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Re:Scam American companies are using to manipulate ingredient lists
on Saturday October 10, 2026 @12:16AM (#50029503)
Polyester ~$1000/MT, wool ~$15,000/MT. Polyester is cheap, barely more than it's feedstocks.
Re:Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data ...
on Friday January 30, 2026 @03:48PM (#46829665)
Considering the capital costs in fitting out these datacenters, the land being 10x more expensive doesn't move the needle much on total cost.
Re:ICC ditches Microsoft 365 for openDesk
on Thursday November 06, 2025 @03:22PM (#45839929)
They can try, but presumably as a tiny shareholder you would tell them to go f themselves. Subsidiaries don't have that luxury.
Re:Today is when the Amazon brain drain sent AWS down the spout
on Thursday October 23, 2025 @09:38AM (#45681680)
I know this thread is dead, but I should have elaborated. The quality of the individual worker is as good or better with an illegal immigrant, but it's a legal nightmare. If you pay decent wages and have decent working conditions, you don't have to get into that shadiness. There's a reason awful jobs, e.g. roofing, are filled with hard working illegal immigrants and meth heads.
Re:Today is when the Amazon brain drain sent AWS down the spout
on Monday October 20, 2025 @08:25PM (#45651073)
I assume the parent was being hyperbolic. Illegal immigrants is the barrel scraping bottom of the work force.
Re:Dutch government takes control of Chinese-owned chipmaker Nexperia
on Tuesday October 14, 2025 @04:09PM (#45584187)
Defacto dictatorship now, but even when there were elections he wasn't exactly popular. In the 2015 parliamentary elections (2 members per district) he actually placed second behind another member of his own party. He became popular during the 2018 crisis then kept proving to be inept.
Re:Two things LLM coding agents are still bad at
on Thursday October 09, 2025 @11:20AM (#45528937)
I really really hate code review now. My colleagues will have their LLMs generate thousands of lines of boiler plate with every pattern and abstraction under the sun. A lazy programmer use to do the bare minimum and write not enough code. That made review easy. Error handling here, duplicate code there, descriptive naming here, and so on. Now a lazy programmer generates a crap load of code cribbed from "best practice" tutorials, much of it unnecessary and irrelevant for the actual task at hand.
Re:Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears
on Thursday August 21, 2025 @10:22AM (#44973169)
Patrick Boyle on youtube has a good explanation of what's going on in the industry: https://youtu.be/3ef5IPpncsg?feature=shared
tl;dw: some of it is anti-trust avoidance and some of it is knee-capping competitors.
Re:The Value of Institutional Memory
on Monday August 11, 2025 @08:09PM (#44870904)
I am currently on a team of consultants. Ironically, most of us have more institutional knowledge than the client due to internal churn. Seems like every few years they try to cut our utilization in favor of some off-shore company that's "cheaper", the project blows up, then we have to jump in and save some middle manager's job.
Re:Apollo 13 Commander Jim Lovell has passed away
on Friday August 08, 2025 @08:02PM (#44842928)
The movie was released 25 years after the incident. It has been 30 years since the movie was released.
Re:A grand tour through the essays of Lewis H. Lapham
on Tuesday July 29, 2025 @08:50PM (#44729930)
Somehow I missed his passing last year. Harper's was very important to me as a teenager stuck in the cultural wasteland of suburbia. Smart, critical, and often funny, it showed me writing didn't have to suck.
I was trying to come up with a descriptor when I found an obit: "Lewis was the last of a breed that never had many members to begin with: the patrician liberal."
https://www.newstatesman.com/appreciation/2024/07/lewis-laph...
Re:Tour de France confronts a new threat: Are cyclists using tiny motors?
on Monday July 28, 2025 @08:51PM (#44717704)
Theoretically, the motor would be most useful on the climbs of the mountain stages. On the flats a couple of hundred grams don't matter, especially when most of the leaders are hanging back in the group anyway.
That said, bikes can already be made under UCI weight minimums of 6.8kg. Yet from what I've seen, most tour bikes are in the 7-7.5kg range.
Re:Tour de France confronts a new threat: Are cyclists using tiny motors?
on Monday July 28, 2025 @08:37PM (#44717626)
I replied directly to OP, but applies here as well. Cycling is far more specialized than other sports so the pay off for doping is greater.
Re:Tour de France confronts a new threat: Are cyclists using tiny motors?
on Monday July 28, 2025 @08:35PM (#44717608)
Road cycling is a sport of extreme hyper specialization. Skill is much less of a factor than dedication, training, nutrition and genetics. Increasing VO2max by 5% isn't going to make you Messi, but it can put you on a tour podium.
Re:Trip to moon required Apollo 11 crew to sign US Customs declaration...
on Wednesday July 23, 2025 @01:55PM (#44662043)
"Juan Carlos Juarez, the town's mayor, said at the time: "They landed on our coast to confront a supposed enemy with typical commando tactics. But we managed to hold them on the beach.""
I would not have been able to get this out without giggling.
Re:Ask HN: What's with the repeated job posts on "Who's hiring"?
on Tuesday June 03, 2025 @04:49PM (#44174573)
I see a lot of unicorn job postings here and elsewhere. Bunch of companies here in the midwest are looking for 5 years experience in AI pipeline engineering. Those people exist, sorta*, but they aren't taking $60/hr contract gigs from bureaucratic hellscape Acme Corp types. Likewise, I see a lot of startups led by technical hustler types (more power to them) who would never pass their own hiring expectations. Your CTO is a webdev with 6 months prompt engineering. Why would an actual expert agree to work for them?
*unclear if experience from 5 years ago is relevant to current practice.
Re:Did "Big Oil" Sell Us on a Recycling Scam?
on Tuesday June 03, 2025 @03:44PM (#44173860)
Calling it "precious" is just a bit too on the nose. That looks more like an art project than an actual solution. One of their shredders working 24/365 can get through <500 tons. In 2018, US generated 35.6 million tons of plastic. Industrial problems require industrial (or legislative) solutions.
Re:A simple search engine from scratch
on Tuesday May 20, 2025 @10:11AM (#44041905)
LN and Westlaw's real service is their ubiquity. Every law student has access to it and every firm expects proficiency. While they generally suck, the last time I used it (looong time ago), their boolean search was quite nice. That kind of text search has mostly been replaced by non-deterministic black boxes which aren't great for legal research.
Re:From: Steve Jobs. "Great idea, thank you."
on Thursday May 08, 2025 @09:03PM (#43932885)
I'm in my 40s so bit of a grey beard now, but I worked with the real grey beards at University of Michigan. Something like 75k active staff and students, and more than 600k living alumni, yet their email addresses were like [email protected]. Setting up the first campus email server came with privileges.
Re:The Inchtuthil Nail Hoard
on Tuesday May 06, 2025 @04:17PM (#43909208)
I had the same thought, but in a different direction. They ended up just recycling most of these 800,000 nails. Seems like today this would be worth a couple million as souvenirs.
Re:The narrowest escalator in New York City
on Tuesday April 08, 2025 @03:14PM (#43625480)
Woah. The first comment gave me a wave of nostalgia I couldn't place. This must have been it. Couldn't have been older than 4 or 5 last time I was in G Fox.
Re:Do you need permission from the government to do independent research?
on Thursday February 13, 2025 @03:13PM (#43040706)
Also, a great deal of the research organizations like META "just do" wouldn't pass muster with any IRB worth the name.
Re:Why Firing Programmers for AI Will Destroy Everything
on Tuesday February 11, 2025 @01:20PM (#43016200)
Google Maps has some strange feedback loops. I frequently drive across the Bay Bridge to Delaware beaches. There are 2 or 3 roughly equal routes with everyone going to the same destination. Google will find a "shorter" route every 5 minutes. Naturally, Maps is smart enough to detect traffic, but not smart enough to equally distribute users to prevent it. It creates a traffic jam on route A, then tells all the users to use route B which causes a jam there, and so on.
Re:20k federal workers take "buyout" so far, official says
on Wednesday February 05, 2025 @04:18PM (#42955295)
The problem is that the new regime appears to be more interested in amputation than footwear for most of these depts/agencies. Those less committed to their mission of walking and running will leave. Those left behind will be the more intransigent veteran operators, "somebody has to keep everyone's feet attached".
Re:20k federal workers take "buyout" so far, official says
on Wednesday February 05, 2025 @04:01PM (#42955059)
A lot of federal workers spend their time overseeing projects run by the private sector. Whether or not those projects are worth doing, funds have been appropriated and the private sector will get their day in court and get their funding. Now with no oversight from some useless bureaucrat (our project manager defending our interests).
Re:20k federal workers take "buyout" so far, official says
on Wednesday February 05, 2025 @03:52PM (#42954939)
I'm skeptical. Most of these federal jobs either marginally improve millions of lives or are completely critical for 10k Americans. The former is so spread out it will be hard to connect the dots; chronic stress of wondering why is everything sus these days. The latter mostly serves the already disenfranchised, e.g. adult daycare cuts.
Re:20k federal workers take "buyout" so far, official says
on Wednesday February 05, 2025 @03:34PM (#42954710)
patco was also a powerful union. Trump has already declared he will nullify the AFGE contract (legality be damned).
Re:I trusted an LLM, now I'm on day 4 of an afternoon project
on Monday January 27, 2025 @06:40PM (#42847167)
Once it gives me the names for the concepts I'm struggling with, I often end up finding the stackoverflow or documentation it's copy pasting.
Re:Are we becoming a post-literate society?
on Friday December 27, 2024 @06:39PM (#42527106)
An old literature teacher tried to instill in us that we hadn't read until we had responded in writing.
Re:Are we becoming a post-literate society?
on Friday December 27, 2024 @06:37PM (#42527094)
The written word offers a precision not found in many other media.