doe_eyes

If you're joining a company of 15 people? Probably. If you're joining a company of 50,000? Absolutely not, because they're not going to vastly increase the complexity of their HR or payroll just to close a single hire.

Money and equity are easy to negotiate because there's no management overhead. But if you want your 401k to be at a different brokerage, or have other "process" request like that? Probably not gonna happen - not for a line employee.

You can't easily make a high-quality firearm a hobby mill, chiefly because the barrel needs to be made out of good steel and needs to be rifled. But the quirk in the US is that federally, only the receiver is the regulated part, and many types of receivers can be made out of plastic or aluminum. You can certainly use cheap three-axis CNC with some fixturing to make AR-15 receivers, for example, and many people did. Cody Wilson / Defense Distributed had this whole thing where they were selling CNC mills for cranking out guns.

You can also definitely make junk single-use guns using either technology, just like the 3D-printable "Liberator".

Mostly because most spam isn't going to be reported. Traditional anti-spam works because once you have a handful of reports, you can probably generalize it to an entire class of spammy pages generated using a particular technique, and get rid of everything.

LLM-generated content is not distinguishable from human content by any simple rule, so you lose the ability to police the platform that way.

I think it's the other way round. You're a respectable individual, you're buying some low-brow ads - and you don't want a newspaper to publish an expose about you, your employees throwing a hissy-fit, or a neighbor getting upset.

No, they used a semi-custom chip known as an uncommitted logic array (ULA). It was basically a bunch of building blocks on a die that were designed once for a variety of possible applications, and then reconfigured by the factory to customer's spec. The idea was that most of the design work only needed to be done once, so cranking out customer-specific ASICs was cheaper than a 100% custom design.

Now we have FPGAs, so this approach is pretty much obsolete.

I think Linus has short temper and there are examples of his remarks that are borderline toxic (or cross the line), but this really isn't one of them.

The situation is pretty clear and calmly explained by Linus in the quoted messages. They removed contributors from Russia. The main reason is that they were told by a lawyer that they need to do this due to international sanctions. The secondary reason appears to be that Linus is not a fan of what Russia is doing, and is OK with sending a message.

They made a call and were immediately swarmed by people trying to argue geopolitics, law, personal responsibility, transparency, and so on - many of whom aren't regular kernel contributors. Linus responded that he's not going to argue, and I can't blame him: it's a software project, not a discussion club. Sometimes, maintainers make the call and you suck it up, leave, or fork it. This is just that.

I generally side with the EFF, but I find the article weirdly duplicitous. It's framed as a criticism of government waste, but would the EFF be happy if the government built a more effective surveillance system at the border? Of course not.

If they wanted to make some sort of a precise argument against border surveillance, they failed to do so in this write-up. "Public contracts are rife with grift, so the government shouldn't be doing stuff" isn't likely to change too many minds.

It’s a shame that Arduino has effectively truncated kids learning with a full MCU as the “building block” of their learning

Why? I think the vast majority of hobbyists used the 555 as a "black-box" chip. They now have a more intuitive, cheaper, and more power-efficient way of doing the same thing.

Pre-Arduino, learning electronics wasn't more profound. It was just less accessible. Nowadays, you have the same number of determined and talented hobbyists who eventually master some of the more arcane topics. You also have more people who learn just enough to get their art project done, and it's easier than it used to be... but why is that a bad thing?

There's a temptation to demand that others do things the hard way just because we had to. But is it healthy? I don't lament the demise of the 555 any more than I lament that the youth no longer knows how to put shoes on a horse.

Except, it's not an advantage in any practical sense. Programmers cost pennies, toolchains are free and easy to use, and there are ample examples for simple tasks such as "toggle a pin in a particular way". The overall learning curve is almost certainly less steep than the learning curve for all the modes and quirks of the 555.

What matters in production is that a 555-based circuit will use more power, that it's four components to source and install instead of one, and so on. Don't get me wrong, I like the 555, just like I like vacuum tubes, but it's nearly as dead.

In some respects, it's a testament to how much the world of electronics has changed over the past ~25 years. It used to be that 555 was this Swiss-army-knife IC that you had to learn about. Multiple people published entire books about it!

Today, it's essentially obsolete. You're quite unlikely to find it in any competently-done commercial designs. Every analog trick you can do with it can be done more cheaply, more reliably, with better power efficiency, and with fewer external components using a modern MCU.

It's not that analog is dead, but it's solving different problems now. Including how to keep ultra-high-speed digital signals usable within the footprint of a PCB - which wasn't that much of a consideration in the golden days of the 555.

With kitchen appliances, it's already a thing. For example, there's a "retro" brand that sells microwaves with a timer knob:

https://www.amazon.com/Nostalgia-NRMO7YW6A-Countertop-Microw...

The problem in that segment is that it's basically the same disposable, non-repairable tech that's destined to the dumpster in a couple of years. The company is selling the appearance of having a different design philosophy, and it works because the consumer has no way of telling.

So, if you want to do anything more profound in that space, it's going to be hard to compete.

But... that's the model of the US space program from the get go. We're just trading one private company for another. Apollo 11 was contracted out to Boeing, Rockwell, and Grumman. The Space Shuttle was the United Space Alliance (Rockwell / Lockheed Martin), the engines were made by Rocketdyne...

The only change right now is that NASA is no longer the only party designing missions, because entities such as SpaceX have enough integrated expertise to run their own show start to finish.

It's also the most successful space program in the world, so what's the benchmark we're comparing it to? The failings of the US space program had relatively little to do with private contractors, and a lot to do with politics and the voting public not liking risk.

Following the Reagan era, the GOP had a period of wanting to reign in the federal government, but I don't think that's quite true now. Folks like Trump or DeSantis are not pro-small-government, they just want to use it to advance different social policies. In the fight between farmers and Deere, I doubt they'd side with the company.

Data point: Trump's VP nominee likes what the FTC is doing - https://fortune.com/2024/08/11/jd-vance-5000-child-tax-credi...

This works wonderfully, but is obviously not sustainable. It's not just that you miss out on newer content, but content rot progresses pretty quickly. Old Reddit accounts are deleted or blocked, Flickr users stop paying their subscription fees, etc.

There are so many photobucket.com URLs buried in old forum posts that no longer work...

Of course they will, just like they did in the past with C11, GNU extensions, or some of the individual features that are now rolled into C23. For example, the 0b notation for binary numbers is widely used in the MCU world.

The microcontroller toolchains are generally built on top of GCC, so they get the features for free. There are some proprietary C compilers that are chronically lagging behind, but they are not nearly as important as they used to be two decades ago.

By borrowing against their holdings. The framing is deceptive. You can do this too: there is no requirement to have billions in collateral. If you own stocks, your brokerage will lend you money at a very low rate, secured by the equity - typically up to about half of your stocks' worth.

The gotcha is market risk. If there's another crash akin to the housing crisis - and there will be - the bank will liquidate your holdings and possibly leave you on the hook for more. The difference is that Elon may be diversified enough to survive, while less savvy margin-surfers might not.

Sure, but... how often do we object when fellow techies make analogies between just about anything and their field of expertise? We feel that our knowledge makes us quite qualified to explain the economy, to chime in on microbiology, and so on.

It's really pretty universal.

The jailbreaks are not doing anything worthwhile right now. They're fun to toy with and they give us insights into how LLMs work, but they don't unlock any superpowers. It's just a brand safety bypass, you can get the model to praise Hitler or something like that.

The way to make MDMA is easy to look up on the web. The government is not trying to keep a lid on it; instead, they're restricting access to key feedstock materials. In this case, safrole and isosafrole are on DEA List I, so no one is gonna sell it to you. If you ask an LLM for more novel and dangerous chemistry, you get plausibly-sounding nonsense, not superhuman AI.

Now, the hacks will become useful once models are given more agency, for example when fully automating customer support. But the existence of trivial bypasses is precisely what's holding these uses back.

It's one of these areas where people (including medical professionals) hold strong beliefs, but then it turns out that there are other highly-developed countries where this is not routinely practiced, and the outcomes aren't necessarily different.

Routine wisdom teeth removal is not a thing in most of Europe. Another random example are colonoscopies and routine flu vaccines (except for the elderly).

The Nobel is now controversial because after all, Nobel invented dynamite and he wanted to expunge his guilt.

It's not controversial for that reason. It's actually a fantastic origin story for the prize, especially since he arranged for it on his deathbed.

OK, I get that you don't like Bezos-Gates-Zuck-Musk.

Huh?

Is there any reason Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk can't endow a Prize in Computer Science?

Even without searching, I'm sure they back a number of organizations that do endow various awards, scholarships, and so on. I doubt they could come up with a "flagship" one that would be as prestigious as the Nobel Prize, though. Our attitudes toward modern-day "industrialists" and their pet projects are quite different today. Whatever controversies surround the Nobel Prize, they would be many times worse for the Bezos-Gates-Zuck-Musk Medal of Merit.

I think it's a pretty good and well-argued video, but how many folks watched it until the end, where the clip seamlessly pivots to plugging some commercial antivirus as a "cure" for the very problems it talks about?

There's so much irony in that... as with video monetization, Google sucks, except the alternatives don't work or suck worse. Since it's unlikely that Google will have a change of heart about product design, so the only way this can change is if we come up with a better way to search the internet.

I've gotten traffic from HN and /r/programming, and the influx from HN is larger. I think it's a function of two things. First, /r/programming is higher-volume (i.e., more front-page links per day). Second, Reddit subscriber counts are not DAU / MAU, it likely includes a ton of inactive accounts.

HN is small as a discussion community, but it is huge in terms of the traffic it generates to top-ranked URLs. There are fairly mainstream publications that optimize for HN, and I have spoken to marketers and PR people who described HN as by far the most significant source of traffic to their sites.

It doesn't necessarily translate to sales or lasting attention, but if you're after brand recognition or SEO, it's great. Spend some time on /newest to see how many organizations are desperate to get a piece of this.

There are surprisingly few venues for video content outside YT, at least not on a scale that would matter on YT! For example, if you want to get to the top of HN, non-video content has much better odds. Many tech- or science-centric subreddits discourage or ban videos too.

YT is a fairly closed ecosystem that's both insanely resource-intensive to participate in, and that doesn't give creators too many second chances. My specific claim is that it's more of a crapshoot than running a blog. There are so many great science visualizations with 50 views.

It's also what bums me out about YouTube. There is an insane amount of effort that goes into producing high-quality videos - orders of magnitude more than would go into putting together a well-illustrated blog post.

As with blogs, a lot of this effort is wasted unless you get lucky. But with blogs, at least you have multiple good shots at visibility. Maybe you'll make it to the top of HN, maybe on X, maybe somewhere else. Even within a single platform, you usually have multiple tries. If you don't get noticed right away, there's still hope that someone else shares your content down the line.

In contrast, on YouTube, an algorithm essentially decides once. If you don't already have a zillion subscribers, it shows your video to a couple of people, more or less at random. If they don't engage, that's the end of the road.

Commercial LLMs generally have input and output filters to prevent "bad" prompts from reaching the model (instead returning canned text), or to nuke output if it appears to violate certain criteria.

But then, you have two independent mechanisms that can get out of sync, a classic source of issues in infosec - except both are also more or less inscrutable and fail in unexpected ways.

I'm addressing the parent's proposal, which is to "why not just keep selling fractions of the asset to cover taxes".

Yes, if you're rich, you might have other ways to cover the liability, but that's not what the parent said.

And for what it's worth, these "billionaire" thresholds in political discourse are fairly meaningless. The last time the Biden admin "cracked down on billionaires", they instituted IRS reporting requirements for Paypal and eBay when you receive in excess of $600 a year. There just isn't enough billionaires for policies that truly target only them to make a difference, unless you flat out start taxing / confiscating wealth.

All it means is that a percent of your investment becomes "realized" every year and you sell a portion of your investment to cover it.

Because there is a ton of investments that aren't liquid, aren't trivial to value on an ongoing basis, and aren't infinitely divisible.

Again, a farm is a perfect example. Land prices are going up. Your family farm was worth n million, and is now theoretically worth twice that. Do you sell a portion of it to developers to pay the tax on the unrealized gains? Oh by the way, the land is probably zoned agricultural, so you actually can't.

Or, you buy a famous painting as an investment. Do you cut off a piece each year and auction it off?

Yeah, it's relatively easy for stock market holdings. But if stocks get unfavorable tax treatment, all this will accomplish is moving money away from the stock market toward assets that get a better treatment... like investment real estate, with all the problems that entails.

That's a good argument in favor of the federal TikTok ban. This particular lawsuit isn't about that, though. It's about harming children, and it's quite similar to the recent New Mexico lawsuit against Snapchat.

The geopolitical angle I can get behind. But these "failed to protect children" lawsuits are a lot more sprawling, authoritarian, and potentially damaging to the internet at large.