hguant

>If you started from scratch, there isn't really any easily accessible coal left.

I don't think this is strictly speaking true - certainly not for the US. I believe the majority of US coal production (according to wikipedia at any rate) is surface level mining, not the traditional underground mines people think about. I know that's true for parts of the Appalachian basin, I'm unclear as to whether that's true for the Wyoming mines.

Europe might be in trouble, I believe the only coal readily available on the continent is "brown" coal (lignite) which is suitable for power production, but has too many impurities to be used for steel production.

>Brooklyn's agesim is much worse than Silicon Valley

Is that a Brooklyn/hipster thing, or a NYC finance culture thing seeping into the tech world?

Reddit had a big shift recently when they had their mobile first redesign - it's made the website subjectively worse to HN types...and has massively increased its appeal. That, combined with the deep algorithmic shifts to the front page after the 2016 election cycle (when every other post was either a "give money to the Sanders Campaign" or "MAGA forever") has made it more difficult for deeper or more esoteric content to rise to the front page.

That being said, I find that Reddit is like Twitter - if you take the time to curate and cultivate your subreddits, you can have a very good experience there. The best of Reddit is the small subreddits that fit your niche and your communities.

1. Handwashing is water inefficient compared to a lot of dishwashers; if this is something that's important to you, a device like this makes ecologic, if not necessarily economic sense

2. Dishwashers are expensive to people not on tech salaries. All upfront costs are difficult; a smaller upfront payment with a recurring monthly/quarterly subscription payment is much more manageable for many people.

3. There are many homes in America that aren't configured for a dishwasher and it would be expensive/difficult to remodel to get one to fit. Anecdotally, my cousin out in <small town outside a college> has this problem - he and his wife would greatly appreciate a dishwasher in their lives, but their home was built in the 1940s and renovating isn't happening on a post-doc + special ed teacher's combined salary

AWS instances don't pay for themselves

/s...mostly

This was also a (secondary) feature in Stephenson's _Anathem_; their equivalent of the Web was so full of viruses, artificially intelligent spam, and what we'd now call disinformation (and network effects of that disinformation) that it was impossible to discern any information of value by accessing it directly. Only by using a sophisticated program that was constantly filtering data could the characters determine what was _probably_ happening in the world.

The protocols on the wire are different than what's documented especially for older SMB servers - Windows "released documentation" on some of the protocols because they were being reversed, but the docs are flakey or incomplete.

The actual transfer operations are pretty straightforward, but the negotiation steps are _very_ intricate and the Microsoft docs about the protocols are less than honest at times.

This is due to an international agreement post world war two (the 1944 Chicago Convention on Aviation) that agreed that fuel and maintenance parts necessary for _international air travel_ would be exempt from tarrifs and all taxes, barring a specific agreement between those to nations.

Domestic use is taxed, and at rather steep rates (look at the US!); however, because most flights in the EU are international, it would require both nations ok'ing a tax on flights between them. No one has gone through with this, and it's doubtful any one ever will, for a variety of reasons.

Yeah, I used to get very pissy about everything in windows being stashed in the registry but...how is that different from everything being hidden inside systemd, or in a /etc/config file that is silently changed by services?

This is huge. There's a YouTuber I've been following for a stupidly long time, and if he recommends something, or even is sponsored by someone, I'll check them out. Same thing with acoup.blog - if there's a book recommendation there, I'll check it out in a heartbeat. Why? Because they've spent a long time developing trust with their audience. The YouTuber has been absolutely brutal about products, and has been extremely open about how people have tried to influence him one way or another when he's doing reviews. The author of acoup.blog has similarly put a lot of work in establishing his bonafides, so when he says a work is good or important, I know what he means by that.

TDD gets pushed because it creates great, easily trackable metrics one can gesture to as evidence that a) your code is good and b) that you're doing a good job and should be paid more.

It makes developers happy because it translates the somewhat arcane nature of the work into something easily digestible by management, and is a fig leaf for shoddy work.

It makes management happy because it goes nicely on a chart that can be shown to the director/customer/shareholders, and looks good at status meetings. It also gives them something to poke at and micromanage.

It makes the customer/shareholders happy because it provides a metric that their money is being spent _doing something_.

TDD may have started as a coding best practice, but it exists and endures - and will continue to exist and endure - because it's performative, and the performance has value to every layer of a business, even though it has nothing to do with actually making the product better at this point.

It depends on your field. If you're a services company (as in, consulting and subcontracting) you're dead in the water unless you have a sales team day 0, even if that sales team is just the founder working over time. Those places live and die by their contracts.

There's a large number of small (<5) person companies that work entirely like that. They're not _sexy_ and they're never going to be unicorns, but they make a good amount of money for the people involved when they inevitably get purchased by some larger group.

You just successfully moved the goalposts by redefining what "going to a march" means...and even then didn't address how "all the examples" don't count. Even then, showing up for a mere two blocks still involves more risk than staying at home.

To me, it's the element of risk that differentiates virtue signaling from meaningful action. Posting "Let's go Brandon" on parlour or "Black Lives Matter" or Tumblr aren't risky actions. Saying "I think gay marriage is ok" in a conservative church is. Just because you can imagine a situation where the context lessens the impact of the action, doesn't mean the example is weak or wrong.

New account

Poor grammar

Blames Ukrainian self determination for the war.

This is a shill propaganda account

Just ignoring all the murders in Hungary and Poland as well.

They're a shill, it's fine.

...what kind of revisionist nonsense are you trying to make up? Like this is objectively false and comes across as tankie propaganda that belongs on Reddit.

Unironically yes

I think, while this might have been the perception up until a few weeks ago, the invasion of Ukraine has shown the world what a true "bully" on the international stage looks like. There will always be cloistered individuals who think that anyone who isn't "pure" (for an increasingly variable definition of pure) is evil. That opinion is absolutely fine to have until reality strikes.

The bubble of people who post on HN have been living in that cloister for the last decade or so, not realizing what goes on in the world. At the end of the day, the US has made it a policy to defend and promote democracy across the world, and has actively done so, through it's support of international institutions and protection of democratic norms.

Talking before this; hey what's our plan if Russia invades? Ok, what about if Russia does a "small" invasion? Etc. "Informal" in that they're not producing anything that requires a vote or action from member parties - it's meeting of established joint committees, distribution of memoranda, back and forth on policy.

Talking now: which of the plans we have discussed before are we going to enact? Formal meeting, in that a member state has declared it's intent to bring a topic to the table and that the body is obligated to discuss and determine a course of action - which is allowed to be "no action".

Basically, before now everyone figured out what to do on paper, now the Treaty Organization has to make a decision about next steps.

Wall Street Journal - there's a quip from someone that when he wanted to read things he agreed with, he opened Jacobin, when he wanted to know what was going on in the world, he went to WSJ. Being based entirely on serving money anchors you to a certain reality that can't be swung to far left or right. The journalism has had some really great scoops these last few years - they broke a lot of the Facebook drama, and some tax evasion shenanigans - while the editorials tend to be pretty principled conservatism ("we'll give a voice to anyone, but we'll put a letter from the Editors in where we call them liars" seems to be their approach to Trump and co).

National Review is similar to The Atlantic in that their long form pieces meant for print publication are wonderful, and tend to be rather nuanced, whiletheir short pieces meant for immediate internet consumption are heavily biased. They're interesting in that they take a "big tent" approach, and will allow a lont of dissenting voices to appear under their mast head - this was always true but became really rather evident during the 2016 elections.

The Dispatch is made up of authors and editors who didn't like that Trump supporters were allowed under the "Big Tent" of the National Review. It's edited by Jonah Goldberg, and David French, who shows up as a guest writer for the Atlantic every now and then.

You're not wrong, but Microsoft was in a position where they could invest over a period of _many_ years, if not a bit more than a decade, to get to a point of 53% market share. I don't think fb/meta has that kind of time - Microsoft was able to do all that while their core business (selling licenses to enterprise customers) either held steady or grew.

I don't think it will be lucrative for fb because Microsoft is already working in that problem space, and has been for a while. They were working on it via Xbox Kinect back during the Xbox 360 days, and merged that into HoloLens suite 5-ish years ago I think. That's a big lead time, no matter how much money you throw at the problem.

Additionally, Microsoft actually is able to engage with the big corporate clients that want or have a need for data visualization, the US government chief among them. The "VR workroom" or conference call is a neat gimmick - the VR or AR security briefing or military planning session is a massive leap forward in capability, and there's a lot of money there.

I think the sheer amount of data being transferred off of our various devices completely shocks the average, non-technical user. There's an assumption that unless you explicitly send something out, or actively make a post - something that involves clicking 'send' or 'share' - that the device is a receiver only when...that's just not the case. Part of this is technical education, but I think a lot of it also comes down to the fact that these devices are hermetically sealed from the average user, and even the average technical user. We have been trained to manipulate apps, not hardware; that's the only 'surface' visible to the user.

The cynic in me says that the lack of transparency about this is intentional; look at the outcry that happens when people learn about fb/meta snooping through their device, or the various apps turning on cameras and microphones when the user doesn't expect it. It's not that people don't care or have given up on privacy - it's that a lot of times developers lie to the user about what's happening, or at the least obfuscate it. Look at how torqued off people were when Apple forced apps to actually notify the user what they were doing!

I, like a lot of other nerds, play Magic the Gathering[0], specifically cEDH[1]. This process really speaks to my deck building process - after coming up with my archetype, color pie [2], and win conditions, I grab everything that I think could be applicable, and throw it in a pile. Then, on my first pass, I sort into yes, no, and maybe. Invariably, I end up throwing out all of the cards in the maybe pile, but the process of taking it aside, considering it, thinking "this could work", then coming back with fresh eyes struck me as similar to this process you've described.

[0] for those of you who don't know, MtG is a card game for two or more players who have a 'library' of cards they draw from, and play. It has a very simple premise - win the game by reducing your opponent's life total to 20, removing all the cards from their library, or playing a card that says that you win the game - and an insane amount of complexity; for example, one of the standard variants is provably Turing complete using the base rule set.

[1] One of the reasons for the longevity of MtG (been going strong since 1993) is that there are many variants of the standard rules that allow for a wide variety of play. Standard uses only the most recently released card lists, while Vintage lets you play with (almost) any card ever printed. cEDH stands for competitive Elder Dragon Highlander, which is a format where you have a 100 card library that has no repeating cards ("there can only be one!"), and they all have to share colors with a chosen 'commander'.

[2] MtG mechanically uses cards called 'lands' to produce a resource called 'manna'. Manna is used to pay for spells, which when resolved have some effect on the game state. Spells have color - 3 blue, for example - which can only be payed for by appropriately colored manna. There are 5 colors of manna, and each color is associated with different types of spells. Red is fast and aggressive, green is ponderous but mighty, etc.

So first of all you're responding to what you want to read, not the actual content of my comment. I said that the friend of mine in question was a self described hard Leftist, and that he was big in leftist oriented Twitter. I made no statement about New Republic...which is in fact a hard left publication. When you were looking at Wikipedia, did you skip the part where they were owned by that guy in the 1980s because it came out that the editors and owner were spies for the USSR, EDIT and they were trying to revamp their image /ENDEDIT? Or the bit about their return to their leftist roots since their sale in 2016?

Furthermore looking at who owned an institution 30-40 years ago doesn't really add any value to the conversation about what they are today.

...no the surface lesson is that lazy heuristics produce habits that provide the illusion of certainty without any rigour backing up those beliefs; the outcome may correspond with reality but the process getting you there isn't rational or dependable, because it always produces the same output regardless of input.

The "deeper lesson" if there is such a thing here is that experts are people too, and just as fallible, only in ways that are generally invisible to everyone but another expert.

I went to high school with a guy who is big in the self described Left-wing journalist Twitter.

I remember very distinctly watching an article - well, the ideas core to that article - he'd written percolate from New Republic to The Atlantic to The New York Times over a period of about a month. What was interesting was that in his original article, the concepts he presented were presented as radical, and as a thought experiment. By the time it made its way down to the NYT a month later, those same concepts were presented as obvious solutions that "both sides" should agree on as a matter of course, and any disagreement was just intellectual folly.

The conversation about these ideas had already happened on Twitter; NYT was just reporting the score.

US National Security, and the groups moving within it, are not monolithic. Different groups and agencies have very different policies regarding how to deal with journalists specifically.

DoD has been very up front - it's pay to play, as you noted. Stay in the lines, do what we want, keep your eyes on the narrative we're interested in, and opportunities and access with magically open up for you. Step outside the dotted line and whoops, you're in a warzone buddy and you need to leave now, base commander said so, sorry.

Whereas US foreign correspondents were, and as far as I can tell still are, entirely off limits for intelligence agencies to recruit from, work with, or even really interact with. State has put down as US policy that we respect the institution of (US) journalism, so no co-opting them. It's kind of a point of pride. Now, that doesn't mean avoid lying to them, no selling them, or just doing any of the various government tricks to throw a journalist onto a particular path, it just means none of the very obvious "you're going to drink the Kool aid" that DoD does.

Of course this is in abstract, I'm sure there are exceptions and people who broke the rule, but compared to the British intelligence services, who absolutely co-opted any and all foreign correspondent they could get their hands on, both as intelligence sources and to plant stories, or the Soviet/Russian Fed groups, the US has been relatively principled... relatively being the key word

It's The Verge; they aren't really well known for giving a shit about technical accuracy or fact checking.

I don't want to say so, but...so? At Intel scale, they're able to buy carbon offsets or - gasp! - install their own solar/wind in their properties. The municipal and state governments are I'm sure bending over backwards to get the plants and infrastructure investment, a permit to run whatever solar/wind/renewable they want is probably chump change for them.