nanidin

My response did not intend to address the NSA, it was intended to address the "state driver license in USA is a honey pot" since in my experience states do not collect fingerprints for driver licenses. Based on some cursory research there are only a small handful of states that require fingerprints, and fingerprints are not required for implementation of Real ID.

I also want to add that I took some time off earlier in my career as well. During that time off I spent a year traveling around Asia, then I tried to create a startup. I was hungrier at the time due to being a lot less established and due to having a clear runway that defined when I would need to have a job in order to be self sustaining. I returned to work with a 50% increase in compensation after that break.

I left my job in February 2021 due to being overstressed and eventually burning out. I was in a role where I was essentially on call 24/7, with the only calls actually coming in at early AM hours on holidays. This made it impossible for me to relax during time off, which contributed to the burnout. Around the same time, my SO was finishing cancer treatment, so work stress was not the only stress I was dealing with.

I left with the stated goals of working on personal projects and of going on a road trip to national parks. I have now been on two significant road trips - one about 10 days, and the next about 35 days.

As far as projects go, I have created a few toys that scratched itches - a pi calculator, a sudoku solver, and a market data collector/analyzer. I also worked on establishing some passive income during this time.

I'm now working as a consultant in the same industry I was working in previously. I'm not sure yet when I will return to full time employment. My plan is to definitely find a job before the COBRA insurance coverage expires (October 2022 I believe.)

My advice to anyone planning to take time off is to have some idea of what you want to do. Don't end up quitting your job thinking all of the free time off will be great, then sit around and do nothing for months on end - at the time it may feel great, but after those months go by it's nice to be able to look back and see that you did something. You don't have to be productive, but at least get out of bed, have a routine, and do something besides sit around. To that end, I recommend journaling.

I also recommend that if you're going to quit and you like your job but just need some extended time off - talk with your manager! Mine wasn't very agreeable to a sabbatical on the timeframe I wanted, but my SO was able to secure 6 months of PAID time off just by talking to her manager about what was going on with her and her plans to leave (keep in mind her case may be unique due to cancer and working for the company for 8+ years).

> State driver license in USA

In which states? The only thing I have been fingerprinted for is in the US is The Global Entry program.

I whip out my phone, pull up Sky Guide, then point it at the star in question. Around here depending on the time of the year it's typically Jupiter, Mars, Venus, or Sirius.

My former company enacted a paternal leave policy around the time MSFT required suppliers/partners to offer them in order to continue doing business with MSFT.

Shortly after I became the manager of my team, one of my reports informed me that he wanted to use 3-4 weeks of paternal leave (out of a max of 6) a few months after the birth of his child (company policy allowed it within 12 months.) He said he'd keep his laptop nearby in case of emergencies. "You're crazy!" I told him, "take the full 6 weeks! And leave the laptop off!"

As a manager, if it's the company policy, then it's the employee's right to take the time off. There should be no amount of brow-beating (assuming sufficient advance notice, of course.) I checked in with HR for procedural details, and overall it was easy/painless from top to bottom.

16 year old me bypassed this and all other monitoring by running a patch cable from the cable modem directly to my machine when up to shenanigans.

My $0.02, but it seems like the moderation team (dang in particular) has been less active over the last 24 hours.

Usually there are reminders in large threads to click the "more" button to see all comments, but there was no such comment on the huge "Facebook-owned sites were down" post yesterday. They usually also merge duplicates and add top level comments with links to the other conversations taking place on the same topic.

The moderation team usually does a lot to reign in problem behavior, but there seems to have been a lot questionable comments making it through lately.

I have also noticed a lot of comments by users with "throwaway" in their usernames - seems like a shift in who is using HN and how they are using it.

I have also found Siri’s voice recognition for shopping list items lackluster, especially compared to Alexa. I’m guessing it has to do with Amazon having a better model of actual subjects/products due to having a storefront with said items.

It’s really bad when I’m at the store looking at something in my list scratching my head over what “Silicon Matt to sit rock song” is supposed to be without any way to hear what was actually said or give feedback that what Siri did was wrong.

I don’t use gmail, but I have also been getting some obvious spam through my filters as well - usually nothing makes it to my actual inbox, but lately there have been 5-6 per day.

I use a Bayesian filter trained on old spam (I haven’t retrained it in years) combined with Spamhaus blocklists. My guess is that spammers found a clever way to fool the Bayesian filter, or they found new hosts to send email from in order to bypass blacklists.

Yep - it seems we're getting deep into "73.6% of statistics are made up on the spot" territory no matter which source we choose :) Which then raises the question - why did the author of the tweet choose 10 million?

> There is precisely zero actual use for it beyond that

I was staying in a hotel in Nepal around 10 years ago. I was sharing a room with someone I met. I paid the hotel, and my roommate paid me in bitcoin. It was pretty convenient considering my home currency is USD, his was EUR, and the local currency was rupees.

Anyway, as far as I'm aware there wasn't any cybercrime taking place that day :)

Agreed! Also consider that the first result is only meant to represent bitcoin owners in a country that makes up 4.6% of the world population.

I'm not saying either way (as this wasn't specified in the tweet either) - just pointing out the huge discrepancy between easily accessible statistics and the story the author of the tweet is trying to tell. There is a huge assumption being made (10 million people hold bitcoin) and zero justification for that assumption.

The tweet makes an assumption that there are 10 million people holding bitcoin, and the tweet goes on to imply that this is actually an overestimate.

The first google result for "how many people hold bitcoins" says that an estimated 46 million Americans own bitcoin. The huge inaccuracy shows the author's bias and kills the credibility of the rest of the thread.

> You put years in effort and then someone steals a significant part of your revenue

This seems a bit disingenuous. A more accurate take might be that you sign up for the Apple developer program, and in doing so agree to the terms of service including the cut that Apple will take from each sale. Then you begin working on the app, then you release the app, then Apple keeps the cut that was contractually agreed upon. There is no stealing, and anyone that puts in years of effort into an app is surely aware of the cut Apple takes before making that effort.

Another downside to wearing at night and charging during the day - automatic updates don't happen automatically.

> Also, the watch presumably can't tell how fast the ball is served, which depends on the racquet speed and whether you make good contact with the ball.

I think I disagree here. It should be possible to build a model that infers things like racquet speed and where the ball made contact with the racquet based on accelerometer data. At the end of the day you have an arm attached to a racket moving at some speed, that impacts a ball that is relatively not moving.

A straightforward model could calculate the lost momentum in the arm + racquet, assume the ball's mass, and work backwards to the ball's velocity from there. I'm assuming there is more ML magic behind Apple's implementation though.

It is worth noting that the linked $8500 repair anecdote took place over 5 years ago. Are there more recent examples, or did the situation improve?

> Also, you can't work for the feds if you ever touch the ganja, which is ridiculous

I believe it is possible to get security clearance after cessation of drugs for multiple years, even drugs like Heroin. I found the full rules[0] while reading an AMA on /r/SecurityClearance.

[0] https://www.dni.gov/files/NCSC/documents/Regulations/SEAD-4-...

My understanding of Mean World Syndrome was that it is related to what gets shown in the news. The news media get more eyeballs and engagement when they focus on bad things happening in a community. This can lead people to believe that only bad things are happening, or that more bad things are happening than before.

The book Factfulness makes a pretty good case that people generally think the world is falling apart but that objectively the world is currently in better shape than any other period of history.

As far as a controlled experiment - this is anecdotal, but I tend to feel less safe outside at night if I have been spending more time inside watching the news or consuming social media. I tend to feel more safe outside at night when I have been spending time disconnected from those trying to tell me how the world is.

Google Authenticator has a feature to allow export of all saved codes into one QR code for re-import into Google Authenticator running on another device. I printed a copy of my export QR code for use in case my device is lost or stolen.

Proof of stake changes the game and raises the bar for entry. It essentially creates a "rich get richer" scenario where the only way to increase the amount of coin you have is to either already have enough to participate in proof of stake, or to buy the coin from someone else. In that light, I wouldn't necessarily say that proof of stake is clearly better than proof of work.

As an example, the proposed proof of stake mechanism for Ethereum requires 32 ETH, which is around $100k USD today. So established parties with capital will be able to stake, but your average person will not. I'm not sure I like that aspect of it.

> Estimates on Bitcoin energy usage put it at over 1TW now. I believe it was comparable to the energy consumption of Argentina.

I'm not sure this factoid is germane to GPU shortages, since no one is using GPU's to mine bitcoin these days.

It would be more relevant to cite the energy usage of Ethereum or Dogecoin.

I'm suggesting them as a way to give people longer breaks from work than can be afforded on 3-5 weeks of annual PTO, as a way for a business to retain talent that would otherwise leave.

Offering sabbaticals and maintaining good work life balance are not mutually exclusive. We should be able to have both.

I quit my job in February in part because my employer would not offer me a sabbatical. Had they offered me a sabbatical, I would likely be returning to work around now. The business would benefit from my seniority and established relationships within the company. Instead I'm out here finding new ways of making money and supporting myself - which is good for me perhaps, but not good for the business that I left.

Have you tried talking about this with your manager? Jumping straight to FMLA is making a lot of assumptions about the company and what they might be willing to do to retain you.

As an example: my SO was dealing with a lot of stress due to health reasons and tried to use FMLA. Her company let her do the paperwork, but ultimately let her take off 3 weeks of paid leave that didn’t count against her PTO. That gave her some room to breathe, but she started crashing again a few months later and tried to hand in her resignation. Welp. Her company is now giving her 6 months of paid leave with no hard obligation to return to work, just a request to be courteous and let them know if she’s not coming back so they can stop paying her.

If the first time that your manager is hearing about your situation is also your request to start taking FMLA immediately or else resign, your manager isn't going to be able to do much for you (and probably won't want to either, given the tough situation you will be putting them in on short notice.)

IMO our industry should really start considering sabbaticals as the next standardized perk. I think they would do a lot to prevent burnout and retain top performers.

Well, one purpose of defragging a drive was to put data from the same file in one place in order to reduce random seeks while reading sequential data. One would defrag in order to increase performance in this regard.

On an SSD, the random seek time is much lower. There may be some gains from sequential reads, but the gains from having data physically defragmented are not as stated as with spinning media.

Wasn’t defragmentation more important in general on spinning media to reduce random seeks? And now most performance oriented things are happening on SSD?

Aha, so the contiguity of the actual memory pages must not be what is used for prefetching by the MMU, instead it is the contiguity of the virtual address space?

I was thrown for a bit of a loop working through virtual vs actual memory addresses and how this works under the hood, but it makes more sense now. In that case then virtual_vec would be better than std::deque in terms of iterating over the contained data in order.

Is there any benefit to using virtual_vec as opposed to a std::deque then? It guarantees constant time pushes to the back and constant time random element access via operator[][0].

I think the case for std::vector::reserve() is when you know you are about to add N elements via push_back(), you call reserve() with the appropriate size to ensure there is only one reallocation caused by that addition of N elements.

[0] https://www.cplusplus.com/reference/deque/deque/operator[]/