bell-cot

15 points and 20 comments here yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50331340

In one sense, Knuth fans and really good engineers are correct to prioritize algorithms.

Unfortunately, most humans see big|new|expensive hardware as great status signifiers, barriers to lesser folks joining the Cool Club, and optimal sources of sales commissions.

Work in progress. Getting the "Impossible to Cancel" stuff right is surprisingly difficult.

Individual animals are individuals, even if they're just animals. Some can be pretty far from average. Try not to get too caught up in anthropomorphic interpretations, or generalize from n=1 tales from the Land Of +5 Sigma.

I'll guess they timed the announcement, to contrast with GM paying out 9 figures for selling consumer data - https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/10/gm-to-pay-220-million-a...

It'd be lovely if other automakers followed suit, but I wouldn't actually bet on Ford keeping its Promise.

It's been a few decades since I've been around academia, but at least back then the secret (if you needed scholarships) seemed to be looking for well-run Honors programs at universities which were otherwise a couple academic notches below your own level. That would also get you a lot more individual attention from professors who cared about students and teaching.

And clearly personalized letters of recommendation from prof's who actually knew you might count far more than the "John was an average student in my huge class" letters you could get at some university where you just squeaked in the door.

Is anyone familiar, to know if this game plan still works?

It's always interesting to see government insiders (elected officials, employees, whatever) act surprised and offended at Americans not trusting "their" government any more.

Yeah, the mom featured in the article should also double-check her son's abilities in spelling. And other subjects.

EDIT: Math grade inflation really ain't new. Back in the later 1980's, I taught a few lower-level math courses at (on paper) a major research university in Michigan. Rule of thumb was that every undergrad taking our "Algebra 101" course (of which there were thousands every year) had gotten through all 4 years of their high school's top-end math courses. With good grades. Hard reality was that any student who actually learned and retained 1 1/2 years of HS math could easily place out of the course. And there were still loads of students who still couldn't manage to get an easy "B-" when they took our hand-holding Algebra 101 course.

No, but it would suggest a couple things to people who actually care about the workers:

- DC's are just a crime scene du jour. As always, the real problem is governments failing to enforce rules about worker health & safety, payroll fraud, etc.

- The folks getting excited about worker exploitation at DC's are not fresh converts to any worker-protection cause, just potential allies du jour.

A city of 772 people having a police chief plus 5 police officers sounds like there was a problem long before the mayor questioned the police timesheets. Especially since Wikipedia says Milner is part of Metro Atlanta - so it ain't like they're responsible for 2000 square miles of Montana.

Anyone familiar, to comment? Not saying the mayor was in the right - but did the whole police force bail because tracking would quickly reveal systematic timesheet fraud?

Obvious question: Are workers reliably better off at non-datacenter job sites in Europe? My suspicion is "no" - but nobody much cares about the actual workers.

Read through the Thornton Thomasetti Forensic Report (linked above).

If the original builders had cared about the boring parts, then pre-WWII QC technology could easily have spotted the extremely shoddy workmanship in the zinc spelter sockets, while those were originally being fabricated.

Similar for designing larger safety margins into the whole cable system. Even PHB's can understand that "Hurricane Snaps Cables, Telescope Collapses" headlines could make them look really bad.

Yes-ish? Funding was far more plentiful when the telescope was being designed and built, and in its early decades. I know zero details about that era - but I strongly suspect it suffered from "just focus on the cool parts" syndrome. And if it'd been designed and built correctly, or the problem caught and corrected back then, it would very likely still be standing.

Which is not to say it'd still be receiving operational funding, nor that its potential scientific contributions would be particularly worthwhile.

I'd summarize it this way:

With competent engineering and construction, the (failed at Arecibo) zinc socket cable anchors can be very reliable. Unfortunately, Arecibo's engineering was so-so, and the construction quality was half-assed.

With annual inspections (by someone with a passable understanding of cable anchors) the problems at Arecibo could easily have been caught in time to correct. Unfortunately, Arecibo received no such inspections.

And this is roughly the pattern for most "sudden" failures of infrastructure.

If a vineyard is just a hobby for Mr Uber-Rich, who doesn't care about losing money, that argument makes sense. But the article devotes a whole lotta words to buying and operating vineyards as viable businesses. And I'm thinking the "losing money is fine" vineyards are a micro percentage of global wine production.

So - Is there a World Wine Control Commission that is forcing all growers to leave X% of their land idle, in order to avoid a supply glut? Or massive gov't subsidies that allow individual growers still make their mortgage payments and payroll expenses, when reducing their vineyard's production by (say) 50% also reduced their vineyard's gross income by 50%?

> The end came in an announcement as stark as it was brief: they had seven hours to get off. They were going no further than Cambodia.

> The Odyssey, owned by Florida-based Villa Vie Residences, had first set sail from Belfast, Northern Ireland, in October 2024 with an explicit offer: Donald Trump had been re-elected to the White House, and this was a way for those ill-disposed to the president to enjoy a four-year “skip forward”.

> For $319,998, a couple seeking such an escape could head off to the high seas for the length of a presidential term and come back from their journey to nowhere when the danger had passed – or not. For those who had simply had enough, there was a permanent residency option for a few hundred thousand more.

> At 642ft (196 metres) long, it was a relatively small ship, but at such prices, and with the world being held firmly at bay, what could go wrong? Neither the more than 200 passengers on the Odyssey nor its cruise operator foresaw the consequences of Trump’s war in Iran. The reality was, there was no escaping the US president.

> On Tuesday, Villa Vie Residences issued a statement. It had run out of money owing to the soaring price of oil. Monthly fuel costs per cabin in parts of Asia had risen to as much as $8,000 from $1,800, placing it “under unsustainable financial pressure”, it announced.

The price of oil hasn't been stable since about 1973. Look at the top graph here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_oil_embargo. Also, blaming Trump is a shit excuse - the whole premise of their sales pitch was that his second term would be a disaster. If you're an honest, competent seller of 4-year cruises - there are things like oil price futures contracts you could use, to make sure that you could deliver on your sales pitch. Vs. going broke before you've even made it half way.

Vs. the mastermind behind the whole mess seems to admit that he was selling a boatload of make-believe from day 1:

> Speaking earlier in the week, Mikael Petterson, who launched Villa Vie Residences in 2023, accepted that he was the “villain in the story” but said he was doing everything he could to help the stranded passengers. “Nobody that’s tried residential cruising has succeeded and we have gone further than anyone else,” he said. “But I think we would have been absolutely fine and we would have seen this through, if there was no Iran war.”

> James and Catherine Kinglake fulfilled every wine lover’s dream when they bought a 72-hectare (178-acre) winery near Limoux, France. Situated in the Languedoc region with views of the Pyrénées, Domaine Begude has over 25 hectares of vines.

So less than 40% of their winery's acreage is actually vine.

The one other winery for which the article gives numbers has a similar percentage.

Any here familiar, to comment on why so much expensive land is being left idle?

Or, as Upton Sinclair noted, what a man can understand is closely aligned with his current self-interest.

I'm talking about the Elbonian gov't subsidizing some local guy (named Elbon Muds?) to build a rocket company from the ground up in Elbonia - same as Elon Musk did in the U.S. America has nothing resembling a monopoly on rocket tech.

General case, it's not that simple. Say there's another train a mile ahead of you...but it's on a siding. To compute the effective distance, you'll need to know the positions of the switches connecting the main line to that siding. And switch positions can change far faster than you can stop, even if the other train doesn't move.

I'd interpret the "minus first N per year" to mean that you get a few "free" fires per year - but after that your habits filling your closets with oily rags, overloading electrical extension cords, and smoking in bed will start to cost you.

I'd suggest reading https://github.com/php/php-src/blob/master/php.ini-productio..., then doing a web search for "editing php.ini for maximum security".

Maybe compare with https://github.com/php/php-src/blob/master/php.ini-developme..., too.

Then similar for your web server (Apache, nginx, whatever).

EDIT: About your "would've seemed adequate before this" - I dug up a copy of a PHP v5.2 php.ini file (2-ish decades ago). That file begins thus:

   ;;;;;;;;;;;
   ; WARNING ;
   ;;;;;;;;;;;
   ; This is the default settings file for new PHP installations.
   ; By default, PHP installs itself with a configuration suitable for
   ; development purposes, and *NOT* for production purposes.
   ; For several security-oriented considerations that should be taken
   ; before going online with your site, please consult php.ini-recommended
   ; and http://php.net/manual/en/security.php.

Unless it was darn small and fluffy, it seems like the object's gravitational influence would have been noticed long before now.

Might there be an astronomer in the house, to comment?

True-ish? If your firewall's admin page is internet-accessible, you have no excuse for not doing "bolted to bedrock" lockdowns of your web server config and your PHP config. Either of which could have blocked exploitation of the PHP vuln.

The elephant in this room is that Elon and SpaceX seem unique in their ability to actually deliver reliable launch capacity at scale. Their detractors may complain all day about gov't subsidies they've receive, and how they've cheated their way into space, and how evil they are - but back in hard reality, two dozen or more countries would happily pay 3X all the subsidies which Elon and SpaceX have received to a local space company, if the result was a launch provider with even a quarter of SpaceX's capabilities.

Has there been any serious public discussion of this issue? I'd assume it's been studied extensively in Beijing, talked a fair bit about in Washington, and reluctantly kicked around in the ESA's HQ.

Yep. And, insult to injury, the /4's and /8's of little-unused IPv4 special-use addresses - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipv4#Special-use_addresses

Outside of high-frequency trading and real-time control, where is speed a serious design priority for modern end-user-facing software?

You are thinking long-term. In the late-stage capitalist taxonomy, long term is a subspecies of lip service.

How on earth do they...

They are the 900# gorilla, and the screams of the smallfolk have no effect on their bottom line.

If that was how they treated top performers, I'd hope you had quite a bit of company on the way out.

If you're unfamiliar, there is a lot of historical context around Pascal's Wager -

Unless you live in a brutal theocracy, it's difficult to describe just how powerful institutionalized Christianity was at the time. Likewise the scale of religion-themed violence. A couple generations before Pascal's birth (in France), the Catholic-vs.-Protestant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Wars_of_Religion had kill off something between 10% and 25% of the population of France.

Pascal's own religious beliefs changed several times - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaise_Pascal#Religious_conver...

The Wager was published after Pascal's death, in an edited collection of his notes - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pens%C3%A9es

In many ways, I'd interpret the Wager as saying "if professing quiet belief in the current local orthodoxy is relatively cheap, and those not doing so are occasionally slaughtered at scale, then prudent people will parrot orthodoxy".