foobiekr

Workers in the valley have been making real money in the startup lottery (not fabulous wealth but real money in the retire-by-50 sense) since Intel and HP were formed in the very early 1970s; let alone Microsoft, Sun, SGI and others in the early 80s. By the mid-80s it wasn't rare at all (Cisco, for one of many).

No.

This is because almost all of the critical EUV tech was developed by the US DOE and a US industry consortium plus a US valley company called Cymer and was transferred to ASML as a political move that excluded the Japanese companies in the space.

This is not to say ASML is not an impressive company, but it's amazing to see it held up as proof of Europe having a real tech industry.

This all used to be on the ASML site, but they appear to have scrubbed it. See https://imgur.com/gallery/8G08q2c

Cymer was not "proto-tech."

Wow you are right. That's crazy, I actually had to learn BCPL because early AmigaDos still had a lot of BCPL content and I seem to have forgotten. Thanks for the correction.

HN is not actually good at programming and CS, either.

It's an alternate timeline, basically. Had Inmos not fallen off a cliff after the T800 with a wicked case of second system syndrome (I know that the T9k wasn't their second system, but it has all the hallmarks) things might have gone differently, earlier.

Unless I'm mistaken, the only thing that lasted was the // single line comment syntax from Occam.

Yeah. It's amazing that people in technology so often are unable to comprehend that the legal system is not a bunch of statements where debating the meaning of words or symbols or obscure things like rendering somehow are magic to bypass the law's intent.

The simple answer is, it's not "what it looked like to the other person" it's the intent of the author.

Much like sales the professionals establish a pretty rigorous funnel and pay no attention to anyone who looks like they will fall out of the funnel. They optimize for offer and if they sense the candidate won’t get there they are better off trying to find one who will.

Also, honestly, a lot of recruiters suck. They are often hired with no qualifications and really not even any serious education. It is routine to hire people who formerly worked in retail or whatever for these jobs so on average they are themselves fodder for the process and often don’t last long.

I spent yesterday recovering some files that had silently reverted to October 2023 versions on - no kidding - December 24th. I only noticed it yesterday morning when I opened a spreadsheet and was absolutely baffled.

This is the second time iCloud has fucked me. As much as I want to use it I no longer trust it.

GPUs doing DMA is a problem whether you have unified memory or not. This is why IOMMU exists.

The blue dye seems to have gone nowhere since the initial study: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coomassie_brilliant_blue

HPV causes cancer. The prevention here is literal - by preventing infection from the oncogenic HPV variants there is no cancer.

Replying to a post noting a 90% reduction in cancer thanks to the HPV vaccine with "preventing cancer seems like a fool's errand" is pretty amazing. Would you care to expand on that?

Software is absolutely getting worse. I think you need to go back in time and really consider whether the SW is "doing a lot more."

The valid excuses for some of the footprint these days are bad protocols (but you pretty much have to use them - JSON is an abomination for resource use), Unicode, and higher resolution assets. There is actually very little else that's driving it other than horrible coding.

One way you can tell is that performance SW hasn't really bloated the way desktop and mobile software has. Postgres? Still pretty tiny and scales as you'd expect. Compilers? Even Excel isn't a huge pig the way the electron apps are.

Slack is so bad it is actually hard to think of a software application that is worse, and barely does anything more than most other, lighter-weight applications of the same sort.

This is mostly Musk mythmaking. Both vertical launch, reusable rockets and electric cars predate the current era. Unless you are 100+ years old electric cars were demonstrated possible before you were born.

TCP/IP was neither a consortium nor an open initiative. You’re missing the critical point. When TCP showed up there weren’t losers or anything else. It has no relationship to the problem I am describing.

Routing is what killed IPX/SPX and that was going to happen anyway. I am a former Netware admin and it was the post-LAN environment that killed IPX as well as pre-IP NetBEUI and all the rest.

It's not just Intel. Open initiatives and consortiums (the phase two of the same) are always the losers ganging up hoping that it will give them the leg up they don't have. If you're older you'll have seen this play out over and over in the industry - the history of Unix vs. Windows NT from the 1990s was full of actions like this, networking is going through it again for the nth time (this time with UltraEthernet) and so on. OpenGl was probably the most successful approach, barely worked, and didn't help any of the players who were not on the road to victory already. Unix 95 didn't work, unix 98 didn't work, etc.

Different services have different and unclear expectations. For example, you'd imagine that a big online storage service would have some access controls in place to limit what uploaded data random employees in operations and engineering can see, but in at least one case you'd be totally wrong. This strikes me as a perfectly reasonable expectation - the data isn't just sitting there exposed to arbitrary employees and that only trusted employees have that kind of access, and not broadly.

I don't think this is rogue actions, I think it falls into the category of perfectly reasonable expectations that are not actually met by a wide variety of cloud services.

Spam. And you knew that.

Once you own the home folder you can drop aliases for anything you want in the bashrc with almost no one noticing. At that moment point you are essentially done in almost all cases even in the absence of a local root exploit which Linux continues to be rife with. You will eventually catch a sudo password (using a trivial sudo wrapper alias) and all the ssh keys and jump host or password manager config.

For years a friend tried to get his department (where he worked as a lecturer) to add a software engineering course where the basic syllabus was to (1) receive a TOI from the last semester and the code base, (2) implement some new features in the code base, (3) deploy and operate the code for awhile, and (4) produce a TOI for the next semester.

The code base was for a simple service that basically provided virus/malware scanning and included the malware scanner and signatures (this ensured there would never be an end to the work - there's always more signatures to add, more features, etc.)

I thought this was a fantastic idea and its a pity he never convinced them. That was more than fifteen years ago, and in his plan it would have just run forever.

It's not that, it's that quality doesn't matter and mostly neither does technology.

If you are doing network switches or GPUs or server CPUs or whatever, yeah, technology matters. If you are building pretty much any SaaS, MCCA, etc. the tech is literally irrelevant and mostly the more "new" tech you use the worse off you are.

Quality also only matters in some contexts and those are even rarer than the above.

Timing and solving a problem is all that matters in terms of revenue. As long as you aren't too bad, it's fine. The only real five-nines requirement for SaaS is that 99.999% of them would be fine with one or two nines.

It isn't weird, its completely straightforward why this is a problem.

Spam. Spam is the reason and the Beeper guys know it.

The algorithm is interesting - at one time I was going to use https://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/publications/papers/sigmo... to do a startup.

This is different but very similar and contemporaneous.

First, the companies involved in self driving need to stop lying about their records. Tesla has engaged in years of making extremely suspect claims about their safety that do not stand up to scrutiny at all.

Do you somehow think complexity is the opposite of amateur - that is, complex = professional?

Because I have bad news for you. If iMessage is simple that means literally the opposite of what you think it means.

It’s not a double standard. AVs aren’t human. We can set whatever standard we want for them. There’s no logical reason it should be consistent with the standard for humans.

It makes liability for failure more complicated and customers might link their proprietary items to toxic licenses. They don’t want to be involved.

Also, just to be frank, if you’re using a solution like this, open source does not meet your requirements.