HN user

andy9775

95 karma
Posts2
Comments63
View on HN

Aside from that, there are people who go into consulting and gain a lot of skills

If what the author claims is true and consulting is basically making up numbers to fit some conclusion and general fluff work, I'm not sure that's a valuable skill to pick up. Sure, you could pick up networking and ...?

That's one way of encouraging investment in green energy sources but may not be perfect. Again, it's a wait and see game. Further, for a firm starting up mining ops your cost isn't just the variable cost of electricity, you also have the fixed cost of the plant. If the cost of a coal plant + cost of electrical production/maintenance + carbon tax < cost of a solar plant + cost of electrical production/maintenance then clearly coal here is the winner.

Exactly. If bitcoin mining drives demand for solar, leads to solar production jobs in the US and increases R&D leading to more efficient panels - awesome. But if companies start to go public based on the premise of mining bitcoin at the cheapest possible price - I doubt they'll invest in Solar/wind/geo[0].

[0] Yes, I know mining in Iceland is a thing. But mines in Iceland don't make up a huge chunk of the network.

The issue is finance firms will get (are getting) involved. It becomes easy to purchase an inefficient energy production source (old coal, natural gas, etc.) that cities/counties/states are trying to get rid of which would otherwise sit dormant and require some sort of upkeep. As soon as such a company goes public they'll have more money to purchase up more (financially cheap, environmentally expensive) sources of direct electricity and they'll be bound to do so since it's in the best interest of the shareholder to continue to mine.

Perhaps bitcoin is a nice academic theory and would work well if humans were responsible. Just like nuclear cars are nice in theory - so long as people don't have accidents.

Edit:

If needed, we can better incentivize green bitcoin mining with carbon taxes or renewable energy mining subsidies.

Plastic is a wonderful material but virgin plastic is cheaper than recycled and various attempts to artificially decrease the price of recycled plastic via government incentive programs haven't worked.

Electronics are awesome, but despite efforts to recycle electronic waste it all ends up in third world countries where it gets burned off. it's just cheaper that way. Some ecyclers were even caught trying to game the system. Taking government incentives and still shipping e-waste overseas.

I'd like to believe in the idea that some sort of incentive program would come into place but so far none have worked in the may other industries that desperately need it.

How do these laws affect companies like SquareSpace[1] (companies which provide a site builder and hosting)? If someone builds a site which violates these laws is SquareSpace held responsible? Is it up to SquareSpace to police the content on their customers sites (comments sections, content, etc.)? Or do they have some sort of immunity or contractual immunity from these laws which places the responsibility of content on the end customer/site owner?

[1] I'm using SquareSpace as a placeholder. I think netfliy, wordpress builders and hosts, and other similar companies could also be impacted(?)

Are you accounting for family connections? High income families tend to have connections which can help. If your parents are good friends with a lawyer at a top law firm you no longer have to apply on your own merit. Poor families lack these connections and students have to apply on their own. Something to consider.

Yup, kept my 2015 13" pro till I bought the 16" a few months ago. The touch bar is meh for me though. I find it quicker to change volume with physical keys than touch bar but it's not a huge issue. However, love that the physical escape came back. That was big.

FWIW, I personally think distance learning is underrated, although I have been doing it for years so I've had time to become accustomed to it. I can understand why some students (including my wife) do not like it, and may never like it.

I appreciate distance learning, it's the distance testing that doesn't work ;).

We went online at the start of the year and while some classes were ok to evaluate online, classes which require coding for example, weren't. Since you have access to an IDE they tend to test other things than what was taught - it becomes more theoretical rather than practical even though the class demands the latter.

A class would need to be fully changed to support online learning, and evaluating, say for example more focus on assignments.

A $600 price difference for this machine is probably worth it in my mind.

Agreed. Recently bought the 16 inch MBP after considering Lenovo and Dell. Prices between the machines weren't that much different (Lenovo came to 7200 minus some discount to bring it down to MBP price).

End of the day I didn't want to deal with Linux drivers (no M$ for me) and I wanted something that worked. Plus, the touchpad on an Apple device can't be beat. It's not a perfect machine, mainly Catalina issues I suspect, but worth it IMO.

As mentioned by the other commenter one of the big features is service discovery and load balancing - it seems like micro is stepping on k8s feet here and is a bit more than just a framework.

I could see using micro on bare metal (with all features) but trying to get the grasp of mixing with k8s (with all of micro's features). I'm assuming no one is using micro's load balancing and service discovery over k8s? I guess the broader question is, is micro highly coupled to all of its features/functions or is picking and pulling parts of it workable?

What university is that? It sounds awful.

Rather not say, but a few do that. Plus in something like CS there's an hour long wait for office hours which are 2 hours twice a week with maybe 3 profs - so 6 hours for 500+ students - not much opportunity to ask questions.

That's only kinda true of 100-level courses and massively popular generals, and quickly becomes false the farther you advance.

Absolutely. Get rid of the 1k lecture theatres for the undergrad courses and build some labs. Get some 3D printers/CNC machines for the Engineering students. A mock court room for the Law department? Some chemistry labs? Move the "I don't need to be here to learn" courses online and expand office hours, TA availability and provide more hands on experience.

Ya, I wouldn't want to see a doctor who learned online. But one how took some calc or basic med courses online but has more hands on/practical experience? Sure!

My undergrad is very focused on self-study. Prof's have gone the the extent of saying, "I won't waste time showing you this, you could just go on youtube". Flipped classroom models are increasing and the focus is again, on self study.

I'd say online doesn't work for all programs or courses. But do you need to sit in a room with 1k people in order to learn calc 1? It's just the prof going through some examples on the powerpoint/overhead nothing more. Asking questions isn't easy either.

Upload some lecture videos and then hold office hours instead of lecture hours. It's not like what you taught in psyc 100 last semester is much different than this.

I'll counter this by saying that in my experience school projects are no better. TA's and prof's don't have enough time to give to groups. Students are left to figure things out on their own. Some classes assume (wrongly) that concepts were taught in prior classes so you have to figure it out on your own.

Not sure when you graduated - I'm sure it was better when there were more resources and less students - but today that's not the case.

"The Ontario government, during negotiations with Cisco for a juicy corporate subsidy, indicated that salaries are 'very competitive' and that they'd do 'anything to keep it that way'. Literally stating that he wanted to keep us 'poorer' to guarantee the jobs. (Sorry I can't find the reference)."

This was also a point made during the amazon pitch - cheap labour.

Of course they did. Parents grew up in a former communist country and smuggling in goods, stealing, were all pretty common. The reason you don't hear about it is because if people did those things that would mean that communism is bad and doesn't work. I wouldn't trust the data coming out of a communist country.

During the chernobyl disaster the USSR kept providing false numbers to the world in order to downplay the significance of the event - to the point of sabotaging the cleanup effort and themselves.

WRT exceptions I'm curious what his thoughts are on the go way of handling them (just return an exception, don't throw)? Clearly this article was written pre-go.