ascotan

correct. the push for dispensaries has been financial not medical. now that we are getting large scale trials there will be more real evidence to show the public health effects. my guess: it will go the way of smoking eventually. realization around public health effects -> cost of those effects on public services -> taxes and costs go up. I'm curious as to why heart attack and not stroke. seems like bp isn't the only thing at play.

i thought apple is already doing this on all it's devices?

its the definition of precise geolocation data in the va code: https://law.lis.virginia.gov/vacode/title59.1/chapter53/sect...

The article is misleading. The sale of geolocation data can still take place but not for precise locations. The bill prevents the sale of data that can identify you within 1750ft. You can still be tracked just not precisely. i.e. companies will just sell fuzzy geolocation data.

so.. hand over your data to china to spite orange man. yes excellent move.

yep. and anyone not aligning to the anti-american reddit rants here get downvoted. shows you where HN is going.

The implications are far reaching beyond cell phones. any service that stores location data for it's user is subject to 4th amendment expectations _regardless_ of an opt-in. The court specifically rejected the argument that by opting-in the user is abrogating their privacy rights. If you centrally store location data you have an obligation to protect that data under the 4th amendment as private and would require a warrant.

The impacts here are with food delivery apps, fitness apps, weather apps, cloud services, ad tech agencies, data resellers/brokers, etc.

this proposal is an extension of the WH crackdown on what it sees as misuse of USG funds for things that are deemed not in the best interests of the USG.

Among other things this proposal attempts to prevent:

1. prevention of DEI related grants

2. prevention of grants promoting anti-american ideologies

3. prevention of gain-of-function research (think covid-19)

4. prevention of ai-powered social media censorship research

5. prevention of FEMA dollars going to help undocumented immigrants

6. prevention of foreign aid dollars being spent in africa on gender ideology

It would but restrictions directly into the grant awards give strong tools to the USG to suspend the grant and prevent the money being dispersed via a subrecipient.

my 2cents: FUD

will AI displace jobs: yes undoubtly. But it's not equal even across the tech sector. Outsourcing jobs are extremely at risk. Companies have been offshoring to vietnam, india, malaysia, etc for decades because they're cheaper to hire/pay than americans. But guess who is even cheaper then them? AI. so all the back office work will transition to AI. it's just a matter of time.

But it remains to be seen if corporations will downsize significantly due to AI. I dont currently see it. In fact the opposite is happening. The hype around AI is driving job growth not decline: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/data-shows-surprising-rebound...

The premise of this that AI will cause a catastrophic wipe out of jobs everywhere is FUD. In software we are much more likely to see the cambrian explosion of software companies and the de-FAANGing of corporate america as software development because easier. a pizza team of 6 can now create something amazing that might have once required a huge budget and organization. The consolidation of tech that has been happening since the 90s might actually be reversing.

AI is something that is empowering new modes of business. Think about how media has become democratized in the last 20 years and big corporate media conglomerates are struggling to hold the publics attention because its now easier than ever to publish your own movies/news. AI (i believe) will democratize things that are now held in control by guilds/companies/etc. And maybe this isn't such a bad thing.

clickbait. they knew what they were doing.

there's a long history of X is dead posts. PHP is dead, Java is dead, jquery is dead, unix is dead, REST is dead, graphql is dead, microservices is dead. and of course none of those things are dead. but... they're great for clickbait.

here's the uncomfortable truth. most software engineers are good enough to hire.

i've seen a few interview types in my time:

1. technical interviews run by nontechnical or junior engineers who can't judge technical talent. this typically produces sub-par hires. imagine you are made the director of UX design and you have to hire someone but know little about the industry. what type of hires are you going to get?

2. technical interviews that focus on CS skills. can you write a red-black tree in Java? can you write a bubble sort in haskell? The problems here is that this has bias towards new CS grads that dont have much industry experience but just took tests on stuff like this in their degree. google pioneered this style of interview and it's taken off as leetcode. the problem is that experienced devs dont typically write bubblesort algorithms. this type of interview is biased toward younger out of college hires and codecamp hires that have little experience but gring on leetcode sites.

3. technical interviews that have too many opinions for a hire recommendation. this seems to be a new trend where you need 3 or 5 or 7 thumbs up to get hired and any negatives sink the candidate. this does raise the bar, but typically what i see is someone on this panel has a high opinion of his/her abilities and gives everyone they seem a thumbs down.

What i've found is that soft skills and team dynamics are > the technical accumen. I can teach you how to write go(lang) but its much harder to teach you how to influence your peers or to communicate effectively.

Experienced devs probably dont know how to ace your leetcode interview, but they do know how to influence and communicate and when to stay away from bad ideas. You dont get tested on these things. It's analogous to a being combat veteran. You've been there, you've done that you know how to survive. You might not know the new tech, but that can be taught. I have never seen an dev not be able to pickup a new platform/language/skill within 6 months of hire - anywhere.

Here's hoping this will get better one day but i'm not holding by breath.

DeepSeek's official privacy policy explicitly states: “To provide you with our services, we directly collect, process and store your Personal Data in the People's Republic of China.”

US companies dont sell AI services in China (as far as I know) but deepseek markets to US companies and customers.

Actually i think AI makes junior devs dumber. Senior devs learned over the gigantic mountains of failed projects they've built. I still get people telling me to build flat file databases - nope. Build me a micro service architecture with 50+ lambdas - nope. Been there, done that. I know why you really shouldnt if you technically can. For me AI make me go 100 mph in the right direction. I see junior devs going 100 mph toward the ocean or into a wall. "lets use ai to build a chatbot in javascript that runs on my desktop that everyone can connect to with a claude skill!" ok buddy. Are they learning? maybe when they get pwned but what I see mostly is the cambrian explosion of bad ideas. What I see is junior devs that no longer understand what a reverse proxy is because AWS made us dumber. Junior devs that can't understand memory management because higher level languages made us dumber. AI is another link in that chain. 10 years from now pretty sure most devs won't be able to read code.

Love reading all the TDS comments about Americans are the new Nazis and Orange Man is bad. However, this article isn't very good:

NIH has publish guidance: https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-25-1...

It seems like the intent here is to prevent "subawards" going to foreign linked entities where the USG can't track it. The NIH is introducing a new linked award system where the foreign entity receives their own independent grant number and that primary on the application must be a US entity.

This introduces new activity codes (PF5 regular grant and UF5 cooperative agreement) where upon granting the new money the foreign entity will receive their own RF2 grant or UL2 grant (based on the original grant type).

Under the old system a grant to a US institution (like a university) could be doled out to foreigner institutions as subawards without the USG seeing where the money was going. This is a violation of FFATA and the USG wants to track these dollars because US universities are not reporting it.

Additionally the USG has grown increasing suspicious of certain countries (think russia, china) that are getting subawards that are effectively transferring US IP to these entities via pliant US individuals at an institution. This forces the PI to get a linked award and pull these folks out of the shadows where they are now identified and where the USG can run a background check on them.

This also deals with university outsourcing where an institution can get a grant and then simply pass the money off (mostly entirely) to a foreign entity where the US university became essentially a shadow distribution vehicle. Under the new rules to do this the PI must show that but funnel funds to a foreign institution that institution must offer something not readily available in the US.

Once a foreign funded entity has received money in this way and then violates policy, or breached security it falls on the university to police their grants (which mostly they can't do effectively). So the USG wants to cut out the middleman and for the foreign entity to become a direct recipient of the grant making them legal liable to the USG for all the terms and conditions. If you violate the grant the NIH can sanction them directly without going through the university.

The real reason for the “cartels” in the US is because of the cost of infrastructure versus the subscribers cost. Because the United States is so large there are only a few companies that can create the infrastructure required to service large area areas with fiber.

So companies that have the ability to lay down, fiber do so in necessary cooperation with other providers to create a large patchwork across the country. This means that network companies have to cooperate with each other to send traffic back-and-forth.

It’s not realistic or feasible to have the US government generate a fiber optic connectivity for the entirety of every household in the United States. In fact, the free market was the only realistic possible to deliver this.

I don’t think this is correct. This is about German politics. Their central bank has been attempting to repatriate gold since 2013 in an effort to centralize their holdings. It’s also not just about the US. In theory, Germany could move all its gold holdings to Switzerland. Where there is a major trading hub. The fact that they want it back in the country is domestic politics.

Alzheimer's is a prion disease. Prions are proteins that cause other proteins to misfold. What's interesting is that most prion diseases are transmitted through ingestion or physical contact - possibly there's a correlation with population density and/or sanitation. It's also possible that there are low occurrences in ancient populations because most people died of other things. For example, 200 years ago bacteria diseases were the most common cause of death. Now that we have conquered most infection disease the primary cause of death now is cancer and cardiovascular issues.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-023-02768-9

Idempotentancy on POST isn't just about preventing double posting. For POST the RFC says you can return 303 when the call to create a resource would have resulted in generating an existing resource. You need a Location header for allowing the client to redirect to the corresponding GET. This allows clients to POST multiple times (over time) for the same resources and not have to handle 400 errors.

I don't think this is a reflection on performance. seems like the key word here is "obligated" to work after hours. this is due to managers pushing deadlines on their reports. honestly this isn't much of a surprise. If your boss is obligating you to work after hours you are unhappy. one issue here asking engineers to work after hours in a 'you build it you own it' culture. in my mind this qualifies for being "obligated" to work outside of business hours.

A more interesting item in the slide deck is that anyone that has more than 2 hours of meetings in a day has a loss of focus. I think it's conceivable to say that a heavy meeting culture may also force people to be "obligated" to work after hours because they have lost focus time in the day.

I think the definition of "productivity" is part of the problem. Managers view "productivity" as the ability to bounce ideas off each other and working collaboratively to get traction on hard problems.

This isn't how most engineers write software at the ground level though. Engineers need quiet concentration, free from distraction. Yes, there are hard problems that need collaboration to solve, but that type of interaction can be scheduled when needed. Far from needing to "bounce ideas" off other engineers, most senior engineers are pretty self-sufficient.

There is a different issue at play with junior engineers. They need supervision and that's hard to do unless your on a zoom call with them all day long. This isn't a new problem - it's simply a problem exposed by being remote. When we were in the office, all these junior engineers, were pulling productivity away from your senior engineers. Moving everything back to the office didn't increase productivity, it's actually decreasing it. Commute + sidebar conversations + mentoring junior engineers = less productivity out of your senior engineering staff.

There's definitely a "managers are from mars and engineers are from venus" sort of vibe happening here. Managers need that interaction and collaboration in order to provide oversight and provide direction. Senior engineers need a place to concentrate - and typically that isn't in the office where we have noisy open floor plans.

it's a millennial thing. they grew up working on laptops and their dream office is to make the workplace look like starbucks. Open seating, no cubicles, a barista. It's a knee-jerk reaction to the old office place standard of 'cubes'. Managers hire out to consultants that hype this type of office layout because it will supposedly attract a talent.

To be fair, cubes weren't any better. I remember having a guy slerping tea sitting across from me. I couldn't see him but I could sure hear him and there was no way for me to get up and move.

No ,when money is cheap people buy assets. Doesn't really matter what it is as long as it goes up in value. Bitcoin, Homes, NFT, who cares.

This isn't quite the same thing as inflation. Inflation is the cost of milk and eggs. That also has gone up, in part because the Fed is dumping money into the economy during the pandemic as part of quantitative easing. But the home prices are an effect of cheap money.

Now cheap money is gone, people have to rethink were to put money. Homes that are expensive to leverage and don't go up in value aren't a great place to put money anymore.

What makes this satire interesting is there is a conflict here. People sitting on $4 million homes in Palo Alto want to see more affordable housing. Just not here and not now.

You forgot about people building homes to be used as airbnb's.

There is a reason these places are uninhabited.

https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/charts/fig07.pdf

So i think the trendline in terms of homeownership rates seems to be gently decreasing for all age groups, but there's a big spike during the 2 housing bubbles we've seen when rates were at historic lows.

Here's are a few charts tracking home prices vs the consumer price index:

https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-vs-inflation/

https://www.bankingstrategist.com/housing-prices-hpi-vs-cpi

This is what I call "Bayesian software" - it will get you quickly to 70% of what you want but getting 100% of what you want is a game of diminishing returns. For some companies 70% solutions are ok and it's a tradeoff in terms of functionality vs cost which everyone has to make.

The reality is that a lot of software engineering is moving into the 'low code' space even if they don't call it that. This is part of a general strategy to sell B2B services (like cloud platforms or cloud tools) where engineers aren't really developing solutions from scratch as much as they are configuring tools provided to them via a B2B sale. Is this software engineering? I guess it's debatable but it's clearly not 'applied science'.

I see this as a general trend in any craft - craftsmen get displaced by cheap industrial alternatives (like plastic chairs vs actual decent chairs made by a craftsmen). There is no argument that a handmade wood chair made by a craftsman is better, but for many consumers at the bargain store, they want cheap plastic foam-injected chairs even if they are poorly made and break. Does the argument hold that these cheap alternatives are "more expensive" in the long run? maybe. It depends on what you're doing with the chairs.

I think one serious downside to 'low code' solutions is the brain-drain on new devs. I see so many engineers that don't understand basic software architecture because they've spend their career configuring B2B tools. Overtime this model of software will cause us to loose core CS skills.

News flash - the internet is full of trolls. Unfortunately since this is now the dominant form of how people get their news it's quite hard to find anything of quality anymore. Everything is a competition for subscribers which leads to clickbait everywhere. sad really.

With this project and the collapse of the Arecibo antenna it looks like the search for extraterrestrial life is on hold for the forseeable future. I loved the concept of the software though. It made people invested in the project even though they never took part in the academics. It was great PR even if it never produced any results that I know of.