timsally

I will admit I never expected to open the front page of HN in 2021 and read a comment about someone who had read The Overstory. Richard Powers is the preeminent American novelist of our time. With respect to all his works, HN types will especially enjoy Plowing the Dark and Galatea 2.2.

There is no better way to dig deep into the effects of modern technology on society than to read Richard Powers. It is no exaggeration to say that reading Powers fundamentally changed the course of my life. Reading his work is absolutely worth your time.

More than 80% of the aid to USSR was delivered after the Battle of Stalingrad was won by the USSR, and the outcome of the war was pretty much settled.

If you think WWII was settled in February of '43 then that says all we need to know regarding your credibility on this matter. I only mean to be as harsh as is necessary, but it is crazy to be as cavalier as you are being regarding the history of a war where so many lives were lost.

Why do you think Elon Musk chose to start SpaceX in the US?

Should we ask the founder in South Africa who was able to recruit the right technical talent and hold a majority share of a private rocket/satellite company while remaining in South Africa?

Why didn't Elon start SpaceX in Canada or South Africa?

Exactly my point. If you want to start a company as ambitious as SpaceX, the US is the only place to do it. If you do it somewhere else, you incur serious risk of getting a large chunk of the company seized/taxed, even if you are successful.

Frankly, it it not a coincidence that Silicon Valley and companies like SpaceX are in the US. They are direct results of the military ecosystem that has developed there.

SpaceX is the direct result of a South African who studied in Canada and came to the US because that's what he wanted to do. The idea that the US "military ecosystem" could claim "direct" responsibility for what Elon has achieved is an insult to him.

Ww2 in Europe was largely won by the USSR.

This comment is unrelated to the discussion you are replying to, but I'll give it a brief response. First, all you need to know about whether the Soviet efforts in WW2 and the American efforts in WW2 were better for Europe is to consider the outcomes of East and West Germany. Second, I have serious doubts whether the USSR alone could have prevailed against Germany and Japan. But as to whether the US and the UK could have, you need only ask Oppenheimer.

If I was an American, I wouldn't want to be footing the bill for Global Security either.

There is a deep and nuanced conversation to be had here, though I will say fourstar already made one important point very succinctly. [1]

I will point out that it has been the position of the American people since WWII that we are happy to foot the bill for global security. So while you might not feel that way, Americans feel differently. I'll give a bit of background on how that came to be.

While Hitler was cutting through Europe there was a extensive internal debate in the US whether just focusing on defending the Pacific would be sufficient. During the time leading up the Battle of Britain, we decided the US view of security needed to be global-- if Hitler overran Britain the threat was just too large. It would turn out that the Brits won one of the most significant military victories in history [2], but prior that fact emerging American policy had come to the firm conclusion that we had to defend east as well as west. The Brits handled it, but it was tough to know that at the time.

Since WWII we have not really reevaluated this policy. Some in the US believe it is time to do so and the current election will decide much of this. But in the last 10 years we have witnessed the biggest land grab in Europe since World War II [3], so now might not be the time to dissolve the world order.

This may be more detail than you were expecting, but I hope you found it interesting. The world is a much more fragile place that I wish and at the end of the day we all need to chip in for global security.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25004863

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Britain#Aftermath

[3] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2020/03/17/c...

Years ago I took 6.828 at MIT which is an operating systems engineering course for which Xv6 was designed. The part I found most useful as a student was the fact that the entire operating system printed out into a nice slim volume. Many significant subroutines fit entirely on one page. To sum up the pedagogical value: Xv6 is an operating system made as simple as possible, but not simpler.

After this course I able to translate the skills to real world results in include a small contribution to the Linux kernel, as well as a significant non-public Linux kernel module. I can recommend studying the Xv6 source code and accompanying book to anyone, without reservation. It was a great privilege to have been able to take that class.

This is really excellent, thanks for being willing to share Colin. It's an impactful essay and the last paragraph in particular hits very hard. I'm a big fan of your work and the path you have taken!

Generally in professional online tournaments there is not a tournament official onsite. Players are competing from their homes. Instead, tournaments require several Zoom sessions from multiple angles in an attempt to verify that the neither the player's computer nor a secondary device are being used to cheat. These Zoom sessions are monitored by tournament officials.

On top of this, commercial chess websites have extensive anti-cheating measures that are used to analyze the games after the fact. For example, one of the major players has 5+ engineers and several strong chess players on their anti-cheating team. These teams have caught professional players cheating a surprising number of times. Being caught results in a lifetime ban from the chess website and there are often consequences for the player in real life as well.

I don't really buy the idea of an adjournment. Are you supposed to have one every time a connection problem happens? Historically players knew at what point in the game an adjournment would happen. Having them happen at random throughout the game would change the whole dynamic.

Your idea of a cellular connection as backup is an excellent one. I think the first commercial chess website to implement a turn key way for players to utilize one will see huge returns from that investment.

Finance Theory I by Prof. Andrew Lo: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/sloan-school-of-management/15-40.... You can view the first lecture here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdHlfiOAJyE&list=PLUl4u3cNGP....

Prof. Lo taught this course at MIT in the Fall of 2008, which you can imagine would be a very interesting time to teach finance. The course is excellent. I think you'll really enjoy it.

The moderators will do it when they see the post. I haven't submitted a link in a really long time, but I don't think the submitter can change it. Makes sense to reserve it for the mods, given the implications of a regular user swapping out the link of a highly visible post.

Github's site for this has much more detail on the technical aspects of this: https://archiveprogram.github.com/. Their data archival goals are even more ambitious than burying it in the Arctic. The GitHub Archive Program is partnering with Microsoft’s Project Silica to ultimately archive all active public repositories for over 10,000 years, by writing them into quartz glass platters using a femtosecond laser.

Worth considering swapping the submitted link out for the original source, per the HN guidelines. I would suggest the original blog post: https://github.blog/2020-07-16-github-archive-program-the-jo....

For those curious, the full position name is Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering USD(R&E), a position in its first conception held by Vannevar Bush.

We’re 50 different states with a federal government, which doesn’t have public health as one of its assigned roles.

COVID is clearly a national security issue, which is squarely a matter for the federal government. The prior administration made pandemic response part of the national security apparatus (i.e. the NSC). According to public testimony, this continues in the current administration despite a reorganization.

You claim a bare recitation of fact, but in my view that is completely inaccurate. There is a fundamental misunderstanding here. One of the first iterations of our government under the Articles of Confederation didn't have a strong enough government to respond to national security threats and we could have lost the war for it. Having a strong federal government that can accomplish things the states cannot is literally the reason for our government as it exists today.

As I mentioned, by our own government's admission pandemic response is a national security issue. There are two additional reasons why this is clear. First, what if the pandemic was started by a biological weapon? Would we still leave it to the states then? Certainly not, yet it would be the same exact pandemic whether started by terrorists or by accident. Second, COVID is going to cost hundreds of thousands of lives and billions of dollars. On and don't forget it literally took a nuclear powered aircraft carrier off the battlefield. It is then by definition a national security issue because of how weak it makes our country.

I generally enjoy your writing on these issues but I think you have the basic structure of our government completely reversed. We threw out the Articles of Confederation and created a stronger federal government because disjoint states did not have the ability to respond to massive threats at the scale of COVID.

One you throw out your designation of COVID as a public health matter and recognize it is an issue of national security (again by our government's own admission) I think a lot of your other arguments do not hold up. Some things that you mention as a matter of law are clearly correct with respect to masks. But the idea that "nobody thought pandemic response was mainly a federal responsibility" is completely false and counter to the ideals of our government after the Confederation Period.

Currently the federal government has a wide range of powers over reservation land such as the ability to prosecute crime. For better or for worse, Congress can expand these powers at any time to include dissolving the reservation. The law in all these aforementioned areas is well settled.

The issue in this case was with a state government, specifically Oklahoma. This ruling will limit Oklahoma's ability to prosecute crime when (1) it occurs on the reservation and (2) involves members of the tribe. Congress would have to act to change this, or some agreement could be reached with the tribe.

The biggest reason would be that the people of Maryland oppose retrocession. [1] You cannot make Maryland take back land they do not want without something like an amendment to the constitution.

Each year DC pays more federal taxes per capita than every other state. In raw dollars it is more than 22 other states. [2] The people of DC want representation to go along with that taxation.

[1] https://www.publicpolicypolling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/..., Q22 on page 6.

[2] https://statehood.dc.gov/page/why-statehood-dc

The racism aspect has been well covered elsewhere. In addition to this, it is the battle flag of an illegal militia who killed U.S. soldiers. Opposing this clearly has an extremely strong moral foundation.

Your arguments are transparently shallow, poorly thought out, and profoundly un-American. If my arguments would satisfy an automated grading system, yours would fail immediately upon parsing. I see no value in continuing a conversation with someone who claims there is no moral foundation in opposing the killing of U.S. troops by illegal insurgents. Feel free to have the last word here on this message board; in the real world the last word was the surrender of the Confederacy.

Your entire premise is built on a faulty foundation-- step 1 in your summary is an illegal act and treason. At the time of succession they were firmly aware the United States considered it as such. After the war, Texas v. White is the SCOTUS case that enshrined this position: unilateral secession is illegal.

After seceding those who were illegally occupying the land were the secessionists themselves. You cannot unilaterally seceded from the Union. Hundreds of thousands of my countrymen died in the Civil War to establish this principle; it is the law of the land and to imply otherwise is to dishonor their sacrifice.

No unilateral secession, period. That is what 350,000+ U.S. military personnel died for. If you believe it was legal for those folks to secede I suggest you renounce your U.S. citizenship and leave.

How can someone be "defending" themselves when they initiated hostilities? [1]

Unilateral succession is illegal. Those flying the confederate flag were not defending themselves, they were committing treason. Our Union is an indestructible one. It was safeguarded then by the U.S. Army who will continue to safeguard it as long as America endures.

It feels me with great sadness to think of the blood that was spilled, but at the end of the day Americans who take up arms against the U.S. Army are criminals and traitors. No American should fly the flag of those who have killed our soldiers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Fort_Sumter

It is the flag flown by an armed group that killed soldiers in the United States Army, is it not? [1] This fact gets lost in the debate. No American should fly the flag of any group that targeted and killed members of the United States Armed Forces.

[1] https://history.army.mil/books/R&H/R&H-FM.htm, Section VI with Ulysses Simpson Grant as part of the unbroken chain of command.

Canvasing in Ohio is a blast. I did it once and the field office was based out of a recently shuttered gambling den. Getting yelled at on someone's front porch is unfiltered democracy!

There's nothing about a pandemic that says that passport issuance/renewal must be closed down all year keeping Americans trapped in the U.S. Stop excusing low standards.

Indoor workers face serious health risks if they have to go into the office and can't maintain social distancing. Do you really think someone should put their family's life at risk because you waited to the last minute to renew your passport and want to go on vacation?

Before you accuse others of low standards I would do a little introspection. The only person you have to blame for waiting until you were months away from expiration is yourself. You could have easily had it renewed while you lived abroad. My advice for when you have a task like a passport renewal that needs repeating once every 10 years: consider doing it before 97.5% of the time has elapsed.

But I still believe that whenever you have an office you are creating a community of employees who will have a different relationship to those who are working remotely.

Fully concur. Senior leadership needs to lead by example, whether it be remote work, taking paternity leave, or using a healthy amount of vacation. As some have pointed out, remote work as some companies has the potential to become the new "Unlimited Vacation"-- i.e. technically the policy but employees worried about advancement are unlikely to take advantage.

Props to Quora leadership for leading by example.

We'll have to see. As another person already pointed out, VMWare has experimented with ESXi on ARM and they claim their customers could realize significant cost savings by migrating to ARM [1]. So if they've already done a good amount of engineering work on it, we may well see VMWare Fusion on ARM that can efficiently run ARM guests. They plan on releasing a tech preview in July [2].

Whether you can stick an emulated x86-64 CPU in there is another matter. It's a much bigger engineering lift and unless Apple puts some resources into it it's not clear to me a virtualization company by themselves would want to incur the cost. I hope there is enough demand for it and that someone will provide it. For me personally the only reason I run VMWare Fusion is to access x86-only Windows applications for which there is no replacement.

[1] https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2019/10/esxi-on-arm-at-the-....

[2] https://twitter.com/VMwareFusion/status/1275466832002945024

Broadly speaking yes. Generally, hypervisors mediate access to shared hardware whereas emulators implement simulated hardware in software.

The very first hypervisors worked using dynamic binary translation. They would run a "guest" operating system by executing a stream of native instructions directly on the host CPU. This stream would be dynamically translated to remove and trap in software any privileged operations so the hypervisor could handle them. Modern hypervisors take advantage of hardware features that allow you to more efficiently trap on privileged operations. ARM started to add some of these features starting in 2013 [1]. In contrast Intel first started adding these features to the Pentium 4 in 2005 [2]. When such hardware features were released, they actually were not faster than the software translation. These days the hardware based options are faster. There is even hardware support for running nested hypervisors. So the first question we need to ask is how hypervisors implemented with ARMs hardware features stack up to Intel. I have no doubt that parity at a minimum will be reached I just don't know what the current state of play is. As indicated in my original comment, if I had to bet on release we wont quite have the performance or feature set you would be used to with a product like VMWare Fusion.

The second question we need to ask is whether there is a way to efficiently emulate x86-64 processors on ARM hosts. Even better if you can do this while taking advantage of the supporting infrastructure hypervisors already have in terms of the emulated devices and other features. QEMU just gets you the CPU and a short list of a devices. The fully experience of a seamlessly virtualized guest requires a lot more than that. But at the core you are right that it is going to require QEMU-TCG, Rosetta 2, or some similar technology because the silicon just is not there to execute x86-64.

Exciting stuff! We'll see where it all lands.

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/557132/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_virtualization#Intel-VT-x

I agree, as I mentioned the debate about "journalism" has no relevance when it comes to computer intrusion and some of the other crimes in the indictment. It is a good point that it could bear some relevance on jury nullification or one juror causing a mistrial. In the end though I think we are of the same mind that it holds no water.

By far the most likely outcome is that he will receive a fair trial, be convicted, and then justice will be done.

Your comment is well taken. However, I would point out that with respect to the disclosure counts there is some legal relevance to the frequent message board debate about whether he is a "journalist" or not. The false claim that he is one is made due to the belief it will provide him with a modicum of legal protection against some of the disclosure counts. It wont help him at all when it comes to the computer intrusion count and I also don't think it helps with the conspiracy to obtain NDI (though I am less sure on that one). Either way I would expect to see the journalism issue discussed and ultimately debunked at trail.

It is very likely that ARM-based Macs will lack a performant hypervisor upon release. We will have to see how VMWare responds. I'd bet it will inspire new products and innovation and the desktop space will move towards a less x86-x64 centric world. In the end it is a short term problem. Someone will respond and provide a performant hypervisor that can run on an ARM host and virtualize x86-x64 and ARM guests.

It's true it will cause some pain in the first year or two, but even as a heavy VMWare Fusion user I am really looking forward to the benefits of a vertically integrated laptop.

If you have a life and death emergency you can still get a passport within 72 hours. Despite the phrasing this also includes things like a close family member getting injured. Aside from that yes you may need to wait. Note that the backlog is being worked through as shown in the data in section 3: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/traveladvisories/....

This is just part of life in a global pandemic. Essential services will still happen but otherwise life and safety is the priority.