jojo2000

I'd say anyone that believes that the current situation will have no consequence for themselves or their relatives, or who are not aware of the current situation in care facilities and so, downplay it.

It has led to unbelievable carelessness attitude, like people organizing parties after government warnings, transmitting the disease to more vulnerable people.

So yes, everyone has skin in the game, but some people think they have not, until they realize that they have.

This. The only way to properly evaluate state of the pandemic is to test the whole population of a country with a test that can differentiate :

- incubating phase - illness phase - post-illness with immunity - fatalities linked with the pathogen

Problem is that the test(s) are currently too pricey both money- and time-wise. Limiting factor here is time, because states push incredible amounts of money to save people.

Furthermore, I could find no reference to assert exactly what the test tests, and its reliability (false negatives/positives) ; this was illustrated by cases of recontaminations that could be linked to incorrect tests.

So now you're a state actor. You've got two choices : either, you play it low regarding extreme measures to contain the pandemic (first reaction of England), you delay measures (like most of European countries, and US), or you act swiftly (China, Korea).

Challenge here is that you won't know if the measures you have taken are too harsh until it's over.

Given the number of unknowns, what will you choose ?

Well let's say that overwhelmed hospital personal, facing dilemnas everyday regarding who deserves to live and who deserves to die, dying themselves to fight the infections, will give you the answer.

It's easy to qualify the reaction as disproportionate when you don't have skin in the game.

Happy for you ! Win7 was a good release indeed, as win2k.

I can relate to your pain. At a previous position we had special windows workstations to deal with all of windows-specific software, and all of our personal workstations were using linux.

Now that I manage teams, I don't care about what OS people use. The more productive they are the better. The only dev (over 15 people) that used windows told me after a few months he regretted keeping windows on his machine !

I'm being massively downvoted here, thanks for asking the why ! Been using windows 95,98,2k,7,10. I've had countless problems with it for more than 10+ years. Countless steps for system setup, bad/missing drivers, malware, spyware, performance degradation over time, system creeping more and more resources, cannot fix bugs upstream...

Since then I've switched to linux (less gaming) which has its own flaws and pains, but I love it.

Regarding WSL, why bother mixing two philosophies together ? Switch to linux and you've got it all, unaltered, and open source.

It's a joke. Windows ? Never again.

A medium-sized yatch needs a crew of 6+ people. An airplane needs to be replenished in food and supplies, and be taken care of, and frequently inspected and repaired. We often forget how brittle technology is...

And once the apocalypse is over, they can live altogether in a devastated world where money has no meaning, and where true skills are the only riches. No one to steer the yatch, no pilot for the aircraft, no petroleum.

So much money is wasted in this world.

Wait, couldn't it be used to live in a better world altogether ?

It is because of the consequences of covid-19 on the lungs of some people, which needs intensive care and specialized equipment to cure them, that is rare (ventilators etc.).

> It's a fair assumption that a lot of people on HN have SF viewpoint or views at least that partially align with them. Even those of us on the other side of the planet.

Totally agree with you ! But maybe some people misunderstood what you wrote.

I'd rather say that the crowd here is technically fit and policed enough to try to understand elaborate and forward-looking viewpoints, sometimes contrary to the doxa [0]. That makes comment so enjoyable to read. And it's also reassuring, that we can agree on some things on both sides of the planet .

edit : and some people who like to think of themselves as independent thinkers and live in SF by design or accident, will not like to see their opinions qualified as "SF" opinions. Works equally well for any part of the world.

> As for your downvoters

+1. This mechanism is a rather raw moderation system, people will abuse it to disqualify competing stances. There are options to refine it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doxa

Well, at least now we know it's widespread [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel

That's absolutely not true regarding the wiring constraints. There have been projects going on for years to sort that problem out.

> “There are 205 million flight hours in the 737 fleet with this wiring type,” a Boeing official said. “There have been 16 failures in service, none of which were applicable to this scenario. We’ve had no hot shorts.”

This is appalling as this company exhibits the same excuses as before "there was no problem yet". Persistence in unfit behaviour at its best.

It's a tragedy. Those unsung heroes need some help as they are our moral compass, and guardians of our future.

Very interesting piece. Same experience here (jump in, build knowledge assets, build team). Last part different, be CTO's worst fear, have you team scrambled, projects refused, go somewhere else taking on a bigger and harder challenge. Funny part is they lost 2 years, hired obedient lead, then went on building exactly what I presented them. They even went to the press claiming this stuff was their own idea. How would you feel ?

Yes, we hate meetings. We understand each other fast, work together at stellar speed, clash often. Sometimes, we code without tests. Bad practice ? Break my code.

Pionners and process people are at odds most of the time. Let's push this idea further.

Pionners are always despised by the tenants of current state of affairs. Bourdieu explained this very well regarding art. Why ? Process people have the power and spent most of their lives perfecting their current knowledge and craft. Inventing something disruptive will disrupt their power. Galileo, one example amongst a lot.

Even the most advanced people at their time have had theirs quirks around this fact. Maxwell predicted that his models had solved physics and that the few problems remaining (like Black-body radiation) were minor problems, where it led to relativity and a new revolution in physics.

Process people are made of habits that work well, ensuring intellectual comfort and easiness, which is very reassuring. We make you itch and scratch, because we live in never-ending uncertainty and know that theories are ephemeral in the grand scheme of things.

Some dogmas of biology have collapsed in recent time. One of the most funny was "brain cells don't divide after end of adult growth"...

This line of reasoning also invalidates a whole part of human theories about things. Fukuoka explained it very clearly: we draw pseudo-conclusions, only valid in a closed-system which in itself is a pale representation of reality. We try to reduce complexity to make it manageable by our current brain power. Those conclusions are wrong, when complexity is taken into account. Economics is based on wrong assumptions, but it works most of the time.

Knowing this leads to respect and not mess with fundamental building blocks we don't understand (gene editing is such a monstruosity).

Tell me about discomfort.

Pionners are risk-taking, and don't bother about controversies, they create those. They are despised and critisized by process people because they disrupt and destroy, as they create new paradigms. Destruction créatrice. They overthrow intellectual kings.

Speaking of experience, being a pionner is very difficult as everyone is against you and you got to prove to everyone that what you're doing is better and possible.

Let's digress about personal examples in order to settle those assumptions into reality.

When I was a kid I could solve the problems that math teacher gave using different methods. Most teachers would not even look at the method but rather blame it. They didn't want to make the intellectual effort to understand the stuff.

When I did my PhD I destroyed theories of some peers using experiments. Well, let me tell you, my academic career didn't last long.

When I worked in aerospace, during the day my boss yelled at me "shitty stuff", while copying my code in another codebase at night.

How can pionners bring value to this world ? It's as hard as producing metallic hydrogen. How to convince an investor when you always look at things from another POV. When the problem you're tackling is far from solved. Risk seems too high.

Let's rather focus on solving big corp problems and get easy money.

Funny thing is : we have an ability to connect to each other. A gang of weirdos trying to attack the doxa.

So, the problem is : can there be a collaboration between those two kind of people ? Here is a very fun example. Rust. This language brings to a large audience some very powerful concepts like ownership, truly a pioneering work. What do people do with that language ? Rewrite the same tools.

Problem with pionners is we cannot stand repetitive work. So after the thrill of finding a new solution is gone, we tackle some other problem. That's were we can build together as innovating is far from enough, and there is a lot of work left for process people, as told by aforementioned piece.

That's why I only work in small startups. Because once the group is too large, we are naturally surrounded by process people. Pionners are a small fraction of people. Once critical mass is reached, burden to leap forward is simply too high.

Don't get me wrong. Too many pioneers together is a bad mix too. Pionners have strong opinions and this may lead to frequent clash and incompatibilities. Process people all have the same processes, so there is less to argue about.

Following that line of reasoning, large organisations are just unable to produce breakthroughs. When processes take over, you're doomed.

So much respect for Elon Musk who has built crazy ventures that manages to break paradigms. That's a crazy achievement. Same holds for Steve Jobs, who could torture an org to squeeze new ideas.

But what's important ? Intellectual thrill or steady business ? Choose your horse !

> It is a drop-in replacement for PostgreSQL.

Well, that's a bold assumption as pg is speaking one of the richest sql dialects out there. And it also means it supports pg WAL protocol ?

The product is backed by solid research, so I suppose that there must be some powerful algorithms built-in, with a good coupling with hardware [1].

So the last question is how the code is made and tested, because good algorithms are not enough for a having a solid codebase. pg+(redis/memcached) is battle-tested.

Seems to use some common ideas with pg such as query jit compilation but mixes it with another approach.

> Umbra provides an efficient approach to user-defined functions.

possible in many languages using pg.

> Umbra features fully ACID-compliant transaction execution.

jepsen test maybe ?

Didn't harvest the clustering part neither.

[1] http://cidrdb.org/cidr2020/papers/p29-neumann-cidr20.pdf

During my last endeavour I had to make high-frequency (1kHz+) plot on the web. Tried literally everything. Only tech that stood out was (webGL + websockets), amazingly working with firefox (but not chrome). So the perf conclusions of the article stands.

My POV here was very cautious, as I didn't exclude programs which can be proved. The problem is that even if control flow is "provable", a lot of algorithms use number computations and is much harder to deal with from a formal POV :

"In cooperation with the University of Iowa and Rockwell Collins, this research focuses on the verification of safety properties on Lustre pro-grams. SAT or SMT, based verification approaches such as k-induction give good results on programs with a mostly discrete state space (boolean, bounded integers). However, when numerical computations are involved (real/float computations) the formalization of the property to be proved often needs to be strengthened using auxiliary lemmas to make it inductive with respect to the system’s transition relation. When attempted manually the discovery of such lemmas is time consuming and hinders the efficiency and scalability of formal verification. Automating lemma discovery hence appears crucial to allowing end-users to apply formal verification on industrial cases."

Taken from [0]

The seminars I attended to, from the creators of coq (a formal verification language), didn't disagree with this point of view. Of course, formal verification is not the only thing we can do [0].

In any case, what you propose seem interesting, if the halting problem was the only problem to solve to have a formally proven system.

[0] http://www.aerospacelab-journal.org/sites/www.aerospacelab-j...

In the era of "all digital", one must be very careful to make the future anew, not a copy of the past.

Our models of system are only a pale reproduction of how those systems work, rendering designs that are tuned by those "evil twins" bound by our current understanding of the system which can be lacking sometimes.

Nevertheless, in engineering, notably aerospace for example, those digital twins are crucial to make better parts, as thrusters for example, do not allow for continuous measurements of temperature (everything burns there).

It rendered hardware system design far more agile.

Yet the concepts to build a novel hardware is not encoded in this simulation.

Another example of "future is past, repeated" is machine learning. Carrying encoded stereotypes in predictions.

As we try to model everything with some notable failures, such as economy, let's just be aware of the limitations of those models.

Even if their disclosed reasoning seems a little light-headed, the consequences are real at a platform level, less acceleration means :

- lower max(amperage) to deliver for battery pack (lowered specs)

- longer-lasting battery pack at same energy capacity (strong accelerations consume lots of energy, and wear the battery)

- reduced weight (critical parameter for higher km/energy) :

  - lighter motor (reduced max torque)

  - lighter brakes (because of lower max speed)

  - ...

Low-tech solutions can sometimes be what people need. Solving the problem "go from point a to point b" in a safe, cost-efficient, and energy-efficient manner, is not a solved problem (yet).

In the automotive and aerospace world, of course tests in the real world cannot cover all cases (cost, time make it impossible).

Even most (not all, but almost none for meaningful applications) computer program cannot be proved to come to an halt [0], so complete testing is impossible by essence. We can only use more restrictive rules for programming but cannot formally guarantee anything.

As those systems are tied to the physical world, a whole lot of complexity is added by uncontrolled parameters.

Yet we love testing things. So a lot of techniques exist, such as SIL [1] and HIL [2].

So you could imagine using a real dashboard hooked up to a plane simulator. Which would enable testing the device in a wide array of conditions.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem [1] https://www.quora.com/What-is-Software-in-the-Loop-SIL [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware-in-the-loop_simulatio...

Indeed, regarding the KFC case, there are a lot of possible explanations, because the evidence doesn't allow to elaborate a certain conclusion.

Regarding inherited memories, this isn't common case, nevertheless it happened in the case of transplants [0] [1]

[0] https://blogs.unimelb.edu.au/sciencecommunication/2016/10/15...

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03069...

The old vision (brain = neurons => memories, rest of the body = organs which execute single or multiple functions, synchronized by the brain) is slowly fading away.

We have a lot of active neurons in the digestive system, which is in fact a second brain.

Same can be said for the heart which contains an autonomous neuronal system to control the cardiac function independently if need be.

Notions of distributed systems apply : redundancy, parallelism, coordinated autonomous systems, synchronization.

So why wouldn't memory storage be distributed too ?

Why wouldn't some memories stored in organs be retained after transplantation ?

Totally, the reality is : smell is masked and air is full of chemical components harmful to your health [0]. Our olfactory receptors are there to protect us. It should be noted that persons with bad perception of odors are closer to their end [1]. At least, use some natural products which may be dangerous, but for those, our body has had generations of evolution to tolerate those.

There is nothing like odour destruction. It's just tricking the nose into believing that another scent is around. Odours add in bizarre ways. If something smells bad, 1) open the window and 2) solve the root cause.

[0] https://www.considerable.com/home/cleaning-organizing/are-ai... [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3561743/

In that case RFID is used to keep track of how many times the linen was washed. This way, you'll never get premium linen/towel if you are in an eco room =]