thinkski

Why not work to become a billionaire, then donate your wealth? Or begin donating your earnings today? I would guess most people on Hacker News are in the upper decile of wealth globally — there are still billions of people living poverty. Feels like a fairer way to help people than trying to do it with other people’s wealth — the latter feels like hypocrisy.

Warren Buffett. Berkshire Hathaway has over $300B in cash reserves, Buffett owns 15% of Berkshire and directs investments — he chose to park all that value in cash reserves, roughly $50B of that is his share.

I’ve used first@last.name for the last 10 years or so. There have been probably a half dozen web forms where a regex expected 2-3 characters and I input an old gmail account that forwards to this address. Over the phone, the first@last part is easier to communicate since customer rep generally has the name info already. The .name throws them for a moment, but I’ve had one or two even tell me “oh, that’s cool, how did you do that?” which feels nice. It wasn’t my first choice, lastname.com was taken, but I like the precision of .name, arguably the most accurate TLD for a personal email address.

You earn gross income with your labor, on which you pay tax. The net is used to pay Jiffy Lube, which pays employer taxes on the mechanic’s labor, and passes that cost onto you, the customer. If you do your own labor for yourself, pay neither.

Another benefit — no one can tax your own labor for yourself. 100% of your effort goes towards your own gain.

I think there’s a common misunderstanding that with IPv6 anyone can connect to anyone else. That’s not true.

My laptop has an IPv6 address, as does the router that routes its traffic. There’s no NAT, that’s true, but there’s still a firewall — only inbound packets from a destination host and port that have been sent to are allowed in. And in enterprise environments, from what I’ve seen, there’s a symmetric NAT on IPv6 anyway — packet comes from a different IPv6 address and randomized port than the one client sent it from, making peer connectivity impossible, as the source port varies by destination host and port.

I suspect one is masking that a call center is in a low wage country, e.g. make customer in U.S. believe they’re talking to someone in U.S. while paying a fraction of the U.S. wage.

We’re not Mormon. And it’s come from her — in fact, I’m somewhat uneasy about it as finances will get tight.

It’s interesting, the grass is perhaps greener on the other side. My wife is planning on staying home with the kids when we have our second, and there’s a part of me that envy’s that freedom from worry on having to provide, being able to spend hours with our daughter while I may get a couple hours a night, our daughter is much closer to her mom already. In twenty years, the software I’ve written will likely have been long replaced — the bond invested in our children will be there forever.

Company has recurring expenses to keep your cloud-connected device running. They need recurring revenue to cover those costs. Depending on one-time revenue from the sale of new devices to cover the recurring expenses of existing devices is a pyramid scheme, no?

I have an IoT graveyard of devices from companies that did not charge a monthly fee and went under (Edyn garden sensor, Automatic car monitor, etc).

Organized by an employer, capital, and management. The orchestration, decision making, done well, is the difference between a highly valuable well functioning company, and dysfunctional paralysis. There are now multiple examples in history (pre-1989 Poland, Soviet Union, DPRK, etc.) that show the communal ownership of industry by labor does not create a high standard of living, enabled by plentiful goods, services, and innovation.

And the answer to that is totalitarian control on wealth accumulation?

Sounds like either NACKs are not getting through to indicate a need to retransmit, or should use a forward error correction (fec) extension.

This has been addressed with mDNS host candidates in lieu of local IP host candidates.

So that various sets of ideas can be tried as experiments. Also, so that groups of people with different values and ideas can live in their own worlds and not have to reach consensus on everything. I believe a lot of the division in the country could be solved by returning more decisions to state and local levels. Only centralize what the constitution requires.

As a DIYer, I like this. But why does this need legislation? If enough DIYers want this, wouldn’t they vote with their dollars and not buy unrepairable products?

From the article: “To get a TRULY random number sequence, you'd need to rely upon some truly random phenomenon, like the decay of a radioactive isotope.”

How is the true randomness of a physical phenomenon proved? Perhaps naively, I imagine that as an arithmetic-based software RNG is deterministic, so is a physical RNG, as otherwise the underlying physical process would be governed by no physical principals, no? Does random in this case not necessarily mean non-deterministic, but rather no statistically visible correlations?

The metrics for websites are flawed. For instance, time-on-site. If a user spends more time on a site before clicking back, maybe that site is more useful. Or maybe that site has made it purposely difficult to find the key information, such as recipe websites that place lots of unnecessary text and ads before to actual recipe. But that strategy gets the site better search engine rankings, which in turn ranks them higher and drives more traffic, which drives more ad revenue.

When I encounter a site where the first thing I see is a pop up to subscribe, or prompt about opting out of cookies, or 60 second ad to watch a 30 second video, I just leave the site.

The main benefit I’ve seen with more experience is being able to find better solutions to complex problems more quickly. Essentially, knowing the right way to do things up front rather than figuring it out as you go.

Often there are many design goals (eg low cost, low complexity, time to build, seamless integration with X, performance, memory and/or code footprint (particularly in embedded), compatibility with standard X, extensibility, futureproofing, etc). Tetrising all the pieces is probably NP hard — experience is akin to knowing the solution already, or something similar.

Spot on. I’ve found the same — used to be I could get things I couldn’t get elsewhere or could get things for a lower price. Now there’s so much junk.

When there’s a mismatch between capacity and load, price increases bring the two back into balance (incentivizing additional capacity and reducing load). But if price increases are not permitted, keeping water cheaper than it should be, then yes, people will waste it.

If price increases were permitted, additional capacity would make economic sense, such as desalination plants and aqueducts. And load would decrease. People would save water and some would move out of state. California’s population has increased more than its water supply, which has remained largely static I imagine.

Very cool. Out of curiosity, why is the H.265 size slightly more than the H.264 size? How does the compute complexity for encoding and decoding compare with those two codecs?

Seems like with LCEVC you still need to decode your encoded frame and compute a difference between the original input to the encoder, at say 30 fps. Many embedded system-on-chips that do H.264/H.265 encoding (eg IP cameras) are not able to decode to memory, only straight to an HDMI/DSI output. Using the CPU to decode and compute a difference is too compute heavy to be possible in real-time on these ARM single or quad core processors.

For me, online dating worked out, but it took a long time, was a bumpy road. I found that having a great group of friends also helped me. After college I moved to a new city and a corporate job with a skewed gender ratio, which made it tough to meet people, and probably made me a less desirable mate (having thin social connections). When I moved back closer to home, to people I knew, and found a job at a smaller company I enjoyed, things fell into place — even people you meet online will need to fit into your irl life eventually.

The license plainly states the software might not work and comes with no guarantees of it not breaking things:

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

There’s a continuous tension between capacity and load. We’ve been fortunate that technology (and untapped resources) have largely placed capacity above load for much of our lifetimes. Spare capacity tends to be followed by an increase in load. Remains to be seen if technology advances can keep capacity above load. If not, load will decrease, either gradually or drastically, one way or another.

It’s really a restatement of supply and demand. Prices that are free to respond to an imbalance between the two keep the two in balance. Prices have been low for a long time because capacity has been high / load has been low. As load increases faster than capacity, expect prices to increase,

In embedded systems, space can be a premium (e.g. a recent project has 75MB for a rootfs). With C++, need to link to libstdc++ and libc, with C only need libc.

I find a number of developers reach for C++ because they aren’t comfortable with C or low-level development. For instance, will copy memory into a std::vector or std::string just to use the STLs search functions where a simple finite state machine would be more appropriate. I also find a correlation between C developers having a better understanding of things like file descriptors, poll/select/epoll for an event loop, while a C++ developer is more likely to use std::thread and then have to deal with proper locking.

Working in a constrained environment, I like C exactly because it “does less”. It’s more explicit, simpler, hides less behind abstractions in practice.

What is the origin of genuine choice?

Unfortunate that the truck was at an angle — much of radar likely bounced off to the right rather than returning back. The color of the truck provided little contrast, probably wasn’t resolved by the sensor, which has a dynamic range of 115dB, low compared to ~160dB of human eye, and 1MP (before debayering), again low compared to human eye at the center of vision.

Does make me wonder what we’re building today that will last. I suppose the engineers who worked on Voyager or Pathfinder have the best shot of having built something enduring.