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dangjc

634 karma · joined October 13, 2015

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dangjc··on Record-High 89% in U.S. Say Government Corruption Widespread
The Supreme Court opened the doors to this with Citizens United. You can’t expect one party to unilaterally disarm while another rakes in hundreds of millions. We all just need to come together and agree on a constitutional amendment to end this.
dangjc··on In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels
Rooftop solar has lower distribution costs. A solar farm needs new transmission and upgraded capacity distribution lines to get the power from far away to the users. Generating solar right next to your neighbors lets them access your surplus cheap power with existing slack capacity in the distribution lines. Our current monopoly utilities don’t have a mechanism to recognize that value created, and they would prefer to keep building more infrastructure as that’s what increases profits for them.
dangjc··on America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back
This! My company is mid size and we can’t hire junior people for fear they’ll jump to FANG right when they’re starting to become productive for us. And we can’t afford FANG compensation for senior people.
dangjc··on Self-Driving Teslas Are Fatally Rear-Ending Motorcyclists More Than Any Other
Then Tesla should pay for back up drivers until their safety record meets the bar.
dangjc··on YIMBYism as Industrial Policy
I live in a VHCOL coast (the Bay Area) and am trying to add onto my house. Contractors are quoting broadly between $500-$1000 per square feet for an addition, for an ADU, or for a new house. We need both YIMBY procedure reforms and also somehow to bring down construction costs. I’m hopeful prefab/modular can help.
dangjc··on Why I don't discuss politics with friends
There are horrible consequences and people are suffering, totally. So then what? How do we get others to understand the impacts and start to change their mind?
dangjc··on Why I don't discuss politics with friends
We often reach for black and white thinking which makes political discussions difficult. Both sides do it, and it stunts our empathy for why people vote the way they do.
dangjc··on Zelensky leaves White House after angry meeting
We destroyed half of Russia’s military without shedding American lives. We defended the principle that people should govern themselves and not be dominated by force.
dangjc··on Zelensky leaves White House after angry meeting
This weakens the US against China. Europeans have no stake in a big Pacific conflict and will be much less interested to back US war mongering now. It’s short sighted for us to forego alliances that were helping us build a world order and a trading bloc that isolated China.
dangjc··on Zelensky leaves White House after angry meeting
China will benefit the most from this. Europe has zero interest in backing up the US in a fight for Pacific dominance. Good luck trying to form a trading block that excludes China now.
dangjc··on Zelensky leaves White House after angry meeting
I think most Americans value freedom and reject tyranny.
dangjc··on Zelensky leaves White House after angry meeting
We (Americans) can’t be relied on. Yeah most Americans are still supportive of Europe but our political system produces whipsaw foreign policy. The end result of all this is America is weakened on the global stage as our allies lose faith in us and start working around us. Why should Europeans boycott China, sanction Iran, support Israel, isolate Cuba, intervene in another Iraq? These are American priorities, not European ones.
dangjc··on US government struggles to rehire nuclear safety staff it laid off days ago
Institutions try to make people more than the sum of their parts. The free market pits businesses against each other in a way that harnesses overall economic productivity. We’ve gotten pretty far with our federalized system and balance of branches. Something does seriously need fixing now that polarized parties lead Congress and the courts not to be doing their job checking the executive. And that presidents are chosen more for their charisma than from trust built up by people who actually work with them. A prime minister is chosen by peers, not by a general population that doesn’t know what they’re capable of.
dangjc··on Ask HN: Is a Masters in CS/Engineering worth it for a mid-career PM?
We have a product analytics team where people have transitioned from being fully PM focused to being deeply data analysis oriented. It starts with using code-lite tools like Tableau and SQL queries then easily opens up into running data transform jobs with Python scheduled on a cluster. It would probably be easier and more financially remunerative to be at a company where you provide value in a product role, and continue providing that value as you slowly transition to a more engineering role.
dangjc··on US government opens 22M acres of federal lands to solar
One other issue with the Sahara is that you still have to transport that energy to where it will be used. It's been difficult already to build transmission within the US between a few states. Crossing the Mediterranean and getting the energy across southern Europe (which is sunny and doesn't need it) to cloudier northern Europe would be a lot of permitting. If they can convert the Sahara electricity to liquid fuels, it might actually fit with trade patterns better.
dangjc··on Goodreads asks users to help combat 'review bombing'
We’re getting to the point where sites might need to embrace ID verification to protect against fake, malicious, farmed, and AI generated content.
dangjc··on Interview with Viktor Lofgren from Marginalia Search
> I can for example look at the HTML of a document and if it has too many ads or if it has too many tracking elements I can downrank the website for example. Or enable a user to have a check box to say I don’t want to many ads. I prefer content that does not have ads, for example. It is hard to get it perfectly right, but even to remove 75% of the ads that’s still a huge improvement.

That's a pretty big opening for a search engine that Google basically cannot fight since it is against their core interests.

dangjc··on Most companies do not need Snowflake or Databricks
DBUs are about +50% the underlying compute cost.

We use Databricks in production extensively.

dangjc··on Why and how we retired Elm
Some nuggets of wisdom from the article when managing an engineering org:

- “if the only reason an engineer wants to work for you is because of your tech stack, that may be a warning sign. Culture Amp therefore avoids hiring engineers who are purely technology-focused. As a product company, we seek to hire people who are mostly excited about our product and its mission, and who are happy to learn new things when necessary to progress that. When someone tells us in an interview they’re excited about working here because they like functional programming (say), we count that as an indication they might not be a good fit.”

- “Perhaps the greatest challenge for engineers as they reach more senior levels in their career is to make decisions that balance the moment-to-moment joy (or frustration) that a given tool affords them, and the costs (or benefits) that same tool might create for their team, company or client over time and at scale”

dangjc··on Perennial rice: Plant once, harvest again and again
That’s reassuring we are in steady state. If perennial rice takes over, we will gradually drop atmospheric methane to a lower steady state.
dangjc··on SVB was particularly poorly run
They decided not to hedge on purpose, take the risk, hoping to earn the extra profits. Slate money did a good episode on this last week. SVB has high touch relationships with their clients, and they need money to pay for all that client service. This was a bet that went bad (in a very foreseeable way).
dangjc··on Google loses EU appeal and is fined a record $4B
It’s not walking on egg shells. It’s very clear directions to avoid anti competitive behavior. Maybe it’s harder without a moral compass telling them to not be evil.
dangjc··on Sunsetting Atom
People kept asking me why I was still using Atom, and Hydrogen was it. It doesn't seem like there's an exact equivalent in VSCode. For now, I'm just relying on sending blocks of code to the interactive Python terminal. Or using the Jupyter extension. But the former might not work with other languages and the latter requires .ipynb files which maybe you don't want to check into git.
dangjc··on Ask HN: I realise data science is not for me and feel depressed
You might want to gravitate more in the machine learning engineer direction. So much of ML is building the data, training pipelines, the serving environment, model tracking, evaluation, promotion, and other general infra around modeling. Many data scientists are more analyst-plus, and don’t have strong engineering skills. But large scale ML needs more of the latter. As long as you can AB test, you don’t need strong statistical skills to tease apart effects.
dangjc··on How should net metering affect your electric bill?
A huge portion of electric bills are paying for wildfire damage/hardening and for expensive transmission lines. Rooftop solar reduces both, but is not being credited for it in NEM 3.0.

When electricity is generated and consumed locally, it doesn't need to be transmitted across huge distances using expensive transmission infrastructure. There's also less wires that can trigger fires. But infra is the only way regulated utilities are allowed to make a profit.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/11/business/energy-environme...

These increased costs being passed to California consumers could kill electric cars. We're paying $0.30-$0.40 / kwh to PG&E, which pencils out to over $9 / gallon.

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a35152087/tesla-model-3-ch...

dangjc··on UK national extradited to US for film/TV piracy
He stole intellectual property and deserves to be prosecuted. With abundant streaming options these days and threat of being cut off from your ISP, few people pirate films anymore in the US. This is not normal, tolerable practice anymore. People’s livelihoods depend on these industries. A lot of the people here on hacker news make a living from producing intellectual property.
dangjc··on Jeff Bezos: Work-Life Balance Is 'Debilitating Phrase'
Bezos leaned very hard away from work life balance. He’s extremely wealthy and divorced.
dangjc··on Facebook’s ban on sharing Australian news stories hurting publisher traffic
This might be a short term hit to publishers, but maybe readers will eventually retrain to visit news sites directly rather than relying on Facebook and friends to select articles for them. This is very much a fight over who controls the entrance to the web and it's probably better it not get centralized into Google and Facebook. It didn't work out well for AOL and Yahoo.
dangjc··on Myopia treatment 'smart glasses' from Japan to be sold in Asia
The eyeball is not “just” too long. It elongates as a response to the stimuli from the lens projecting an image at a focal length behind the retina. Most kids are not born nearsighted. It develops over time. This is how.
dangjc··on Myopia treatment 'smart glasses' from Japan to be sold in Asia
This is similar to the “active focus” method: https://endmyopia.org/

I’ve been in this Facebook group for a while and lots of people have great personal anecdata about their improvements. It’s really interesting to see a medical device come out and if they have clinical trials to back it up.

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