HN user

cure

1,440 karma

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/cure; my proof: https://keybase.io/cure/sigs/WbtlspMh45oi3gla3ysEVPPSiyIz_piGc0SdoKYxIYs ]

Posts2
Comments362
View on HN

There seem to be a few camera manufacturers listed under "Supporters" on the introduction page, namely Goodcam and RunCam.

VIM is well designed and stable, so you can learn the interface and be confident that it will work for you next time you use it. It's an amazing tool.

Today's voice assistants are the opposite. They are unreliable and completely unstable. They don't have a clear list of commands they understand, let alone some sort of menu system - the documented commands on the manufacturer's websites often don't work. They also randomly change what they can do: stuff stops working for no obviously reason.

For example - yesterday, my son's Nest Audio suddenly refused to set a music alarm, claiming "this device doesn't support that feature yet" (it's literally a speaker for music...). It worked the day before.

There is a school of thought that developers should have hardware that is a generation behind the cutting edge, to make sure that their output will perform really well in the real world, on the latest hardware...

A “burn all the packaging down and start over” path?

In Python land one of those seems to come along every couple of years. They start over and implement a solution for some subset of the problem space. Then they realize the Python packaging mess is much, much bigger than anticipated and progress stalls. At that point there are 15 partial "standard" packaging solutions for Python, where there were 14 before. None of them are feature complete, and they don't really coexist well or at all.

Cue the obligatory https://xkcd.com/927/ and https://xkcd.com/1987/

On the plus side, the article provides an explanation for why this is happening, with some detail.

On the minus side, the article seems to try to make some weird, more general point that is just scaremongering: "omg the sky is falling, sometimes components with hidden defects cause failure on a large scale years later".

The author also suggests this has never happened before, which is of course false. I guess they never heard of the "capacitor plague" cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague, which was a lot more serious.

People who made those exact arguments 10-20 years ago where wrong, since those plants would have prevented a lot of coal, oil and gas from being burned. Those people have both blood and an ongoing climate crisis on their hands.

Perhaps. But 10-20 years ago, solar/wind/storage was a lot more expensive and a lot less efficient. The situation is quite different now.

Who should we blame in 10-20 from now if people still are burning coal, oil and gas? Who will take responsibility for the inaction?

Realistically, there will probably still be knuckleheads who will be burning coal, oil and gas in 10-20 years from now. But hopefully they will be a very small minority.

The main thing that gives me hope is that it is now so much cheaper to build/run renewables than fossil fuel plants, that the latter will be phased out sooner rather than later, just for economic reasons. Those 6 out of touch old people on the supreme court are trying to delay things - and their actions will have very bad consequences for all of us - but the trend is clear.

Every year coal is still here, instead of nuclear, is 100 years of death. If building powerplants (of any type) were instant, and solar were one year away, then we should STILL replace all coal with nuclear TODAY, to minimize harm. (in a spherical chickens in a vacuum sort of way)

But... we all know that it takes a lot longer to build a nuclear plant (on the order of 10-20 years) than it does to build (large) solar or wind farms (on the order of 1-5 years).

So.... yeah, if it was magically possible to replace all coal with nuclear right now, that would be a net improvement in terms of carbon output and general pollution.

But we live in the real world, and that is not possible, so I'm not sure what point you are trying to make, to be honest.

I'm pretty sure that enough solar/wind + storage can be built to replace a significant percentage (30%? 50%?) of the remaining coal plants, before the first new nuclear plant's plans and siting are even finalized, let alone before a new nuclear plant is fully operational.

And it's going to be a lot cheaper, too.

do you think lawyers work on Jira tickets?

Probably not, but instead they get to bill their working hours in 6 minute increments. And they have to bill a high number of hours a day. Praise yourself lucky if you don't have to do that!

There are many large employers here like Apple, Google, Cisco, Microsoft, Github, Redhat, SAAS, Epic Games, etc.

Yeah. And based on the idiotic bills coming out of the NC state government (bathroom bills, now this anti-EV nonsense), these organizations need to step up their lobbying.

This kind of logic I would expect only from a bean-counter, and a bad one to be honest... Why would anyone pay $80k/month to solve a problem that could be solved with 0.5 FTE?

I think you're underestimating what it would take to solve the problem (even one as "simple" as this one). But, let's assume there is an off the shelf open source solution that is perfect for your environment and requires no changes and integrates easily in your corporate processes without any work (this is already very unrealistic...).

Then, you need to run it and provide 24/7 uptime for your 10k users, which are presumably spread across multiple timezones. Your 0.5 FTE is going to be on call 24/7? Good luck filling that position.

Finally, how are you going to support the 10k users? Is that 0.5 FTE going to answer all the support requests?

I'm not saying it's bad to do things in house - and there are really good reasons to do so. You just have to be realistic. It's going to take a whole lot more than 0.5 FTE to run even a "simple" service like this with the kind of reliability and support your 10k users will demand.

Suddenly that $80k/mo to make it someone else's problem doesn't sound so bad :)

When I see that many open postings at once, alarm bells go off.

It all depends on context though - for a company as massive as Tesla, 20+ open postings for SWE is nothing. It certainly doesn't warrant alarm bells, I think.

Curii Corporation | DevOps Engineer | Somerville, MA or REMOTE | Full-time | https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/devops-engineer-at-curii-...

Join Curii (https://www.curii.com) as DevOps Engineer! We are the small but mighty team that builds Arvados (https://arvados.org/), an open source platform for large scale computation and data management. Most of our customers and users are in life sciences, in the genomics space.

We're looking for a DevOps engineer with strong analytical skills to join the Arvados engineering team.

We're a friendly and well functioning team that loves free and open source software and open science. Our team is in 4 countries and we operate mostly in the Eastern timezone (Americas). We are remote first.

Feel free to contact me with questions (e-mail address in profile), and by all means apply at https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/devops-engineer-at-curii-...

LWN Is Hiring 4 years ago

Definitely not everyone. For example, Google jobs have a narrow, specific range, e.g. https://careers.google.com/jobs/results/117083209834865350/

=================== Additional Information (Colorado only) Minimum Salary of $198,000 - $212,000 + bonus + equity + benefits. Note: Disclosure as required by sb19-085 (8-5-20) of the minimum salary compensation range for this role when being hired into our offices in Colorado.

I get that Ashton is trying to do the right thing here. The problem is the solutions are just so short sighted. I dug through his website and came across a blog post [1] they made blasting Facebook for implementing E2E on Facebook/IG Messenger.

I would argue that he's just trying to make money. Lobbying politicians so that a requirement for a product becomes enshrined in law, while your organization just happens to be providing that product? For a fee, of course. This is just plain old greed in a wrapper of virtue signaling. Yuck.

For example, some of my homelab servers use older AMD Athlon 200 GE as their CPUs, due to the fact that there are on board graphics and because the TDP is 35W, both saving electricity and also allowing me to use passive cooling (with just a large heatsink https://www.arctic.de/en/Alpine-AM4-Passive/ACALP00022A).

I have a server with a 3700x. I originally had a cheapo discrete AMD graphics card in it, but I ended up just yanking that and running the machine without any graphics card. Saves power.

there’s nothing really that can be done

I very much doubt nothing can be done - this is just a matter of (political) will and appropriate enforcement.

Here in MA we also have a law that says that items for sale must be priced. The law must have teeth, because all big stores have dedicated price scanners spread out through the store. The scanners can be used to check the price of any item, in case a price tag was not applied. In general, price tags are present, even in small corner stores.

Sun is only present in the summer

Your general point is not controversial (sun/wind are unpredictable). By stating that the sun only shines in the summer,though, people are not going to take you seriously and will miss your point.

The obvious solution to the unpredictability of solar/wind is to couple renewable power generation with short/medium term energy storage capacity. There are many ways to do this, all with their own upsides and downsides. E.g. pumped hydro, grid-scale LFP batteries, etc. Also, long-range interconnects to places with more sun and/or wind.