adwf

I think part of the problem is that they've wrapped all the responses in a positive language framing to make it feel more human.

It's always "Sure thing!" or "Yeah I can do that!", and it responds so quickly that you equate it to when a human responds instantly with a strong affirmative - you assume they're really confident and you're getting the right result.

If it took 5-10s on each query, had no positive framing and provided some sort of confidence score for each answer, I think we'd have different expectations of what it can do.

Would've been worth comparing to Vermeer for some examples of excellent shadows.

This almost feels like some sort of anti-linux trolling. Suspicious number of pro-Windows comments in the first couple of hours, all focused on the sub-par website, not the OS.

I was going to say much the same. Vertical mount is a game changer.

Whilst this example is a bit on the extreme side:

https://uk.thermaltake.com/the-tower-900.html

It does have some nice properties, no GFX card sag, any water cooling leaks can't drop on expensive components, power supply is back and away too.

Most important point is the cables out the top are covered by a shield so you don't have the ugliness.

Problem is that Valve have yet to ever go to V2 for their hardware unfortunately.

Except then you need to be paying someone to monitor your queries and develop your views rather than just dropping a container in the middle with this app.

Latest Motorola Razr foldable scratches that itch for me. I know it doesn't fit into the mid-price category, but I finally have my pocket space back again!

Yes it could unfortunately. The solution repeated a number, making it almost impossible to guarantee a correct answer even if you had the majority down fairly early.

Vortex Tab90M with silent reds. Best keyboard I've ever owned. Compact, quiet, mechanical, just fits all my needs for both work and gaming.

As a number of people above mentioned, Cookie AutoDelete extension for FF does exactly this.

Sites start out default clearing all cookies the moment you clear the tab. Greylisting clears them when you close the browser. Whitelist retains all cookies.

Multi-account Container and Temporary Container extensions take care of your per-tab container needs.

Slightly more complicated than that.

The National Opt-out [2] does not prevent NHS digital from accumulating your records in a central database (in pseudonymous form - not anonymous). It only prevents them from sharing your record with others - for now...

The type 1 opt-out with your GP should prevent your records from even being sent to NHS Digital at all. The difficulty with this one is that it's a paper form only and has to be handed to the GP by the 23rd, there is no web service to opt out of this.

NHS Digital have also hinted that they will be trying to remove the type 1 at some point in the future.

You are aware this is his website, right?

A large proportion of people are here specifically because of PG and his endeavours, of course he's going to get lots of upvotes. Even if you don't agree with him, he's worth listening to, particularly if you have any aspirations to join YC.

There's also the fact that they've only argued from the point of economic productivity.

As if that's all there is to life...

There's a big difference between promising tech in the future and saying that something is true now.

This kind of marketing is a standard release of information in the form of opinion of the future, which shareholders can decide for themselves whether to believe it or not.

When the SEC slapped him down previously it was because he conducted a release of information about "facts" - not opinion - that were supposedly true now (that he had a private buyer at $x price). This was deemed a market manipulation because it was presented as 100% true. Whereas self-driving cars in 2 years might be true and it's up to individual shareholders to do their own analysis.

That logic only works because we have no issue with slaughtering horses en masse. It'll take 100+ years of economic deprivation for the human population to balance out.

It does happen to other products. Notably 3D printing was held up by a 1989 patent for 20 years - when it expired in 2009 it resulted in a massive boom leading to lots of new innovations in the space.

Strongly disagree on the SSH example. Security warnings should be a little more alarming than just "Continue yes/no".

Asking whether they are sure they want to continue has added context to make someone think twice about whether they are really connecting to the correct host.

Likewise, repeating the host address again after confirmation makes an error more likely to be spotted if it's off slightly (think along the lines of spaced repetition helping memorise things).

I think the technical quality does matter though. Everyday people may not care about how "cool" the Netflix engineering is, but they certainly care about the end product.

For example, over the holidays I watched 3 different streaming platforms:

BBC iPlayer - occasionally cut out and dropped back to main menu requiring me to find the program again.

Amazon Prime - often had buffering problems requiring me to manually lower resolution (on a 150Mb/s connection...)

Netflix - No problems, hit start on a movie and watch it to the end.

This kind of thing does get remembered; I certainly ended up watching a heck of a lot more Netflix than any other platform.

Seems to be either standard property taxes listed (with a bit of variation) or minor deployments as experiments?

That's the gist of why I was comparing it to communist economics - it works great in small communities, but when either the scale is large, and/or the stakes are high, it will be subject to inefficiency and corruption.

LVT experiments on the small scale have people highly invested in making it work. On the large scale, this will just be a matter of everyday bureaucracy and any competence will revert to the mean.

On the large scale, it will be subject to the exact same corruption seen elsewhere. Certain industries will carve out exceptions to the tax, certain people with influence will get their historical properties excluded, etc.

By and large I've heard of LVT being a replacement for Sales/VAT style taxes. Whilst those are often regressive, at least they are relatively simple, 20% VAT is 20% VAT.

Indeed, the biggest problem with LVT is who exactly gets to value the land and how. It's an extraordinarily difficult issue which would require a very precise implementation.

Once you start assessing peoples property in such a wholesale fashion, you almost end up in a classic "managed economy" situation. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" failed due to the combined difficulty of assessment + corruption of the assessors. LVT is the same principle applied to land.

I think that LVT will end up as one of those ideas that is great in theory but doesn't work in practice.

I've always referred to it as a Development DBA. But the gist of separating DBA's into two camps, I've definitely used and seen used in many places.

I sometimes attribute the modern rise of NoSQL and other databases on the somewhat bad reputation that infrastructure-only DBA's can give to the profession. If the only major thing you do for work is check the backups ran overnight and deny change requests for "stability" reasons, it can really poison the well for others who want to make the database sing.

So what do developers do? They cut out the DBA role by inventing complicated but relatively low-maintenance DBs that don't need any DBA's at all - if you have performance issues just spin up another node. Whereas all they often needed was a good Development/Application oriented DBA to sort out their traditional RDBMS properly.

Doesn't surprise me in the slightest.

Worked for a fintech company a few years back that used Wirecard as the processor for one of their products. Somehow they managed to lose the PK/FK relationship between accounts and transactions (or something like that). A whole lot of our customers suddenly started getting other people's transactions on their accounts. It was the final straw that shutdown the entire product line and we moved on to other providers for new projects.

So, not at all surprised they don't know where their money is.

Not sure why you're being downvoted, the lack of quality FOSS IDEs for Postgres is well known.

I do feel that Postgres administration mostly caters to command line fans (like myself); the people more used to visual tools like SQL Server Management Studio tend to find it difficult to transition because of this. Even if they might be absolute wizards at writing SQL otherwise.

Part of it is familiarity of course, but there's always something ever so slightly embarrassing about showing people psql when they're used to advanced IDEs.

I admit to not having done more than skim the abstract, but couldn't it be just as likely that authoritarian governments cause the spread of disease (and famine, etc.) through ineptitude?

Hubris is half of software development ;)

I wouldn't say that postgres is hard to tune. Yes it has ~300 parameters in a config file, but a lot of those are to do with logging/admin etc.

There are about 6 parameters that I might touch on every deployment:

Listen address, shared buffers (default it to 25% RAM), connection counts, max workers (CPU core count), max parallel workers and max WAL keep segments.

That's 95% of the tuning you need on an average deployment. The rest is a bit dependent on workload (like checkpoint timeouts on heavy-write boxes).

EDIT: And when I say "need", the actual defaults out of the box will usually get you a long way. Just set the right listen address and let it do its thing.

I was taught that the only "strong" rule about cocktails was that it had 3+ ingredients. Every other rule (like sweet + bitter) has notable exceptions, ie. drinks like the cosmo substitute a citrus for the bitters.

Plus, the whole sweet cocktail thing was a more modern invention of the prohibition era to cover up the taste of harsh spirits. Plenty of older cocktails around.

EDIT: It kinda feels like the rule about email address parsing. The only good rule is that it has an @ symbol.

A potentially more interesting solution is liquid metal mirrors, either mercury-based or some sort of ferro-silver suspension managed electromagnetically.

A hollow toroid could be spun to provide force and the liquid would naturally form a parabola.

There've been a few experiments on earth and it could have huge cost saving potential in space. Instead of having to launch a 8m+ solid mirror machined to perfection, you could launch a lightweight toroidal substructure with a vat of reflective liquid at a fraction of the cost.

This is really great! Two things that could do with improvement:

- The backspace key quits the program. I've accidentally quit so many times after deleting my filter by holding the key down.

- The filter seems quite quick at first, but when I add a period it slows down massively. ie. Search for "xorg", then "xorg.conf", the moment you type the period it hangs for a good few seconds, even though it's in the top level of my home folder. A breadth first search should find it trivially, so I'm assuming it's some quirk of the fuzzy matching.

Yep, it's surprising how much performance you can get when you're not paying Oracle millions for licensing.

A lot of people who think Oracle is amazingly fast, think so because who puts a million dollar DB on thousand dollar hardware? Put any major DB on equivalent hardware and you'll get some pretty damn good performance.