Hacker News Reader

colin_mccabeon Intel CEO Letter to Employees

It’s hard to argue that Intel is critical to national security when we have TSMC making chips in the US now.

colin_mccabeon Intel CEO Letter to Employees

Sorry, but I don’t find it a very insightful comment.

(Removed comment about it being AI-generated since that might be unfair.)

colin_mccabeon Intel CEO Letter to Employees

PE is not VC. VC is targeted at early-stage companies, which Intel is not.

colin_mccabeon Intel CEO Letter to Employees

Intel is not funded by venture capital.

colin_mccabeon How California’s Bullet Train Went Off the Rails

I was mainly thinking people could charge EVs at non-peak times. It's interesting to think about using the cars as batteries, but I don't know if they're set up for that.

colin_mccabeon How California’s Bullet Train Went Off the Rails

In theory, electric vehicles could help stabilize the California grid, if we could charge them at times of peak solar production. There are definitely logistical challenges with doing this, though.

colin_mccabeon How California’s Bullet Train Went Off the Rails

> > Here in CA we've already have the government ask electric car owners to alter charging behavior due to power grid problems.

> This bit of propaganda has been surprisingly successful, especially since it doesn't really make any sense.

What doesn't make sense to you? California did ask electric car owners to charge off peak hours to avoid overloading the grid. See https://www.newsweek.com/california-facing-power-crisis-fret...

It was not a legally binding request, so electric car owners could ignore it if they wanted to.

colin_mccabeon Apple Removes SIM Card Tray on All iPhone 14 Models in U.S.

Is this sarcasm, or do you really think Apple should get 30% of the revenue from all phone plans?

colin_mccabeon Black Hours, Morgan MS 493

TL;DR: Dark Mode in medieval times

colin_mccabeon A controversial shipping law is swaying the price of gas

According to wikipedia [1]

The newest large refinery built in the US was completed in 1976 in Garyville, Louisiana. Since then, while some existing refineries have expanded, new refinery construction has faced significant barriers in environmental regulation, permitting, and local political opposition.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_refining_in_the_Unit...

colin_mccabeon Dropbox deletes Rick and Morty creators account for secret TOS violation

Someone did that and called it MEGA

colin_mccabeon What a gas stove ban means for restaurants

It seems questionable to evaluate what happens when you cook without any ventilation. You need ventilation to avoid smelling like food later on. Poor ventilation also has other bad consequences.

colin_mccabeon What a gas stove ban means for restaurants

> ...avoiding the need to build the gas infrastructure results in significant savings and so does skipping all the chimneys, vents and fans needed to remove the smoke from the kitchens

I agree that skipping the gas infrastructure will save some money. However, you can't skip all the chimneys, vents and fans for the kitchen because heating foot produces particles and sometimes smoke.

> Thus, for example, wine that has been casked in wooden barrels is often said to have a pleasant smoky smell, even if the barrels are not actually burned.

Those barrels are always burned. There are various levels of "toast": light toast, medium toast, heavy toast.

> And to create initial demand in new buildings, where you are actually making significant savings by not hooking up gas at all, is just an easy slam dunk decision.

I mean, it saves money for the builders, but will probably cost more money for the people who live or work there. Unless electricity prices go down drastically, which doesn't seem likely.

On the plus side, it's nice not to have gas lines around if there is an earthquake.

colin_mccabeon Dreaded commute to the city is keeping offices mostly empty

My point was that commuting causes pollution, not that cities are always polluted.

colin_mccabeon Dreaded commute to the city is keeping offices mostly empty

I do wish we spent more on bike paths and infrastructure. It's much cheaper than any of the other transit initiatives. However, it becomes very difficult to use them if you have to drop off kids in the morning. So it is never going to be an option for a lot of people.

In general, working from home makes cities and public transit a lot less relevant. There isn't a strong reason for everyone to get on a train to the big city, if they can just sit at home and work. When you add crime, COVID-19, pollution, etc. into the mix the case for just staying home seems even better.

colin_mccabeon Moving the Linux Kernel to Modern C

The Linux kernel developers have pretty good tooling for refactoring. For example, they have Coccinelle and Sparse.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coccinelle_(software) 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparse

colin_mccabeon OK for Apple to Call Sagan 'Butt-Head Astronomer' (1994)

Hmm. If Apple names something "Butt-Head Astronomer" and Carl Sagan sues, saying that they used his name... what does that imply about Sagan?

One for the history books.

colin_mccabeon David Chalmers considers the possibilities of VR

Thanks, Supernintendo Chalmers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av4lbel9aIo

colin_mccabeon Notes on the Go translation of Reposurgeon (2020)

Go treats strings as a sequence of unicode code points.

colin_mccabeon Facing sky-high connection fees, rural Ontarians go off the grid

I agree that many people move away from cities to "escape", but it's important to recognize that for many decades now, rural residents have received significantly more benefits from the government than they pay in taxes, while urban dwellers pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits. Essentially, those who live in cities are living within their means and subsidizing those who live in rural areas.

This is a commonly repeated factoid, but it's not really true. Or at least, it's very misleading. Let me explain.

Rural populations tend to be older. That means more spent on Social Security, more spent on Medicare, and so on. This is by far the largest reason why people say that cities "subsidize" rural areas. But if those old people moved to cities, they would still be receiving Social Security and Medicaid. So it would be more accurate to say that young people subsidize old people.

Farm subsidies exist and probably should be reduced (or eliminated) but in the grand scheme of things, we're not talking about much money. It was about 22 billion in 2019, according to NPR [https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/12/31/790261705/fa...]. That's comparable to some of the increases in yearly budget that are being talked about for Amtrak, a program that mainly benefits cities.

So don't move to a rural area believing that the federal government will shower you with cash. In general, it won't, or at least not more than it does for city dwellers.

On the other hand, being old or poor may cause the Feds to shower you with cash, but not more than you would have gotten in a city (and many things will be more expensive in a rural area than a city).

colin_mccabeon On Leaving California and the Silicon Valley

Yeah, it would be nice if their last train was later. To be fair, SF kind of shuts down around midnight anyway. If 24/7 bars and so on are important to you, there isn't any substitute for NYC.

colin_mccabeon On Leaving California and the Silicon Valley

The South Bay also has VTA, the Altamont Corridor Express (ACE), and Amtrak. Caltrain is just the one that goes to the penninsula and to SF.

colin_mccabeon On Leaving California and the Silicon Valley

If you compare the Bay Area to most of the US, it has significantly better public transportation. That was the point I was making in my comment.

colin_mccabeon The four noisy horsemen of Perl hate

> What other mainstream language lacks function arguments?

Assembly language doesn't have function arguments. You just decide what to put in each register when you begin the function. So you can remember that eax is the count, ebx is the pointer to the buffer, or whatever. Or if you're a nice programmer you write a comment there.

colin_mccabeon On Leaving California and the Silicon Valley

The Bay Area has weather. What it doesn't have is winter.

There is plenty of live music in the Bay. Example: https://thefillmore.com/

Public Transport (or lack thereof): The Bay Area has none

Wrong. The South Bay has Caltrain, the East Bay has BART. SF has... a few systems, but mostly Muni.

Variety (or lack thereof): There is a lack of variety, whether it be in the type of people encountered, the conversations, the cities/suburbs, or the scenery.

Very untrue. Try visiting Oakland, San Francisco, Palo Alto, and Santa Cruz and see if you think they are the same.

Affordability (or lack thereof): Flimsy, modest houses cost north of a million bucks minimum. Everything that requires human labor is stratospherically expensive.

The situation is the same in NYC. Housing is expensive.

colin_mccabeon Rethinking software testing: perspectives from the world of hardware (2019)

Given what we know about the latest flaws in CPUs, such as Spectre and Meltdown, maybe we need to rethink hardware testing using perspectives from the world of software instead.

colin_mccabeon Go 1.17 Beta

If compile time is the problem, Rust is not (yet?) the solution.

I agree that Cargo is much better than the Go build system, though.

colin_mccabeon Go 1.17 Beta

Rust doesn't really have a "runtime" in the same sense that Go does. For example, Rust has no GC.

colin_mccabeon Resistor Noise Can Be Deafening, and Hard to Reduce (2007)

Thanks for the comment... good to have some EEs drop in.

colin_mccabeon Cloudera taken private for $5.3B, acquires Datacoral and Cazena

I worked at Cloudera in the early 2010s, before they went IPO. It's a bit sad to see the way things played out. All I can say is, it was a fun ride while it lasted.

Cloudera actually started in the cloud, but quickly moved to selling mostly on-premise software. Back then, cloud was a lot less cost competitive (it still is not really cost competitive) https://a16z.com/2021/05/27/cost-of-cloud-paradox-market-cap... The on-premise business had much higher margins, which kind of "took the oxygen out of the room" for the cloud side of the business. In retrospect, neglecting the cloud market was a big mistake, of course.

Cloudera management knew even back then that Hadoop was eventually going to be superseded by a newer technology. We tried to build that technology, in the form of Impala, an optimized SQL query engine. Unfortunately, it never really took off in the marketplace, for several reasons. For one, its dialect of SQL was not compatible with Hive, the traditional SQL frontend for Hadoop. For another, early versions of Impala were somewhat unstable, and didn't have the fault-tolerance of traditional Hadoop tools.

From my perspective, the main issue that cloud solves is that managing the server side stuff is really hard, and requires experts. Cloud also aligns expectations: it's really clear to both customer and vendor that a cloud contract is not a stepping stone towards self-managing. Unfortunately, Cloudera just didn't see the shift towards cloud coming, and they're now paying the price.