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I realize my comment gave perhaps an inaccurate impression, but even with an incredibly sparse itinerary, and bounteous amounts of time (I spent weeks in Italy. I went through Belgium and France over two weeks. I spent a day just wandering around Paris with no itinerary, in addition to days more doing a variety of things), being completely inundated with new and unknown -- even the most benign door or building -- added to staying in a strange places, eating at strange places, and being detached from your normal life, for me at least made the experience far less...persistent.

The Sistine Chapel experience, for instance, aside from being just a mass of people being shuffled through one of the largest tourist draws in the world, was on a day that started with incidentally seeing Pope JP2 give an address, and ended with seeing the Dalai Lama at Tivoli when going there for a dinner (two spiritual leaders in one day! Yet I remain an agnostic). In the end the Chapel got filed away as "neat some stuff painted on a ceiling". That is an extreme example, but for my "a 100 year old is historic" North American sensibilities, virtually everything in places like Belgium, France and Italy is overwhelming, from the weird little waffle shop in Ypres to the sound of bells, the stones on the street, etc, everything just becomes an onslaught of overwhelming experience.

"A lot of Americans really only knew about "red" and "white" wines back then"

At the release of Sideways, everyone and their brother knew the major wine varieties, and had opinions. Indeed, a major reason the merlot spiel had such an impact with so many is precisely because it was so popular. Many like to be a contrarian, so if something knocks on the popular thing that can have an impact ("who else can't stand Tiktok, right?"). Most of the varieties of merlot were very high quality, and I doubt the overwhelming bulk of wine drinkers could taste any deficiency (many can't even differentiate varieties).

https://www.guildsomm.com/public_content/features/articles/b...

That's a much better article about the rise and fall of California merlot, and basically notes that merlot had plateaued by Sideways release, and there's a bit of a cause/correlation mixup happening.

I'm going to be the contrarian: Unless you're getting an exclusive viewing and you wake fresh with a singular goal, seeing the great art of the world is likely to be a compromised experience. When overwhelming beauty and art surrounds you, and a hectic schedule dogs you, everything is dulled and the experience becomes almost a fog. My experience going through the Sistine Chapel was almost an aside to just days of overwhelming artistry, so I gave it barely the respect it deserved. I've enjoyed and experienced it virtually magnitudes more.

A couple of years ago I did a trip to Belgium and France. Saw all of the sights, loads of museums, and did a tonne of wandering. It was a great time, but was overwhelming. I came home and maybe a week later we were browsing YouTube on the TV and came across a channel that just walks around neighbourhoods of Japan (e.g. Shibuya, Tokyo, among others. The channel is Virtual Japan). A couple of hours of walking a stabilized camera through the streets of a Japanese city. My son came in and watched with me while we looked at storefronts, read restaurant menus, walked through malls, virtually participated in pedestrian scrambles, etc). The weirdest thing is that days later my "trip" to Japan felt much more real than my trip to Belgium and France (or any prior trip I'd ever taken). Absent all of the worries and hustle and overwhelming inputs, somehow this completely not real experience felt much more real, and to this day I feel like I've been to Japan, while so many other countries that I've physically been to and experienced for weeks seem like almost a dream. It really was a fascinating experience for me.

It made me wonder if there is a business in on-demand telepresence for this sort of virtual travel. "Uber" someone technologically enabled to walk around an area, look at things you want and follow directions. Add some dystopian elements to it and soon they're getting in fights at your request.

Oracle has fantastic budget tools. Not just "you've passed your budget", but "you're forecast to pass your budget in 22 days before the month is up". And you can couple it with quotas to create hard budgets.

AWS has decent tools in this regard, but it pales compared to Oracle. Azure is a product I've never used with any scale (just small projects), but the fact that it actually costs money to setup alerts is gross (and morally reprehensible). Even if it's a trivial amount, that alone just sours the product in my eyes. I mean, already Azure is pretty uncompetitive unless you're running on free credits, as Troy apparently is (purportedly some $13K per year, so unsure what the pitch for donations to cover a bill is about).

The game itself has limited novelty, with the majority of people getting the solution in 3 or 4 guesses through normal fitting. It's entirely natural that people try to find new ways to challenge themselves with it.

Intel has some 15 or so fabs already in the US (most upgraded multiple times), and is constructing two giant new ones in Arizona.

The continental US has a good amount of domestic production capacity. The "problem" is that TSMC and Samsung got a node advantage on Intel, drawing a lot of the performance part manufacturing (including Intel contract work). Will this Ohio plant be competitive on the edge? I haven't seen information indicating that, and the two Arizona fabs Intel is building (operating in 2024) are targeting 7nm.

Samsung (3nm) and TSMC (5nm) are both building fabs in the US as well. A pretty healthy subsidy by the government and various levels of government lubricated the choice. It's good for the sanity and economic stability of the world if everything wasn't concentrated in Taiwan.

I apologize for being so direct, but you seem really sensitive about this topic. The tweet you linked to in your edit was actually questioning Intel's faltering business model, not Ohio. Of the comments you linked, most are banal or negative about a specific area. Columbus, for instance, really doesn't seem like a particularly compelling place to most people who don't already live in Columbus. That doesn't seem particularly contentious. I see absolutely nothing about (the) Ohio State, or how it compares to Stanford.

And a smattering of negative comments is hardly unique. Anti-valley rhetoric is nonstop on HN (as an aside, I suspect >85% of HN contributors are not in or near the valley). The theft gangs, homeless people, drug overdoes, etc.

But none of it is really relevant at all for an automated facility. Like a data center, it really doesn't make a big impact in an area outside of the initial construction . The real beneficiary will be ASML in all probability. Regardless, it's good to have more advanced fabs distributed around the globe.

Scanned this submission several times today, never seeing a single negative comment about Ohio. I did chuckle at one pro-Ohio that basically said it's a great place because it has [list of things that every metropolitan everywhere has], but whatever.

After seeing your comment I dug through the comments and found a single negative comment that is clearly written by someone from and in Ohio.

The linked article (the Japolnik blogspam adds nothing but removes plenty -- see the original al.com article) gives a wrong impression, but this is a classic Southern small-town policing tactic of extorting outsiders. The citizens in the town love it because all of this stuff is paid for by everyone who just happens to drive through.

This should be dealt with by higher levels of government -- it is gross, rank corruption -- however higher levels of government are drunk on civil forfeiture.

Mississauga has a density of 2467 people per square kilometer. Mississauga neighbourhoods look like this-

https://www.google.ca/maps/@43.5675623,-79.740886,916m/data=...

That isn't apartment building density, but that's about as dense as single family homes can get.

Mississauga had to raise property taxes somewhat -- still extremely competitive -- as a revenue source dried up. But those new neighbourhoods all easily pay for themselves in property taxes. Nonetheless, loads of really silly narrative comes out of Toronto writers, still foreboding this dire scenario that they've been pitching for well over a decade. It's a bit farcical at this point.

Putting a device into space is relatively cheap for a project like this, and is only dropping with each year. Say $100M - $200M, on a $10B project, puts the launch at just 1-2% of the price tag. I believe the Hubble total project cost is pushing past $16B in adjusted dollars.

It's the massive capital expenditure on the telescope and its infrastructure that is the significant limiting factor on the pace of putting newer and better telescopes in place.

UV A/B is oxidizing, which is why plastics left outside degrade rapidly, discoloration occurs, etc. It's bad for your eyes, bad for your skin in excess, and creates ozone in the air which is an environmental pollutant.

Normal indoor plants have no need for UV at all. Nor do most food plants -- greenhouse glass blocks UV, for instance.

The recreational consumption of content of all sorts is, I suspect, at a historic high. We watch hundreds of hours of movies and limited series and shows, watch YouTube and Twitch and TikTok, and browse Facebook, Reddit, and Hacker News for hours a day. Even the most active programmer -- if they're being honest and not just preening for hopeful bosses to nod in praise -- spends a significant amount of time not programming.

Yes, most people have enormous amounts of discretionary time. Long form content has a pretty large base that enjoys the content, and it's some of the best content that appears on HN.

To condense, I find the notion that no one has time simply ludicrous. As otabdeveloper4 mention, it's remarkable how content has grown and grown rather than the opposite.

Having said that, I don't understand the site. By appearances some people post some links of some content that they enjoyed? What is there to "shut down"? Are we to believe this was some sort of business or something?

"Fact checkers made a mistake" articles draw out a certain crowd, and their over the top rhetoric is always the same. The dominant narrative in here is unlikely to correspond with the public at large, or even the majority of HN users.

This is a particularly weird submission because the article the person authored was basically blogspam. They took someone else's hard work, put a clickbait title on it intending for the sole value of pandering to a very specific audience, now getting to double down under the auspices of "my blogspam was suppressed" narratives.

And I suspect that the article came under the attention of Facebook because it, exactly as intended by the author, fed directly to a certain crowd that absolutely consumes and propagates fake news (not like "it's open to debate", but just astonishingly nonsensical junk that just makes a wider and wider audience of the gullible and misled). Being embraced by that crowd is probably the biggest indicator to such systems, and 9 times out of 10 it's probably spot on.

"You don't read much about "death by misadventure" associated with them though"

When stories do come out, they tend to be over the top. For instance-

https://globalnews.ca/news/4735129/thomas-chan-guilty-mansla...

People with certain conditions should stay away from psychedelics.

Having said that, as others said a normal experience does not include hallucinations of the cliche "see weird crazy things that aren't there" variety. Instead you get more of an experience from patterns, music seems richer, colours deeper, etc.

Our brain dulls reality for us as a evolutionary benefit to allow us to focus our brainpower only on changes/unique things (e.g. the predator sneaking up in our periphery). Shrooms roll that back a bit so suddenly the pattern on a blanket, the branches on a tree, or the backing track in a piece of music, or even the varying white points of lights, comes front and center. In many ways it's like experiencing things with fresh eyes and ears, and that really is the delight of the experience, de-jading our senses.

This can be a disadvantage if you're doing something safety critical and suddenly you're amazed how you never noticed the features of some thing, distracting your attention. No one should ever drive or do dangerous things under the influence. The evolutionary benefit allows us to focus attention in a way that keeps us and those around us safe.

But from a judgment perspective, I am a fairly average chess player (I mean among active players), and under the influence of shrooms I play at the same level as not. I manage time as well, etc. I have programmed some critical code that I later marvel over on shrooms. This is wholly different from under the influence of alcohol, for instance, where my ability drops precipitously.

I'm pretty in the dark about [new thing]. I don't have skills in it and really don't grok it. And even though it seldom gets mentioned, my insecurity about that gap in my knowledge -- that thing that makes my existing knowledge a little bit obsolete -- makes me laser focused on those instances where it does appear (Baader-Meinhof phenomenon of sorts): If one in a hundred posts mentions [new thing], I'll throw my hands up and complain about how these hipsters are trying to push this stuff down my throat at every venue. Maybe I'll no true scotsman in a futile effort to try to coerce people against talking about it, for instance by claiming that real pros don't actually talk about it at all, Fight Club style.

This has played out over, and over, and over again. Blockchain, NoSQL, JavaScript, Angular, "web3", Android, iOS, Swift, K8s, and on and on. Legitimate criticism gets drown out by people just fearful that something might take hold and then they're going to have to change how they do things or learn something new.

Eh.

The US is a democratic republic. Canada, the UK and a number of others are parliamentary democracy.

They are ALL democracies, and I'm unaware of a single country on the planet that is a pure democracy. All are representative in some way.

This bizarre "not a democracy" (for the oldest ongoing democracy) is not based in reality at all, but someone read it somewhere and just mindlessly repeats it.

> It's easy to win elections when you promise free healthcare, free education, free childcare,... The average person will vote in their immediate interest and not worry about the big picture

In reality the "average person" votes against their own interest -- both short and long term -- at virtually every turn.

I feel like I've been trolled.

For sure, and I'm not disputing your experience at all but there are hundreds of much vaguer "they're a bad company" style posts that don't have direct experience though.

It's entirely possible that they've improved some of the cost monitoring and management facilities as well. Under "Governance and Administration" you can set a budget -- notably budgets are alerts and not hard budgets, so one should act accordingly -- not only based on actual spend, but even for period forecast spend. It's a great rapid awareness if you accidentally enable a pay feature. There are also regularly updated graphs showing the daily spend charted by source of cost, along with multiple-per-day CSVs with billing details. Another way the Oracle cloud actually helps is that it actually isolates you to a single region (you have to go through a process to do otherwise), so it's harder to have the situation people would encounter on Amazon where they'd accidentally create some resource off in some other region and then it's effectively invisible but costly (though AWS now has the global dashboard that really improved that).

What is "free" or not could be clearer. For instance they have a terminology issue with a conflict between "Free tier" and "always free". Sometimes they use the former to refer to things during the trial period. Sometimes they use the latter to refer to resources that are free forever even after you've upgraded to an ostensibly pay account. It is confusing. And they make the two AMD instances just straight "always free", but for the ARM instance they give a monthly CPU/memory credit that allows you to run it for 31 days.

And then you have to search on various other things you regularly do figure out what is free or not, and that information is dispersed. For instance you can have so many volume images beyond which they are charged, etc.

Alas, I've been extremely pleased with the service. The console is a bit clunky in places but it works.

Quite a few negative replies [1], so here's a counterpoint -- Quite a few months back someone on here mentioned using the 24GB/4 core thing for a Minecraft server. While I knew Oracle had a cloud offering, I had never looked at it at all but this enticed me to give it a chance. Not for Minecraft, but lots of time I'm doing things like ETC1 compression of massive textures and I don't want to do it on my MBP. I signed up, got the month free trial (with $300 of credit), and spun up the three "always free" instances (two limited 1 core AMD servers and a 4 core 24GB ARM instance, though I couldn't get the latter until like a week after signing up as there was no availability at the time). All three of these have a public IPv4 which is just super surprising.

These have been perfect since and I have had zero problems. Okay the sales guy in the first month was clearly just bothered by the whole thing (and somehow managed to cancel my account in the process of upgrading it to "paid"), but then it was fixed and everything has been perfect since. On that "personal" account I have had $0 of billing, and they are very clear on billing with up to the moment charting and allocation of every penny billed (not to mention that you can of course set alerts. You would have to really not be paying attention to get surprise billing from this). I've done backups, used volumes, and tried out loads of their services and they have "always free" quotas on loads of stuff. Hilariously I now use one of my AMD instances as the management console to run AWS CLI and kubectl controls for my AWS deployments.

It worked perfectly on me. Since then I've done their "Oracle University" programs and then moved two of my client web applications to Oracle on separate paid accounts, where the pricing is incredibly reasonable (especially the lambda-style functionality which just blows me away). I plan on moving more.

[1] I honestly wonder if some of the negative comments might be people trying to dissuade people from discovering something that seems to be Too Much of A Good Thing. Honestly hesitated posting a positive comment on the chance that if too many people run for freebies it might get the program noticed and clamped down on.

Often in situations like this -- where everything seems to be wrong with everyone else -- I remember that old Dysfunction Inc. post that had a tagline something along the lines of "The consistent feature of all of your dysfunctional relationships is you". It's a nod to the fact that often we need to stop and self-reflect instead of constantly enumerating the failures of everyone else.

I have limited insight into who you are, which is a post that was likely made in an irritated state and probably is a bit over the top, but various phrases in it are red flags. Having hired and managed for two decades, they sound irritatingly high maintenance.

Questioning why someone uses something is completely valid, for instance, and should never be met with resistance. Questioning in a derogatory or dismissive way (which if you're going to go on about "maniac managers creating work for them to manage with tech they don't understand" seems likely), on the other hand, is going to yield eye rolls and a complete lack of interest in humouring your question. Angling to be "smarter than thou" in a discussion or interview by trying to prove the existing team or group dumb in their choices will never, ever succeed.

We've all been there with the guy who sneeringly questions everything being done. It's incredibly boring.

I'm playing devil's advocate here, and it isn't personal. I'm just going on the limited bit posted.

"I was just thinking this morning that Intel segments their market by the class of person that is their customer."

Just about every company in the world that sells things (including AMD) engages in market segmentation.

A classic - https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...

It has nothing to do with the "class of person" -- that whole notion seems pejorative in this context -- but maximizing how much you can extract in the aggregate.

In the case of Intel, for years (decades?) they were their own primary competitor. They wanted to be sure that for a given customer they could extract the maximum amount possible, and they did this by gating some features (ECC, AVX, etc) to try to avoid business customers deciding to get by on "lesser" processors. And the simple truth is that the overwhelming bulk of consumer products will never, ever have an ECC relevant error event, which is how businesses managed to get by without it.

`It's the first guy to publicly say "the emperor is naked"'

That MySQL has a poor optimizer has been known for as long as MySQL has been a product. The product is legendary for its inability to do even basic RDBMS needs competently, and the rise of NoSQL was largely people assuming MySQL limitations were general RDBMS problems (for instance its painful incompetence doing basic RDBMS tasks like joins).

Having said that, a couple of decades in this industry has me reading this post and immediately sensing oozing bitterness. That maybe he got passed over for a promotion he felt he earned, etc.

When someone does the "it's all crap" exit, it's seldom from a good place. Who could seriously have applied to and joined the MySQL team without knowing that it isn't exactly the pinnacle of database systems?

Having said all of that, it's interesting seeing pgsql being held as the panacea. I like pgsql, and prefer it among open source database systems, but in many ways it is a decade+ behind MSSQL and Oracle.

You have left a number of these meta comments now (a sockpuppet account even appeared to lend you support), apparently that injured that someone disagreed with your comment. To say these add no value is overstating their contribution.

Thanks

Ignoring that I've been a professional software developer for 26 years, a large part of that building large scale web applications (every one for the past decade+ targeting Safari as well, and before that I always ensured my teams supported alternative browsers even when various team members were moaning and whining about how much a nuisance it is), let me just focus on this-

"misguided impression that it’s a good browser"..."Simply talk to any developer"

Your experience as a developer, and you dealing with utterly trivial regressions or handicaps, has shockingly little bearing on whether it is a "good browser" or not.

We seem to agree entirely.

Many developers would prefer a single, universal browser. A single platform. A single input mechanism (a single development language, compiler, RDBMS, filesystem, cloud provider, backup system, etc). All for obvious, practical reasons, at least in the short term.

That would be devastating for the future, but if it makes projects easier today, many developers are entirely onboard.

That was very much a dominant position among developers in the IE days. Other browsers were a nuisance, and maybe they should just be cut out entirely.

If Safari weren't such an important part of the market, Firefox would have been cut out long ago and we'd be awash in "Made For Chrome (and skinned Chrome)" badges. It is only the economic necessity of supporting iOS users that keeps cross browser development alive.

Lack of modern feature support? This is beyond parody.

"What point are you trying to make here? iOS users have no choice but to use Safari."

Android users use the browser on their device -- any browser -- less than iOS users use their browser(s).

Read the Google corporate propaganda repeated on here, and other platforms provide a web bliss of PWAs, freed from app subservience. Only, not at all.

"supports the smallest number of features out of any browser."

This is a bit like saying India has the smallest number of people in countries named China or India.

It's still an enormous number of features, and it is simply extraordinary what is capable in the browser.

"this is reflected in all the developer surveys"

Remember "Made for IE"? IE was dogshit, yet there were loads of devs who thought ActiveX was the bee's knees and having to deal with other browsers and platforms was just an annoyance in their lives.

Developer surveys on this are worthless, and if we listened to developers as a group it would be an entirely Windows world.

"basic browsing experience"

Google pushes out yet another half-baked, poorly considered new feature in Chrome and overnight has mobs chanting about Safari purportedly holding everyone back because of some close to irrelevant fringe thing.

Safari might just be the fastest browser, and it supports a ridiculous, awe-inspiring array of features and standards.

And the greatest indictment of the ridiculous anti-Safari smear is that no platform uses the browser more than iOS users do. iOS users always are over-represented in web usage compared to marketshare.

> Picture in picture works just fine on Windows and Android without a YouTube Premium account. Is this something specific to iPhone?

Google decided that in YouTube for iOS the feature would be premium only, at least for now. Maybe they feel iOS users are more easily monetized. Who knows. It most certainly isn't a limitation of the platform.

> stripping out the ads is dangerously close to "I just want this for free, so I'll steal it"

I never use YouTube intentionally. The service is a bit of the perfect example of boiling a frog, with one short skippable ad becoming multiple skippable ads becoming multiple unskippable ads becoming multiple unskippable ads plus interstitial ads, on top of the content itself almost always having sleezy "sponsored by" advertising content. It's simply remarkable how what was supposedly the new world that would break us free from the classic television model has somehow gotten so much worse.

That doesn't really address your point, but it is kind of tough to feel too sympathetic. The morality becomes...clouded.

> On the other hand the fact that the entire thing seems to be Apple ecosystem

Google decided to be extra greedy towards iOS users, so users helped solve it. Sounds like you're giving it a thumbs up.

The doctor notes that the patients she has seen have all been young, healthy men, with a very small sampling set. I'm not sure how much to read into that at this point, as every variant of COVID would average out to "mild" to non-existent symptoms across most of the population, but causes enough mayhem with a small percentage to become trouble at scale. Given the effective "punishment" of South Africa for being vigilant and detecting the variant, she's also incentivized to lean towards optimism.

Who knows. Maybe it'll end up raging across the population with little downside and the end result might be advantageous. We can't know yet.