andrew_v4

It's a big shift because we have never as a society catered to the most cowardly before. Personal responsibility used to mean if you cared about something it was on you, now its shifted to forcing it on other people. This is really antithetical to western values.

I think it's a direct consequence of media and government trying to remove free will from the equation and present taking the vaccine as the only choice people have. If you're going to essentially force people to do it, a statistically meaningless side-effect becomes more important as reason for people to push back (and the media to drum up false fears).

If you treat people like adults and let them consult their doctors and make their own decisions, the bar is much lower for safety (by lower I mean from impossibly high to reasonable). People willingly take much more risky medicines and treatments all the time and are fine with it. But if you try and force something in them, it's not surprising they push back on anything that isn't guaranteed to be perfect.

(So my point is, I think demand would be higher and concerns lower if you just made it available and let people make their own choice. But the whole pandemic has been more about forcing people to do things than about trying to do things that actually solve the problem)

[Edit- it's funny how any presence of giving people control over their bodies evaporates in a situation like this. And re the strawman that "nobody is forcing you" - if the consequence is severe limits on what you are allowed to do, that doesnt really hold up]

Agreed - the article is tips and tricks to use google effectively, not an editorial about the value of googling

That's not unique to cryptocurrency mining, there are other things that are rate limited by energy costs as well.

Re team structure, most consulting firms are a collection of mini pyramids, with partners or equivalent at the top that are supporter by project teams. Partnere are responsible for sales, client relationship, and quality of the delivery, and are often (for better or worse) very hands on in the execution. I have seen failures result from having a sales org that gets the contracts and writes the scope, and a subordinate delivery org that had to go in and try and figure out to do what the salespeople pitched. When its bespoke services, the people doing the work should be selling it. If it's something closer to a commodity with well defined inputs and outputs, the opposite is true and you might as well have a dedicated sales person/team

This is a question I have had too. One place is LinkedIn, but it suffers from the social media issue that it favors pre-digested flashy stuff, many people don't really go there to do a deep read. And it's not really technical (although oddly I do see people posting journal articles and other deeper stuff there sometimes).

You could use Medium, but I don't know how you get anyone to read it without posting it to some social media.

It would be cool to have some kind of HN style post and mod system for well-written stuff. Or some kind of discovery system that doesnt just race to the bottom like social media or search.

There's really nothing to gain from nay-saying a new space like this, tbh.

Dismissing a new technology is not helpful. But I think it's valuable for people that understand the tech to debunk proposed uses of technology that are not things the tech actually does. This is closer to how I see the article.

In what I see as the current big 3 - quantum computing, AI, and blockchain - there is a parallel imaginary business world claiming things they can do that at best are misunderstandings and at worst are effectively scams to get consulting money. People who understood what the tech is actually doing should not shy away from clarifying what it does and make it harder for the snake oil salesmen to do their thing.

This is spot on. I have worked as a consultant doing reviews of a handful of diverse government departments, and leadership's priorities were always identical: justify headcount increases. Every one will have a presentation about the changing nature of their work, new legislation, the decline in staff vs some past golden age etc etc that shows they need more people.

As you say, its 100% a function of the incentives. This is a general flaw with "command" economies where resources are based on who can argue for them best as opposed to demand for the outputs. There is a lot that can be done in terms of SLAs for operational departments and discretion to the operational side on how money gets spent, to try and come closer to a market driven system, but there is no political will for it.

I'm not familiar with this specific product. But this is really a dark side to SaSS, broadly defined, that I have not seen a good solution to.

It's not helpful to have a service provider that can renege on commitments when they take issue with them for whatever reason. In this case, it (based admittedly on limited information) feels like Stripe agreed to something and then later unilaterally just decided that they didn't like it and bailed. There is a certain amount of risk in any contract, and what bothers me about this kind of thing is that providers think they are entitled to all of the upside but none of the downside of the contract. As a small business owner myself, if I committed to do something (including for a company like stripe) I would be on the hook for delivery, even if it turned out to be different than I had planned for (within the agreed scope). Stripe should be held to the same standard.

Not sure I completely agree, but I definitely do think this kind of project can be derailed by proponents who want to be uncompromising about it and don't think it's acceptable to compromise in something like location because its harder to get built where people don't want it.

An example people probably won't like is those mixed income buildings (can't remember where now) that had separate entrances for the subsidized units. It's definitely not egalitarian in some sense, but if it allows more subsidized housing to be built for people that need it, is it really better just to not do it?

Yeah, this is an underrated comment. I mean the origin of some of this stuff is to be inclusive and diverse, but ironically it has the effect of making people walk on eggshells all the time and not feel like they can act normally.

It's like that scene in x-men (x-people now?) first class when magneto tells mystique that if she's using half her energy to be someone else all the time, she'll never be at her full potential. If you're constantly screening your code, writing, and speech for increasingly obscure ways that people could get offended, you're not working at your full potential.

Wow, how unhelpful. I don't know the acceptable way to call this out, but how about focusing on substance instead of just bringing pedantic language stuff into the mix. I see this happening a lot, when people can't find a real way to contribute, they start debating the position of commas or whether it should be called inquiry or enquiry or whatever. It distracts from real debate, and maybe gets you some attention (lots of bureaucratic leader types love this sort of thing) but it's really wasting everybody's time.

(Edit, the irony isn't lost on me of providing a low value comment that doesn't contribute to the discussion in response to one I accuse of something similar. But I've seen so much time wasted and so many people getting ahead and in some cases basically build a career on engaging with these kind of language things instead of doing any actual work, I wanted to bring it up)

Safety engineering is a matching between user expectations of safety and actual safety. If there's evidence that this treadmill is disproportionately dangerous for it's category, that's one thing. But if it's just "dangerous" without qualification, that's not a reason in itself to be especially concerned about it.

I think you highlight a weakness of formal "tell me about a time" type questions generally. They are more about testing the framing (spin) abilities of the candidate vs the underlying competencies you ask about. That is largely how the questions in the article feel to me as well.

I have interviewed a lot of people, and been interviewed now and then, and in both cases I think the best info, especially about less definable things like culture, comes out through informal discussion rather than single questions. So actively breaking out of the Q and A style and getting a discussion going is how I would approach learning about the culture.

Are you saying that all "equipment" sold should be in the category that it can safely be installed in a multi-use area of a home with kids in it? I get the idea that there is demand for such products, but it's pretty backward to mandate that a product can't exist that requires a dedicated area to house it. As a concrete example, everywhere I have lived requires your pool to be fenced off from the rest of your yard, because of the danger to kids (which would dwarf that of a treadmill). Should we ban pools because you need to have dedicated space for a pool in order to have one?

I agree that's fair (normalized for any past regulatory overreach). Products that are death traps compared with others in their category should definitely be called out. I did a google search and the first link [0] says about 3 treadmill deaths per year and 24k (!) injuries is typical in the US (well, those are the numbers the article quotes).

That's not enough information, but certainly not a smoking gun showing that peloton is dangerous vs others in its category.

[0] https://www.mensjournal.com/health-fitness/exercise-equipmen...

I've read a lot of the comments here condemning Peloton, and I don't think I completely agree.

A treadmill is a big fast moving piece of gym equipment. It is definitely dangerous to kids, as are all treadmills. And what about like freeweights or those universal gyms with the plates that go up and down?

What about power tools? Or vacuum cleaners? Or plastic bags, or cleaning products, or whatever? Lots of stuff is dangerous for kids. This is not something for kids or suitable for use around kids, and it's hard to believe anyone thinks it would be. What happened is horrible, but I don't see why it should mean peloton cant make their product

"Non-contrubuting ideation" - people from other groups without real skin in the game who don't want to take responsibility for anything but insist on providing input on how it's done, and often have some political standing to do so. This has come up again and again in many roles. For me personally, I am really bad at handling this. Sometimes it's fine just to meet with people an hear their ideas (which can obviously be helpful). But other times I have had to basically say that if this other person wants to run the project, they're welcome to it. I'm aware that a lot of this is my fault and some people are much better at diplomatically handling this kind of situation. At the same time, I have led some very successful projects by taking a stand and burning political capital by keeping armchair quarterbacks away from the project.

Is there anything dangerous about linoleic acid? I.e. is there harm in trying it, even if it turns out it doesn't work? Just curious how a trial like this would go. If it's essentially benign, it seems like people could just use it, if it had some potential side effects then I guess it would be more complicated.

Python (in common ML frameworks) is really just wrapping well optimized native code. The overhead is very minimal. The advantage here is about easy access to the internals. I don't know that any material speedup is expected just because its written in C++

I had to look it up too, I had forgotten about it as it was not very interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24164470

Note that the link is to an article on HN, not flagged, and the comments pretty clearly debunk the article's claims. TLDR, author wrote some clickbait headlines and used gpt3 to fill in the articles, with an unspecified amount of editing, then some of them got onto the front page of HN and he wrote an article about that.

Really? In North American english, a flashlight is a handheld light, there is no thought of the toy you're referring to when it is mentioned. That "light" got its name as a play on flashlight. It's funny to see that now become the primary connotation in some peoples minds.

Just for contrast its interesting to look at an example of writing a similar kernel in Julia:

https://juliagpu.gitlab.io/CUDA.jl/tutorials/introduction/

I don't think it's possible to achieve something like this in python because of how it's interpreted (but it sounds a bit like what another comment mentioned where the python was compiled to C)

It's actually "accountability" that's a big part of the problem.

Government procurement is so focused on the appearance of fairness and money saving that all other goals, like actually getting something that works, take a back seat.

You end up with over-specified requirements that remove the possibility of innovative or creative solutions. Providers are treated like a commodity, where it is assumed that all will do the same job, and cost is the only real negotiation point, maybe with some kind of scoring grid against the over-specified requirements thrown in.

And the procurement decisions are made by procurement officers who are not the actual users of what is being bought (in the name of objectivity).

So what happens, on a good day, is that the operational users in the purchasing department work with the preferred vendor to "wire" the RFP to reflect the scope or work that is wanted and add requirements (e.g. years of very specific experience, past projects) that heavily favor the preferred vendor. At least this way the department may get something they want, thought it obviously can be gamed. Worse though is that many contracts just go to lowest cost staffing firms that are optimized to comply with government procurement requirements and provide the minimum set of bodies that meet those requirements, usually former government folks rented back, plus some low cost IT resources, that are there to execute to the letter of what the government has over-specified, usually something that wont actually work as written.

This is why so much government procurement is a failure by any objective measure. What I have seen work is when a vendor provides a credible unsolicited pitch to a known problem at a fixed cost, and the relevant departments are forced to decide if it makes sense.

In Canada we had a major one like that a few years ago, the outcome was great for the department that needed it, but careers were destroyed in the process as politicians and their incumbent friends pushed back to try and stop it.

(This looks like a throwaway comment but as a Canadian, this is the correct reaction)

What are some examples that don't favour entrenched interests (Rogers / Bell / Telus ) looking to legislate away competition, or subsidise politically approved "artists" while making it harder for us to access content we actually want to see?

I agree with you, its something only possible because they are throwing off cash. But is it worth them having turned much of the internet into a cesspit?

I'm conflicted. On one hand you could argue it's like some dictatorship putting on lavish parades while conditions in their regime are generally terrible (I'm not trying to compare the magnitude of the problem, just the idea that having something fancy to show doesn't necessarily cancel out all the harm done)

Or is it a natural positive byproduct of capitalism that the internet has garbage strewn corners filled with listicles and "content" alongside genuinely cool stuff. And trying to clamp down on this would just make everything mediocre.

Anyway, there are definitely lots of good things Google had done, in research, in public availability of tech, and in cool stuff like this. Are we making the right tradeoff against all the bad they have done, I don't know.

What I had in mind was money being given to the masses through covid related benefits and then quickly concentrating into the hands of a few.

Something analogous happened to me where my role was changed to something that had nothing to do with what I was doing before and was for a much different (and bluntly a lesser) skillset. To me it was a sign that management had no understanding of what my skills and job were (there are lots of laypeople that see "developer" as html, assembly, and everything between). The options in my view were to try and move to a position that is aligned with my experience and career goals, or leave and do that at another company. It sucks because its basically the same as being fired and having to find a new job whether internal or external. But unless you're interested, it is much worse for your career to stay doing something that doesnt make sense for you and is, if I understand your characterization, a move down the career ladder.

The valuations are in part a leading indicator of inflation, as governments print money. It's no good having cash, buy a stream of inflation adjusted revenue.

Also whatever the opposite of trickle down economics is. As more concentrated wealth chases investment opportunities, prices go up.