zug_zug

I feel like this article is a bit too confident for the evidence provided.

I recall going to a Steven Levitt speech (Freakonomics) speech where he was talking about looking into what miraculous star teachers were doing to educate their students who scored incredibly well on standardized tests.

Turns out those teachers were cheating -- which they figured out when they saw the tests and they were covered in eraser marks (the teachers simply erased the wrong answers before handing them in!)

I'm not saying that cheating is necessarily happening state-wide here, but when you do create an incentive for teachers to cheat without any oversight, and an incentive for principals and districts to not notice.

Now its possible the teaching methods and incentives help too, that should be looked in to, but I don't think this is concluded until replicated.

[He estimated that a few percent of classroom may cheat in a high-stakes testing environment]

> Even when you don’t agree with decisions the company leadership is making, part of your job is representing and facilitating those decisions with full alignment.

No, not for a staff engineer. You keep your mouth shut in the #general channel when something crazy is said, or you ask a single question in a thread when you don't understand at all.

The sound of a dozen people not clapping is the perfect rebuke to management mistakes.

Absolutely. Especially when those election deniers become insurrectionists.

We are usually skeptical. And I don't know why a weird ad for a smart-knife has gotten to the top-page of HN.

We don't like "buzz" and "hype"... if it's truly a great technology we can buy one a year from now. Not trusting a commercial to be honest isn't undue skepticism.

Well said.

So the issue with that tomato cutting test was that it was terrible form.

You obviously don't apply flat pressure on a tomato until it breaks, you slice it by sliding the blade forward as you push down. It's unclear to me that this blade offers any improvement over proper technique, and feels disingenuous to even offer that comparison.

Yes the 90s and 00s were rough for js, especially because of where JS and browsers were at, and also our collective knowledge.

However also it was much nicer in many ways -- we weren't trying to make insane single-page-apps like today.

The irony is that we have all of these powerful frameworks, but somehow they seem to mostly make worse/slower websites than this silly 0-javascript orange site we're on right now.

I understand this may look dismissive or blamey, but sometimes (actually a shocking amount) there aren’t equal merits to both sides…

I’ve looked into this a lot and there isn’t any strong argument I’ve seen that this is good for humanity, and let’s not pretend every political action is a sincere attempt to improve the world for all equally.

If you look into all the abuse heaped upon the man who discovered leaded gasoline was bad it helps give context on just how far some people will go for their own profits.

But even "genetics" isn't really a single cause because it's over 200 different genes that each have an effect.

The other thing you're leaving out is that Charlie Kirk was actively provoking people with outrageous takes, perhaps as a social media strategy.

It doesn't justify death, but it certainly makes it less surprising and more understandable.

Imagine if a democrat went into the deep south and said "The confederacy was a stupid joke you should be ashamed of, it only existed for 4 years, get rid of the flag already." etc etc and posted it to social media while talking over people trying to engage in debate.

Then that would be an apples-to-apples comparison. Not an elected representative.

In March 2023, around the time of Donald Trump’s indictment, Kirk said conservatives are being provoked into violence, and said “we must make them pay a price and a penalty” by indicting Democrats.

There are claims from media/reporters that Kirk made statements about “dealing with” transgender people “like in the ’50s & ’60s,”

Also the famous and now ironic comment that "Some gun deaths are worth it to protect the second amendment."

Who's inflammatory now?

There may be no systematic way to draw the line between dangerous opinions that need to be silenced and those that do not. There may be many people who draw that line incorrectly.

But that doesn't mean there is no such line. Almost everybody agrees there should be some cost to expressing highly dangerous views -- where we disagree is what that cost needs to be for a given view (reputational, financial, capital).

I mean this is well-intentioned, but with all career advice I've seen it's mostly a bunch of hocus-pocus.

For example maybe your company gets bought by private equity and 0 people get promoted for years on end.

Or maybe you have a speech impediment and you never get promoted beyond a certain point.

The only career advice is - if you want to get promoted understand the motivations of those who can promote and try to make it in their self-interest to promote you.

Logs can represent point in time, or spans, or anything you choose. Logs can have the span-id attached to them (and normally should), so they are hierarchical.

In short, logs can do everything spans can do, depending on how you use them. So really there isn't much distinction.

I'd say that spans and logs are about 95% similar, whereas metrics are wildly dissimilar to both.

Most tools would be be better if they treated spans and logs as two nearly-identical things:

- logs should be viewable in a hierarchy if they have a span id associated - spans should be queryable and countable and alarmable and dashboardable with the same tools as logs

That doesn’t really make sense… essentially the choice to do this isn’t in the hands of any nation, rather any business in the nation could try to do this and the government has no real way to know.

You could try to raise tariffs on a whole country because one company in that country was falsifying country of origin… but it’s inevitable

Well I agree except in theory the board should want to force authenticity on all executives and directors and such. Fakers and cheats who lie about their results and hide behind manipulated metrics are a big threat to the board’s profitability

True. I think I’m emphasizing their similarities because what I’m seeing is companies treating them as unrelated (eg splunk and signalfx making entirely different query languages and visualization tools for logs vs spans)

Imo spans and logs should be understood as the same and displayed and queried the same (it’s trivial to add span id to each log), it almost feels like people are trying to make something trivially simple seem more substantial or complex

This is sort of all just a reframing of existing technologies.

Span = an event (which is bascially just a log with an associated trace), and some data fields. Trace = a log for a request with a unique Id.

A useful thing about opentelemetry is that there's auto-instrumentation so you can get this all out-of-the-box for most JVM apps. Of course you could probably log your queries instead, so it's not necessarily a game-changer but a nice-to-have.

Also the standardization is nice.

Weird to have a bit of a window into the cryptic world of directorial promotions. Sounds like it’s mostly about self promotion sadly and perhaps unsurprisingly.

Make it less event-orchestrated and use a db. It’s just a social network for recruiters it’s not as complicated as they like to pretend.

You don’t need push, it’s just a performance optimization that almost never justifies using a whole new tool.

My only complaint with this article is that it seems to be implying kafka that linkedIn's problem couldn't have been solved with a bunch of off-the-shelf tools.

Maybe just take away that protection? Where I live nobody is losing a house for having the wrong color mailbox, but there are certain historical protected areas where beauty is an externality — you can’t demolish a historic house in the middle of the beautiful downtown

My point is that it's part of the standard basket and the rate they allegedly calculated for its growth didn't match up to lived experience.

I can't speak to this, but I suspect something is afoot.

I know my mom went to a university that she paid for with a part-time job while a student. Currently that university's tuition is 80,000 a year. When I looked at what inflation figures said for college education, it wasn't enough to account for that 10x+ increase.

Really? I saw news about it just today.

It's never dropped of my news, from him moving Maxwell to a minimum security prison, to questions about whether he'll pardon her, to the signed letter with illustrations he wrote for Epstein's birthday.

I don't think the world will ever forget, certainly my social circles and social media are still buzzing with it.

In many ways it's more damning than watergate, though people are debating whether to call it Epsteingate or Pedogate.

He'll do anything to distract from epstein.

Wow, after reading the various pages on this link for ~20m+ I have to agree this is one of the best resources I've ever encountered.

These charts show that the outdoor exercise is better than twice as good as indoors in several respects.

Yeah I think I've read multiple PG essays on the importance of writing, but they always struck me as no different than Katy Perry telling you to sing, or some Grandmaster saying "go play chess." That is -- a personal anecdote that doesn't necessarily generalize.

I'm not saying that writing can't be a useful tool to organize ideas, definitely it can. But I think I've found two things:

- Now the best way to "iterate" my thoughts is to rubberduck with ChatGPT; it's really amazing how much faster I can learn when I admit how little I know, even on something like global warming or an advanced math topic.

- By and large, "organizing my thoughts" isn't really a high-return activity in my life. Having an intelligently written blog that I've put hundreds of hours into has never done anything for my career or led to any personal connections, and honestly who's to say my time wouldn't have been better-spent just coming with some jokes to network better rather than having some cohesive theory of everything that nobody asked for?

My comcast story is I have xfinity, and at some point the rate went from 80 to 120, and I called them on the phone about it, and they said "I've sent you a new user-agreement where if you agree and sign up on this link it's only $80 again. I read the link it basically said you they can 'share' my browsing data with 'partners' and such".

Really offended me on principle, but not $40 a month level offended, so I signed it.

I see a lot of people say "writing is so important," and I think what they mean is "I feel really smart/good when I write." And I think what they are experiencing is that they've been assembling ideas in their heads for weeks, and only when it's all come together are they ready synthesize that information at a higher level, and they mistake this synthesis for the writing itself (rather than the writing being a symptom OF the synthesis -- if they had tried to write a week prior they would have found it unproductive).