon Gary Starkweather died on December 26, 2019

Easily the most trivial $1T inventions of all time! Spinning hexagonal mirror, laser, modulated by a serial port running at 14mhz, roughly. A 2 week hardware project and 3 month software project! I am ex Xerox Office Systems Division, 1984, I work at 3406 Hillview Ave, and heard it from work! It created a whole industry of repurposing hardware for new purposes like rockem sockem robots, I did it for our Internet radio service, 1994, at UBC ECE Dept. Just repurposed a portable AM/FM CD player and digitizer board.

williamDafoeon What Happened in the 2010s

Not on-demand, rather, channel-ADAPTIVE video streaming as embodied in the ubiquitous 3GPP2 DASH protocols, and used by html 5, took the world by storm 2010-2014, when YouTube and Netflix dropped Silverlight to use the newer, open standard.

Adaptive streaming originated as a Microsoft pilot project for the Beijing 2008 olympics. Microsoft's prototype had so many hacks and so little documentation that they publically admitted to giving up on standardizing it and threw their support behind mpeg DASH in ~2011.

Also, YouTube reached profitability in 2015 when it was ported to Google's lowest-TCO infrastructure. YouTube monetization practically invented the 10 minute video and made millionaires out of many online personalities.

williamDafoeon What Happened in the 2010s

Very few new capabilities for mankind were discovered in the last 10Y mainly CRISPR and CAR-T therapy and two level neural networks (Google translate, alphago). Lithium-Ion batteries got 50% stronger and 6x cheaper (see photo in https://drive.google.com/open?id=1FwCzOaig88r79FC7wM7RqtZ72c...). Most scientists focused on confirming what was already there (gravity waves, higgs boson, water on moon, water on Mars, etc ). Carbon fiber increased passenger air travel efficiency and became commonplace in bicycle frame design. The 2010s were not a creative decade ...

williamDafoeon Working for a startup makes less sense

What made you think that Google does design? In my experience, what they do at Google, is talk about the overall idea of what they are going to do, but they never did design, they never analyzed tradeoffs, and they never estimated project costs or long-term implications of the crap they threw at walls, at Google. They just pretended to do design, at Google.

williamDafoeon Working for a startup makes less sense

Lyft also gave 7 years equity exercise terms starting around 2013, and it was part of the reason for having the IPO when it did, was because some of the early equity holders were getting near to seeing their shares expire.

williamDafoeon Working for a startup makes less sense

We have a lemon socialism banking system. Obama made certain that 100% of bankers wiped out in 2007 paid NO PRICE for their recklessness; he prosecuted NO ONE.

williamDafoeon Working for a startup makes less sense

Really that sums up the american dream, completely. Get rich by screwing the people whose hard labor built your enterprise, often based on "borrowed" software (Example: Microsoft 'borrowed' a source listing of a basic interpreter written at DEC.) It happens every day in the USA, and it's why conservatives love it so much.

williamDafoeon Working for a startup makes less sense

I have worked at 3 startups for 3 years of my career. At one, I was a founder and seed-venture investor; that one lasted 8 years. It was the only company NOT run by criminals. Total out-of-pocket costs to me (in 2019 dollars) : $45,000 in 2 startups for shares and for options. Total return : $0. Total discount to market salary that I worked for : 33%. In 2 out of 3 startups, the CEOs (1) stole all the money and fled the country, or (2) conned the VCs out of $2.5m and shut down the business the next day after the final funding round (all monies went directly into CEO bank accounts.) Ask me what I think about startups .... Fuck startups.

williamDafoeon How to Make Python Wait

The idea of waiting with a progress indicator has a large bug, on an 8-bit or 16-bit machine you cannot read or write atomically from a progress variable. I guess the code works because of the interpreter lock that cripples python but it's very bad hygeine in all languages.

williamDafoeon YouTube Created a Generation of Young Stars. Now They Are Getting Burned Out

They are managed by Robots. Just like Uber and Lyft. What did you expect?

williamDafoeon Undocumented Catalina file access change

It's so darned important to skip the step of asking the user if they want to make the file world, group, or user readable. So darned! I bet the guy who invented this has a patent and is a vp by now ....

williamDafoeon To Understand the Future of AI, Study Its Past

Neural network fads come around every 25 years (1960s - killed on purpose by Minsky by his book Perceptions. Minsky wanted everybody to work on his type of AI, symbolic AI which went nowhere. Late 1980's. 2010s.) They usually die out, leaving no trace behind. Maybe this time it's different, imho because of Google translate. Most neural networks don't actually earn any money. But in general they make super slick demos, that's for sure .

williamDafoeon Some things every C programmer should know about C (2002)

One mistake in the first native C compiler was that all struct arms were in the same namespace, so

  struct a {
    struct *a next;
  };

  struct b {
    struct *b next;
  };

was illegal because the second declaration of "next" is a redeclaration.

williamDafoeon Sundar will be the CEO of both Google and Alphabet

That's right, give him credit for Ruth's budget cuts and he is very good at squelching employee will and silencing freedom of speech at Google.

williamDafoeon 'Shockingly High' Number of Injuries at Amazon's Staten Island Warehouse

Good thing everyboy took Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to the woodshed over Amazon settling in NYC. We need more of these worker-maiming lower class jobs to keep the lower classes in their place!

williamDafoeon Fight back against Google AMP (2018)

Websites WERE building horrible, non mobile news articles in HTML when AMP started at Google in 2015. The news articles were so slow and wasted so much bandwidth that many news orgs wrote bad apps (think CNN app; BBC app) to replace shit with even worse shit. That's what you get when you skimp on frontend engineers!!!

AMP gives little guys, the ones starting blogs and trying to grow, a shot at freedom of speech. The web was developing in a way that the big players like BBC and CNN would dominate with big budget winner-take-all walled gardens. AMP is one of Google's most anti establishment services, which means I'm sure Ruth will be killing it very soon!

This meant Google search on the mobile web was literally dying. Every year more and more content was being locked inside walled Gardens!! I was a maintainer of AMPHTML 2015 - 2018 at Google. The project is hibernating and loses a ton of money I know I worked on the budgets for flash memory for AMP. At the time Facebook and others were proposing proprietary non HTML news document formats. Google, to keep HTML alive, decided to cache amp for free, which subsidized hosting costs for ALL news websites. I hate it that now I have to switch browsers 2x to write an article comment, too! But news apps NEVER supported this AT ALL!! News apps NEVER supported a working search feature AT ALL!! News apps NEVER supported a good user experience or global search AT ALL!

If you want to rant, blame the bloatware mess that is HTML, it has almost at killed The mobile web, not AMP! AMP is Google's attempt to keep HTML alive on phones ...

williamDafoeon Hours Worked by Women Age 55 to 61 Confound Labor Market Analysis

Women aged 55-61 had been growing the percent of their daily life spent working from 17% to 21.5% but something happened in 2007 and the growth trend slowed drastically so that today they spend only about 22.5% of their life working. Had the trend continued they would be spending 25% of their lives working, today.

williamDafoeon Hours Worked by Women Age 55 to 61 Confound Labor Market Analysis

Unemployment has become a bullshit political statistic designed to exclude minorities, which became the racist standard Under Clinton with the introduction of "discouraged" workers (not employed and not unemployed!). A much more meaningful number is the employment population ratio, age 25-54, can you see the big difference Trump made? I knew you couldn't ... https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12300060

williamDafoeon The LEGO Group acquires BrickLink

Any idea how this affects peeron.com? Will they develop their own marketplace?

williamDafoeon Computer Architecture – ETH Zürich – Fall 2019

As someone who taught this at a top 10 university, it doesn't look to me like a very good course. I feel like you should have all the basics to design a CPU by the end of the course and this course fails completely to teach the Breadth necessary for CPU design

williamDafoeon The Unparalleled Genius of John von Neumann

Yeah as I understand it that ain't going to happen for a thousand years, minimum ...