crispyambulance

  >...vocation of choice is misaligned with your personality...

The OP mentioned they were doing systems engineering. That's a very particular hellscape of grinding details. It involves being comfortable constantly dealing with a lack of control and flow. The good news is there many different kinds of work. I hope they can find their path.

It really depends on what the individual goal actually is.

I think engineering curriculums “stop short” on mathematics just as it starts becoming interesting, more generalized and before connections start becoming easy to see and remember. Math is often handled as a bag of tricks.

A lot of engineers would do well to review mathematics at a deeper level than their undergrad days, and that can mean hitting up real analysis, abstract algebra and other topics from scratch in a proof theoretic way.

Once that mathematical fluency is achieved, it becomes possible to ingest other topics at higher levels of sophistication, IMHO.

XML was a good, well-intentioned idea.

The problem, IMHO, was that rampant "xml-abuse" in the naughts. ws-* standards and over-engineered garbage like SOAP ("complex object access protocol") made people loathe XML.

I did like JAXB in Java, XLST, schemas, XPATH. Never got into XSL, but it seemed like good thing too. It worked best when your tooling manipulated it for you or at least helped you in an intelligent way. Much of the hate for XML came from situations where you had to deal with someone's over-the-top-one-size-fits all schema without the benefit of tooling to at least hint you in the right direction.

It still survives in WPF and c# *.proj files. If it were just me, I would still use it for object serialization. But json is king now even though it's inferior.

   > I really do not think it’s a difficult language to learn.

Of course, everyone in HN is "advanced" so what do I know!

    > You can learn something like ~90% of useful SQL in an afternoon.

It's an ugly little language that one has to come back to and re-learn over and over at different levels of sophistication. Nothing wrong with that, but to suggest it's trivial is a gross mischaracterization.

Beautiful!

I did have in mind something more like the Socratic method, asking pointed questions of your mentee, guiding them but not pushing them. I suppose that in a weird way that essay is the Hunter S Thompson idea of the socratic method.

I really do think it's important to give thought to HOW to give help.

Especially in the technical communities, there's such an over-emphasis in "asking correctly". It perhaps started with usenet (think Eric S Raymond's INSUFFERABLE FAQ on "How To Ask Questions The Smart Way"), and ended with the persnickety and now thankfully moribund stackoverflow gameified and toxic question-and-answer forum.

There is plenty advice around for "how to ask" (really, it's the same if you know the person or not). It all boils down to a Calvinistic "show you're worthy" kind of exercise.

But what about advice for giving help to someone?

There's plenty of ways that giving someone help can go horribly wrong, and I think that it's not uncommon for people to be blindsided by such a request.

...it's massively expensive to buy the components piecemeal.

I think the point of this is not to make "a product". It's just a fun project that you can build yourself or participate in some way with it's creation and/or funding.

It's not practical. That's OK.

Motto's, slogans, mission statements...

All of these things are 100% bullshit and always have been. It's tragic that Google actually had people believing them when they championed "don't be evil".

Yes. It was good enough to communicate that news item.

Did Alibaba perform "an attack" or were they taking advantage of resources and going beyond Anthropic's terms of service? Didn't Anthropic do the same kinds of things when building their models?

These are all interesting questions, but they don't have to be addressed in full by a news blurb about a letter Anthropic wrote to some senators.

The standard of neutrality that people here pretend to require from news organizations is not even remotely realistic.

It was a timely story from Reuters. They do fast news feeds, like APnews. Could it have been better or more accurate? Sure, they could have gone into why distillation may or may not be seen as "an attack". But then it would have been a more involved story, defeating the purpose of a news feed.

The Reuters piece was "good enough". Some other place like the NYTimes or WSJ can follow up with more detailed investigative coverage if it's a worthwhile story.

Ferriss has been part of what I call the "self-help industrial complex" for a very long time. He also has known Thiel since at least the early naughts.

  > Regulate or not regulate, but the government should not pick winners and losers.

  > They were asking for regulation.

I've heard others call it a marketing ploy that AI companies keep coming back to-- the idea that "it's soooo dangerous, we have to be careful".

If we're talking homemade vacuum tubes... I wonder if it wouldn't be easier to just use metal endplates with feedthroughs for electrical (like spark-plugs) and with v-grooves for o-rings or some other gasket material. this kind of construction can handle vacuum easily, I think?

A lot of success-striving people are pretty grossed out by absurd levels of wealth inequality as well.

Sure, some folks are going to be fantastically wealthy, that's OK to a large extent.

But, we're on the precipice of trillionaire's existing in a country where literally half of the population is functionally illiterate (yes, that's the USA), where the middle class is dissolving, and where we are approaching a feudal level wealth inequality-- and all this stuff is accelerating.

I mean, I guess it's not that bad. We still have a democracy. It's not like we have billionaires re-arranging political power and public resources for their pleasure and benefit. Oh wait, we do!

The thing about "compound growth", even in the most general sense, is that it ALWAYS ends, and that end is typically a crash of some sort.

In biology there's the notion of a growth curve. It starts out with the familiar "compound interest" exponential growth, but unlike Econ-101 textbooks, that curve then proceeds to resource depletion (overshoot), followed by "die-off", followed by extinction, where (N -> 0, where N is usually something like yeast-cell count, but if you're applying this model to something else, it could be stuff like well-being or money).

I do appreciate how helpful AI has been with troubleshooting and providing vital background info in repairing appliances. I've been doing this since before AI, as appliance repair services from professionals are all but gone where I live.

However, neither AI nor (most of) the videos can help with finagling frail snap-fit assemblies one encounters in appliances. A lot of appliance repair work is very simple but requires significant practice and figure-it-out time, in addition to waiting for sketchy parts from Ebay. Half the battle is just finding the damn parts.

I've used this pattern for ~10 years now:

1 Subscribe at some very reasonable intro rate: $4 a month for 6 months

2 The intro rate expires and goes to $25 a month.

3 I call the number to cancel, say I am canceling because expense

4 They offer the intro-rate again to keep me, I accept

5 goto 2

Lately, however, I haven't even had to call someone. I just go through their webapp and it automatically offers the intro rate again. I suppose that if I decline that, I would have to talk to someone, but I really like the NYTimes and $4.24/month is reasonable to me.

And yes, I think they do have some sense of desperation chasing them. It costs money to do what they do and newspapers are a hard business.

By the way... if the OP really doesn't want to bother with a subscription, many public libraries offer digital access in the form of 72 hour passes to the NYTimes, the passes are unlimited. I realize that public libraries aren't cool for the libertarian set, but it is a viable option. There are tons of other newspapers and magazines available to read online for free too through your public library (needs a library card though).

It's always been hard to know the extent of how draconian tracking actually is (IT pros tend to not talk about it much).

In the US, there's the expectation that when you use an employer-provided device that any and all activity on it can be fully monitored/recorded and used against the employee for any reason. In practice, however, few people worry about reasonable amounts web-surfing, being on hacker-news or doing life-activities on their work machines. Oh, here I am on hacker-news when I should be working.

With AI, this changes significantly since the man can now employ a robot to categorize and finely scrutinize every little thing with the pretext of "training" (to take your job). We will soon have to brace ourselves for an absolute draconian level of tracking.

Good riddance! I've used it a lot, like everybody else, and it helped me many times.

Unfortunately, it developed a serious culture problem that would not go away. I suspect the gamification attracted many rigid-thinking, rule-obsessed personality types that weren't self-aware enough to realize when they hurt others.

Yes, of course, they wanted good questions and useable answers. That's a good intention but it does not excuse treating people like shit for asking the "wrong" question. The level of smugness and the withering dismissals I saw on there just made me cringe-- I'm looking at you Hans Passant!

  > When I look for people to take advice from I want to see a pattern of home runs, that they can deliver repeatedly...

For those of us with more modest aspirations, listening to a cool person talk about cool stuff is a far better of use of time and attention.

From which would you take advice, the successful entrepreneur/investor, or the nice hacker geek [?]

The nice hacker geek? By the way, the Woz has a net-worth of 140MM, so he's more wealthy that the vast majority of "successful entrepreneur/investors", and also vastly more beloved than virtually all of them.

In any case, that's a false dichotomy and actually the wrong question entirely.

Beyond a certain amount, the actual number becomes meaningless especially for people who already have dynastic wealth not even counting this. It's just what they happened to negotiate.

It's quite a retirement package.

A lot of this is a matter of taste and judgement.

In the same way that it's possible to have an xml/json/yaml/toml config that creates despair in those who have to maintain it, a python or bash script can grow into a monster in the basement.

Or, it could be a cogent script that makes its intent and operation obvious. I prefer that when possible.

Infrastructure as Code, not infrastructure as YAML.

Right on.

It's amazing to me that we've spent decades with programming languages and environments which can accurately guess what you're about to type next, which have enormous expressiveness while maintaining cogency, which are intuitive and well understood by humans, which have endless libraries and an infinity of ways of connecting with the world.

And what do we use to configure the most sophisticated infrastructure to run such code? Yet another mark-up language!

...sneaker company that pivoted to data centers set the 'weird' bar pretty high...

"Weird" is the wrong word for Allbirds. "Fraud" is far more fitting. They obviously have no intention running an AI-datacenter business and are doing it for the stock-price rush. A small number of people will be laughing all the way to the bank, and everyone will forget Allbirds in short order.

Ebay has a history of being legit, though they have had a long list of uncanny acquisitions themselves (including Skype, which they later sold for a stiff loss). It's a pity they couldn't just execute on their core business and are now being acquired themselves by an entity using sketchy financial shenanigans.

Who's going to stop a few rich people with a pile of money and a stated intent of doing something they have no intention of doing? No one, I guess. I mean, there's plenty of examples. Supermicro is still listed on NASDAQ even though one of their founders was caught smuggling export-controlled GPU's in Supermicro servers to the tune of 2.5 billion dollars a couple months ago.

I think USB-C is certainly a step in the right direction.

The remaining problem is the lack of CLEAR, easy to understand markings on the cable that indicate whether it’s intended as power delivery cable or as a 10Gbps data cable or as a thunderbolt-capable cable or any of many combinations in between those. This should not be limited to physical markings on the cable itself but also in the form of electronic self-identification so that you could plug in a cable and have the OS tell you exactly what cable you plugged in. Why not? We have power-delivery protocols, adding cable self-id would be a trivial addition.

I suspect the vendors of these, and perhaps the designers of the spec too, have deliberately made this confusion an integral part of the standard. It creates churn and consumers buying more cables than they need.

Apparently, you can use it in RPN mode!

RIP. He was an amazing human. I worked for a time at JCVI when it was in Rockville, shortly after he had left Celera Genomics. He led a team that did something which was considered intractably difficult-- sequencing whole genomes. Then he did it again with global ocean sampling and synthetic genomics and other things. That is not to say that "he did it single-handedly", Venter was a hybrid of scientific and organizational talent that was able to make this stuff happen by coordinating stuff that's super hard to coordinate.