Nelson69

I went all metric when we started the new millennium. I try to do all my personal measurements in metric. It has been my own personal battle to make progress, every little bit helps..

It's funny how life fights with you though. My wife and I share a scale in the bathroom, it's a fitbit wifi thing and she finally laid down the law, it uses pounds now. Chasing 130lbs is somehow more satisfying than 58.9 or 59Kg. Our electronic outdoor thermometer is in Fahrenheit now too; this one sort of pisses me off, metric is simple, below 10 you need a coat, 10 to 20 probably want a light jacket, 30+ is shorts because it's hot. Mind you, she is an actual scientist, a real deal scientist that works on viruses and immunology, which is somewhat frustrating. You wouldn't believe the fit she had when our electronic human thermometer was found to be metric... When you call the doctor because your child has a fever, it is better to use whatever units the doctor uses.

I suspect that major new papers could probably start using metric units with translation in parens and only the wingnuts that think the papers already harbor a liberal bias would say anything about it. Other than temperature and like human height, you can toss out metric measurements to most folks when they ask something and they seem to absorb it well; from time to time you get a question or push-back, rarely I'll translate the unit for them. We're at the point where people just need to see it more. It would be an interesting experiment if some media organizations started to make metric more prominent. Hell the US military uses it, mostly for NATO reasons... we could probably somehow put a patriotic spin on it.

I know, and I get it. Maybe "mini-tower" is the wrong description. It should be a maxi-cube. I'm not holding my breath for it though, the things they sell huge numbers of aren't terribly configurable or expandable and it gives them an edge that way.

They just need some sort of minitower, a mac mini with a couple slots, a couple m.2 connectors and room for 64GB of removable memory..

I don't know why but I've thought something like that would almost be an ideal vehicle for xeon-d type parts.

Where did Disney get all this delivery cred? They do seem to be taking their time and they've been gobbling things up and certainly have the content. Aren't they just an old media company though? I remember when Disney Channel was a pay channel with relatively bunk content; like it had some original stuff and then like ancient re-runs for the Mickey Mouse club and once fairly rarely they'd play a classic Disney movie. Tons of commercials too and they had like special "early access" adverts for the big next movie and toys and things like that.

Maybe it's a different company now but I'll ask, with all their content: the disney stuff, star wars, marvel, fox, etc.. If they put it all on Disney+ at $7 a month, are they not leaving money on the table? I can't imagine there won't be up-selling or limited availability of certain media properties or something. The author is right, if it's all there at $7 and the app is great and they are bold and aggressive, then I would think Prime and Netflix, etc. will be in a bit of trouble. On the other hand, if Disney acts like they always have then I expect there to be like 10% good stuff, an advertising machine for whatever movie is next in the pipe and then just some bunk filler content.

I don't want to disparage any project or guess the motivation but there have been some undercurrents of anti-GPL sentiment at times and anti-complexity. Folks have sort of backed it up by posting some links to things that aren't as you might think. GLIBC in particular looks nothing like how you might imagine it. You can look at strlen in the K&R book and it's beautiful, like a textbook: int strlen(char s[]) { int i; i = 0; while( s[i] != '\0') ++i return i; }

then you look at: https://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=blob;f=string/strl...

and your mind will sort of explode for a bit. The difference is the GLIBC version is dramatically faster; take the comments away and most of us wouldn't even know that's strlen. It's more complex, no question, but it's much faster. GLIBC is full of stuff like that. qsort and memcpy are non-obvious to many folks. It's not complexity for no reason, you'd be challenged to build a better qsort than the one in glibc, it's not easy.

It's also arguably not acceptable. There have been allegations of fairly large amounts of money changing hand for in some of the deals, promoters and sponsors tend to frown upon that stuff, as do sports books and it might be against the law (sporting fraud) in a few European countries. The rules and the codes regarding this sort of thing are fuzzy. There is also a class system of sorts in play. When Lance Armstrong went to the media and claimed he let Marco Pantani win on Ventoux in the 2000 Tour, that's against the code too but because Lance was so dominant nobody said much about it. The fact was, nobody could make Lance pay for that on the road. In the romantic ideal world, a bunch of Italian teams would have worked together to prevent Lance's teammates from winning some monuments (maybe Hincapie at Paris Roubaix, but he was never really in it) that they were targeting but the fact was the team was built for one purpose and that never was an option. The ability to enforce the deal is part of it. Likewise, in retrospect, Lance going public with it was a scorched earth psychological tactic that made his image even bigger.

I would say, at least at some levels (u-23 national championship might not be that) that if you can get someone to gift you a win for an unenforceable deal, then you beat them and you did it mentally. It's like all the secret rules of baseball.

+++

You don't have to travel far to do this. Any medium sized city in the US will have soup kitchens and organizations that try to help the homeless, volunteer some time and energy and you'll get a radical perspective reset. And make no mistake about it, it's hard. Do it until it feels comfortable.

It will help you in a lot more ways than you think. You might be able to sustain a transactional relationship with a partner, but you won't have a really great one if one or both of you is continuously keeping score; things just get out of balance and there is nothing that can "fix" it if maintaining that balance is a need. It's sort of obvious too when you're objective about it, there is nothing you can ever do which is equivalent to growing a baby in your wife's body for 9 months, no amount of "girl's nights" or whatever will ever equal that out. I have no idea how you can be a good parent if there is some sort of return you're expecting other than a smile and a hug; it's sort of the ultimate in that you just give and give and then give some more.

I have over 10 years of professional C++ and helped teach a course on it in college. One of my observations, and I may be off, is that a fair number of C++ users tend to take on a kind of macho attitude about it: it's a hammer for every nail, if you make certain mistakes you shouldn't use it or maybe be programming at all, garbage collection and other safety apparatus are kind of like training wheels while the "big boys" don't need that sort of thing.

I'm being a little snarky here, but if you are truly a macho developer, then crapping out that unsafe code in optimized assembly or C or something is a really really easy time to show off and shouldn't be such a big deal for such a seasoned developer. Instead, the question is always raised in this more insecure way: for that tiny percentage of the time you have to do some bit-banging (and it's usually pretty small and encapsulated on most embedded projects) you had might as well do the whole thing in C or C++.

I have never worked for Amazon so I'm just speculating but if you have a culture of being data driven, specifically in the ways you optimize things then I'm guessing you'll probably be pretty successful and it's not a giant leap to plugging that data in to some ML models or something. To plug that stuff in the some ML models requires an entire culture of data collection and some thought as to how you'd improve or benefit from it; it's sort of like the "no brown M&Ms" rider that Van Hallen used to have.

I don't know what your Honda experience has been, but for a very competitive price you can buy an insanely reliable car that you will probably become bored with before you need to replace (so long as you change the oil regularly)

Nobody is mentioning the tax credit either..

Tesla thinks the logistics IP is valuable, does anyone else' opinion matter? Didn't Sergey Aleynikov get nailed to the cross for "stealing" something that didn't matter?

When I last bought a house, I had an agent to show me houses. Then when it came offer time, I actually had my lawyer do the final review and he essentially did the bulk of the negotiation, the agent was simply a mouth piece with access to the databases and someone the other agents would talk to. It was during the 2008 time and I placed a bid on a short sell, my lawyer gave me distinctly different advice than the agent did (a personal friend, no less) the seller made some demands that he wanted in the contract and the agent simply wasn't capable of giving sound advice about it. Probably saved me about $50,000.

The big problem is agents are incentivized to have sales in the market. If you sell your house for $100,000 vs $110,000 is could make a difference of months and they're paid nearly the same even though it's a pretty large difference to the seller. To many of the people "helping" you sell, it's better for you to take less money now than 10% more in 3 months. Nevermind the roles they helped play in the big 2008 crisis... And this is a profession that has a claimed "code of ethics"

There is nothing new here, if you piss off someone that is wealthy and they have vendetta, and you're not wealthy, they can make your life difficult. Whistle blowers take huge risks. Now we can talk about if that's the way we want to world to be or not, but right now rich people can threaten poor people with lawsuits and get their way a remarkable amount of the time.

Are we letting the board off pretty easily? We expect wage earners to potentially out their corrupt company and take the risks associated with it, but if you sit on the board and the unicorn valuation is big enough then we just wave off the fact that they never asked those questions either. No CEO wants a board that get's in the way but we give them a pass just because the valuation was big? That doesn't seem quite right either.

WADA and most sports have exemptions. A so-called "Therapeutic Usage Exemption" or TUE. They are easy enough to get that team doctors for certain cycling teams have abused them.

The female drug is the interesting one. Typically testosterone is detected by measuring the ratios of different hormones, a lot of testosterone isn't even unusual in many people but it's balanced out by epi-testosterone. When you add testosterone via unnatural means the ratio skews. (Read about "the cream" that Barry Bonds used with "The Clear", it was used for masking) Hard to say what goes on in some of these folks' heads, they generally know the rules and they know the penalties and they know they'll be tested. I'd assume he took both to mask something. If you're really trying to have kids or on T-replacement, you have a doctor treating use, measuring things and that doctor can provide a TUE letter.

He wasn't turning donkeys into race horses. He was tampering with the spread.

Just calling or not calling traveling, say 3 or 4 times and calling or not calling charging a couple times and you're easily looking at nearly a 10point swing. Lebron doesn't have to lose, just not win by 15 points...

The "8400" part almost seems arbitrary to the rest of the name

There might be some pride, I have a fairly highend bike and I hate not riding it well. I'd much rather get dropped on one of my middle bikes than on my best weapon...

The difference between some of those mid-level bikes and superbikes is also quite small compared to the price. Regardless of you wealth, the return on investment isn't there unless you're just a bike nut. They are also getting specialized to the point that they are really pro-level bikes that sort of need sponsors and mechanics behind them; how many Pinarello frames have been broken in competition the last few years? It's one thing when they pull a near exact duplicate off the car and give it to you in a race, it's something else when you call your wife for help and then take it to your dealer and 6-8 weeks later you get a new frame from Italy iff your still under warranty. I only pick on Pinarello because I think I've seen 4+ chainstays broken over the last handful of years, in competition. The second level gruppos are generally known to be identical but more durable than the top levels.

this is off topic though...

I would spin culture the other way too. Sears was a more premium company. They had commission salesmen working the floors. (I think it was as recently as like 2010ish, I walked in to one and looked too long at something was was swarmed) You didn't go there for the "lowest price" you went there for good stuff and when you bought something big they helped you figure it out, they'd show you a dozen fridges, maybe with features you'd never seen before, and by the end of the day try to talk you in to a stove and dishwasher to go with the one you landed on and then have someone bring it over, install it and take your old stuff away. They had house brands: Craftsman, Diehard, Kenmore that were legit and made legit stuff; it wasn't the highest end stuff but it wasn't just the cheapest stuff they could label. I don't think it was possible for them to compete for low margins like Walmart or Amazon, it just wasn't "Sears." Prodigy was expensive, the few things you could order there had extra costs associated with it, I don't fully remember but I think you had to actually pay a premium for the experience to order it on prodigy and then you paid shipping costs and everything. It's not simply just buying and selling stuff online and it shows up, price matters and people buy big stuff differently than they did 40 years ago, they know way more about it before they go to the store now because of the internet.

I'm sure there will be plenty of books about it all when it's said and done and I'm sure there is a list of mistakes that is unimaginably long. I doubt Sears could have been saved though, it wouldn't have been "Sears" any more.

It is odd, at least to me, Sears is this nostalgia thing. Looking at the catalog as a child, playing with Prodigy way way back when. I've read maybe a dozen articles on the place here on HN over the last decade. I haven't been in one in nearly as long. I think I've known they were totally doomed for as long but in some part of my brain it was impossible for it to unfold exactly as it has. It's just been a train wreck in ultra-slow-motion. They seemed to have had so many resources they could have used to try things, they just couldn't actually try them.

Not just is it intact, but is there really an alternative ML/AI platform out there? They're still the best (only?) game in town with the full stack. And you can go buy or lease access to their parts right now and get radical performance improvements for your model training.

I'm sorry to hear that. I wish the best for your family.

Is there something unique to tumblr that makes this content thrive there? If tumblr cleans their stuff up (and I know there are legitimate stuff that is impacted by that) won't those communities find refuge elsewhere? There are some incredibly seedy parts of reddit and sites like voat and just tons of places where there is "bad stuff" on the internet.

What's your long term game plan with that? At some age, they'll get a device, are you just hoping for the best when that happens? Or "you pay for it, it's your problem" or what?

We limit device time and I try to be as involved as I can, we ask them what they're doing, we try to play games with them, etc. Every day. We keep repeating the mantra about not talking to strangers online, and to tell us if they talk to you. Honestly, I think it's other stuff that will make the difference, spending time with them every day, talking to them about everything, and encouraging active participation in real world stuff like sports and some volunteer work for the homeless through our church.

I don't disagree with the "no internet" idea exactly but at some point they'll be exposed to it and the way things are, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if a smartphone was required equipment for junior high or highschool within the next 5-10 years. Already our schools send us just about everything online, we have regular emails with the teachers and they use google docs and other platforms for online sharing within the school.

Is there any evidence of MPEG showing a bias in favor or patents? The different standards they define seem to have fairly well defined goals and then, to my casual observer's eye, they've had fairly concrete technical reasons for their decisions.

As it's constructed and the different patent pools involved, I'm not sure that a patent holder could benefit more than others by having MPEG use their patent.

That being said, patents are still annoying when you bump in to them. MPEG is remarkable in terms of the amount of interop though, you can watch video on your phone, laptop or your 4k TV all made by different vendors with different parts.

Onlooker since GNOME was being called Teak..

KDE initially used QT which didn't have a satisfying license. Possibly incompatible, I'm not sure it was ever resolved entirely as to what the condition of things was. What was clear is that a corporate entity could close source QT and effectively end KDE. After years, multiple business transactions and such, QT was really open sourced all the way. By then RedHat had gone "all in" with BlueCurve and GNOME. I think as a result of that, and in spite of various standards about open desktop support, the commercial apps tend to be on GTK+; maybe not full GNOME apps, but Firefox and VMware and others have GTK+ in them and they will seamlessly use your distribution's custom skin... Ending support for KDE is just momentum. There could be a bit of a European vs North America thing too; I'm just speculating but take Suse vs RHEL, RHEL is tons more common in the US despite Suse's remarkably quality, there has been some questions about its future at times but it is a remarkably high quality platform with a really nice aesthetic about it but RHEL and Centos tend to dominate.

To be honest, I didn't know Redhat still supported KDE.

KDE is great, I think it's always been a bit more consistent, a bit more cohesive and it has a great set of well crafted applications.

With Redhat being bought by IBM and everything, the possible rumors about Canonical being in play, it sort of seems like it might be time for a new distribution to take hold. KDE is a great place to start, there is an awful lot of good stuff in there.

Why is it such a dog whistle?

What's mindblowing is the rage that seems to pour out of, mostly, non-contributors when this stuff comes up. There is a more fundamental insecurity or just a fundamental disrespect that some of these folks seem to have for others. I've heard claims that there have even been planted "social justice warriors" that have intentionally engaged in conflict to change projects. When you have guys like Eric Raymond saying that sort of thing, what do you expect?

Google "hate" is a product of their success. IBM, MS, Apple, they all get it or have had it too.

What is frustrating with plus though, it was clear from outside Google that the company wasn't completely behind it. It also seems like it was good enough that they could have played with it to find the right recipe. I haven't followed it that closely, but from the outside, it looks like it launched, it didn't achieve facebook-like popularity immediately, they just sort of babysit it for a while and now it's shutting down. I know better, but it doesn't seem like the company tried very hard... Where were the stupid drug dealer games or some kind of fantasy football apps? It was only part social or something.

Linking it to "PC" or "women" I think sort of undermines it on a larger level.

To take part in opensource, especially a big project like Linux you have to be willing to put yourself out there a little bit. You have to put in some work, and then put something out there to possibly (probably?) be crapped on by people you respect. They might love it and merge it, they might hate it and tell you why, they might come back somewhere in the middle with a list of things to change that you may or may not agree with. They might ask you questions you can't answer, they might point things out that make you feel really silly. That element of risk is something many computer people have a hard time with, not just women or minorities.

I got involved with the kernel a long while back, sent in a couple smallish things. Then I found what seemed like plutonium, the embedded project I was working on, we were literally spending like 1/3 or our cycles zeroing pages. Did some stuff to use MMX like instructions to do it and got a nice little bump. Turned if off entirely and got a huge bump. I/O took off like a rocket, all sorts of things got noticeably faster; like we were able to double what our project had to do. I had a more senior Linux guy coaching me up on this, a made man in the community, it was late one night when we discovered this so I put together some patches and sent if off to Linus, he was encouraging it. Linus was quiet for about a day and then sent back some pointed observations and was kind of making fun of me. Zeroing newly allocated pages is kind of important, it's a security risk to not do it and it happens for a reason. I felt like a total newb, and Linus had poked fun at me in an email, it didn't feel good. The made guy I was working with sort of picked me up, told me he does that to everybody and that it's good natured ribbing for the most part but before that I had just felt like crap. This guy I respect the hell out of was making fun of my contribution, I got over it pretty easily but I could easily see how others might not.

There have been some fairly popular contributors (or maybe not, I don't know..) over the years that have basically managed their own forks with various patches (Con Kolivas' scheduler stuff stands out to me) because for whatever reasons they couldn't or wouldn't get stuff merged or accepted, even though it seemed to be really useful and appealing to a lot of others. In the heat of it all, it can seem really arbitrary too, you put some code together, you know it solves some problems and the community of developers doesn't want it or won't take it.

Not sure what caused Linus to recognize it this time but I hope things improve, it's better for everyone.

This is slightly off topic, but I'll ask.

I refinanced my house and as part of the process I get copies of the credit reports pulled. Anyone know why they last a lot longer than 7 years? It has all my mailing addresses for over 20 years. They asked me about a student loan I had paid off 10+ years prior. Is the "7 year" thing just a myth?

I don't know about bat vs cat, but fcat is actually kind of impressive..

https://github.com/mre/fcat

How should ls coloring work in your view? ls just does the file system reading and then some other tool parses the ls output matches some expressions and adds color? Or something like that?

I suppose it's just a generic colorizer tool that takes a configuration file of expressions and arbitrarily colors data feed through it?

Are there any interesting papers on formal verification of some of the most modern machine learning algorithms?

Clearly when we "verify" Waymo or Tesla auto-pilot, we're going to want to use that stuff, right? Surely they won't just provide insurers with some data about the billions of miles they've driven without accidents and how humans can only drive like a million miles without an accident and try to get the insurers to give them policies...

Just like when we hand out licenses, we always check to make sure the 16 year old took some formal driving classes from professional driving instructors... I wish things were better but we don't care about this stuff as a society until much later usually. When did the car first appear? When did the first seatbelt law appear?