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Period: 2024-11-17 18:37 - 2024-11-24 18:39 📚 All Digests

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  • New comment by NAHWheatCracker in "How to give a senior leader feedback without getting fired"
  • Content:

    I agree with you that's how it should be, but experience tells me that everyone is insecure and it's hardly correlated with position and job security.

    People lower down the chain are insecure because they could legitimately be let go at any time for any reason.

    People higher up the chain are insecure because any loss of face is debilitating. Especially having failings pointed out by someone "below" them.


  • New comment by lijok in "How to give a senior leader feedback without getting fired"
  • Content:

    Astonishing. Completely backwards. This article describes how to give feedback to your subordinates, not to your superiors. If your superiors are unable to process no-fluff information, regardless of whether it's feedback or updates, they have no business lording over anyone and will sink whatever function they have oversight of. If you find yourself working under such people, don't bother giving feedback, start polishing your resume.

    The reason you fluff up feedback to your subordinates is because lower down the chain they tend to be insecure and don't yet have the experience to distinguish between actionable impartial feedback, and threats to their job security.

    The reason you don't fluff feedback, or any information for that matter to your superiors, is described in basically every handbook on highly effective communication in organizations.


  • New comment by gary_0 in "The tech utopia fantasy is over"
  • Content:

    In retrospect it was extremely arrogant of us 90's nerds to think that the bullies and autocrats and sleazebags of the world were too stupid to figure out how to use the Internet to their own ends, and overwhelm the incumbent minority. Once you could use a sleek, trendy iPhone instead of a clunky desktop computer to get online, the writing was on the wall.

    Technology changes, people don't.


  • New comment by jaysinn_420 in "The 'Return to Office' Lies"
  • Content:

    I quit my FAANG job yesterday to join a fully remote company. I took a >50% pay cut but I think it is a 100% life saver. I remember spending 3-4 hours/day commuting and I am just not willing to do that any more. I've cut back on expenses and simplified my life, built up some savings so I can make do with less. My retirement savings will slow down dramatically, but if I don't hate my work life then those savings will be less of an all-consuming goal.

    Thank you senior leadership for your wisdom, "If you don't like it, find another place to work". The first good advice I've heard from them in 5 years.


  • New comment by wheybags in "Dear sir, you have built a compiler (2022)"
  • Content:

    This is a sentiment that I've seen expressed in comment sections many times. I've been programming professionally now for 10 years, and it just doesn't resonate with my experience. Problems with build systems for external dependencies, package managers, and underfeatured / overcomplicated / buggy third party dependencies have been by far the worse issue in my career, compared to problems with homebrewed systems.

    I'm not saying you're wrong, I don't doubt that many people have the opposite experience. It just makes me feel a bit alien when I read comments like this.


  • New comment by frankus in "Phased Array Microphone (2023)"
  • Content:

    "As part of the calibration, the speed of sound is also a parameter which is optimized to obtain the best model of the system, which allows this whole procedure to act as a ridiculously overengineered thermometer."

    Reminds me of the electronics adage: "all sensors are temperature sensors, some measure other things as well."


  • New comment by iandanforth in "Show HN: A Marble Madness-inspired WebGL game we built for Netlify"
  • Content:

    Nice! My favorite challenge was avoiding the glowing white dots along the path.


  • New comment by shihab in "ICC issues warrants for Netanyahu, Gallant, and Hamas officials"
  • Content:

    This is common and expected. Even when a serial killer suspected of 20 murder is apprehended, arrest is often made based on one or two confirmed cases, more charges are later added as investigation deepens.

    Also, keep in mind foreign journalists are completely banned by Israel from entering Gaza- complicating evidence gathering.


  • New comment by nabla9 in "ICC issues warrants for Netanyahu, Gallant, and Hamas officials"
  • Content:

    (before you jump into discussion, remember that this only about these two individuals)

    ICC and the prosecutor are on very solid ground here.

    The prosecutor asked opinions from a impartial panel of experts in international law. The panel included people like Theodor Meron (former Legal adviser for the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs), Helene Kennedy, Adrian Fulford.

    Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant provided plenty of evidence of the intent. Did they really think that when they talk Hebrew to their audience, rest of the world does not hear them. Case like this would be harder to prosecute without evidence of intent.


  • New comment by OutOfHere in "FireDucks: Pandas but Faster"
  • Content:

    Don't use it:

    > By providing the beta version of FireDucks free of charge and enabling data scientists to actually use it, NEC will work to improve its functionality while verifying its effectiveness, with the aim of commercializing it within FY2024.

    In other words, it's free only to trap you.


  • New comment by nabla9 in "Yi Peng 3 crossed both cables C-Lion 1 and BSC at times matching when they broke"
  • Content:

    October 2023 there was similar incident where Chinese cargo ship cut Balticonnector cable and EE-S1 cable. Chip named 'Newnew Polar Bear' under Chinese flag and Chinese company Hainan Xin Xin Yang Shipping Co, Ltd. (aka Torgmoll) with CEO named Yelena V. Maksimova, drags anchor in the seabed cutting cables. Chinese investigation claims storm was the reason, but there was no storm, just normal windy autumn weather. The ship just lowered one anchor and dragged it with engines running long time across the seabed until the anchor broke.

    These things happen sometimes, ship anchors sometimes damage cables, but not this often and without serious problems in the ship. Russians are attempting plausible deniability.


  • New comment by mrtksn in "Let's Encrypt is 10 years old now"
  • Content:

    Hands down one of the greatest services out there, stopped a racket and made the internet secure.

    I remember a time when having an HTTPS connection was for "serious" projects only because the cost of the certificate was much higher than the domain. You go commando and if it sticks then you purchase a certificate for a 100 bucks or something.


  • New comment by redleggedfrog in "When did estimates turn into deadlines?"
  • Content:

    I've gone through times when management would treat estimates as deadlines, and were deaf to any sort of reason about why it could be otherwise, like the usual thing of them changing the specification repeatedly.

    So when those times have occurred I've (we've more accurately) adopted what I refer to the "deer in the headlights" response to just about anything non-trivial. "Hoo boy, that could be doozy. I think someone on the team needs to take an hour or so and figure out what this is really going to take." Then you'll get asked to "ballpark it" because that's what managers do, and they get a number that makes them rise up in their chair, and yes, that is the number they remember. And then you do your hour of due diligence, and try your best not to actually give any other number than the ballpark at any time, and then you get it done "ahead of time" and look good.

    Now, I've had good managers who totally didn't need this strategy, and I loved 'em to death. But for the other numbnuts who can't be bothered to learn their career skills, they get the whites of my eyes.

    Also, just made meetings a lot more fun.


  • New comment by fbartos in "Fair coins tend to land on the side they started (2023)"
  • Content:

    Hi, I'm the first author of the manuscript, so I thought I could answer some of the questions and clarify some issues (all details are in the manuscript, but who has the time to read it ;)

    Low RPM tosses: Most of the recordings are on crapy webcams with ~ 30FPS. The coin spin usually much faster than the sensor can record which results in often non-spinning-looking flips. Why did we take the videos in the first place? To check that everyone collected the data and to audit the results.

    Building a flipping matching: The study is concerned with human coin flips. Diaconis, Holmes, and Montgomery's (DHM, 2007) paper theorize that the imperfection of human flips causes the same-side bias. Building a machine completely defeats the purpose of the experiment.

    Many authors and wasted public funding: We did the experiment in our free time and we had no funding for the study = no money was wasted. Also, I don't understand why are so many people angry that students who contributed their free time and spent the whole day flipping coins with us were rewarded with co-authorship. The experiment would be impossible to do without them.

    Improper tosses: Not everyone flips coin perfectly and some people are much worse at flipping than others. We instructed everyone to flip the coin as if they were to settle a bet and that the coin has to flip at least once (at least one flip would create bias for the opposite side). We find that for most people, the bias decreased over time which suggests that people might get better at flipping by practice = decrease the bias and it also discredits the theory that they learned how to be biased on purpose. From my own experience - I flipped coins more than 20,000 times and I have no clue how to bias it. Also, we did a couple of sensitivity analyses excluding outliers - the effect decreased a bit but we still found plentiful evidence for DHM.

    If you doubt my stats background, you are more than welcome to re-analyze the data on your own. They are available on OSF: https://osf.io/mhvp7/ (including cleaning scripts etc).

    Frantisek Bartos


  • New comment by rkharsan64 in "DOJ will push Google to sell off Chrome"
  • Content:

    People here seem to be underestimating the advantages that Google gets just because of Chrome:

    - When you sign in to Google, you sign in browser-wide. Google now gets all of your browsing data, perfect for advertising. (If you ever doubt it, go check out Google Takeout. You'll be shocked at the amount of data you see there.)

    - They have special APIs and features that they get to use, and nobody else. Only because they own Chrome. [1]

    - They get to move forward with enabling and pushing features that allow for more advertising: see Manifest v3, FLoC.

    - Google specifically serves a worse version of Search on Firefox for Mobile. You have to get an extension to get the full experience.

    This isn't an isolated attempt. You can see more of the same thing with Android.

    - AOSP (the open source counterpart of Android) is now unusable. It doesn't ship with most essential apps, including a Phone app. In previous versions of Android, all of these were a part of AOSP.

    - Most third party launchers/stores struggle to implement features because they are only available for Google themselves.

    - The signing in with Google thing from above continues here too: you sign in to Google system-wide.

    [1]: https://x.com/lcasdev/status/1810696257137959018


  • New comment by wesselbindt in "DOJ will push Google to sell off Chrome"
  • Content:

    I'm very surprised by the number of people in this thread who don't seem to understand that monopolies are _very_ bad for consumers.


  • New comment by joemi in "Air traffic failure caused by two locations 3600nm apart sharing 3-letter code"
  • Content:

    It's quite amusing that they used the incorrect, lowercase abbreviation for "nautical mile" which means something else ("nanometer") in an article about a major issue caused by two things sharing the same abbreviation.


  • New comment by JumpCrisscross in "DOJ will push Google to sell off Chrome"
  • Content:

    > only reason I still use Chrome is because I already use other Google products and they integrate well together

    This is the point. Google's products integrate with Chrome better than non-Google products. Including its ad platform.


  • New comment by curiouscat321 in "DOJ will push Google to sell off Chrome"
  • Content:

    Who would possibly buy Chrome? Letting any of the large tech companies purchase it (the only possible buyers) would just give someone else monopolistic power.

    Chrome can’t exist as a standalone business without being even more consumer hostile.


  • New comment by Etheryte in "Two undersea cables in Baltic Sea disrupted"
  • Content:

    This is a misleading framing. The two cables last year were not taken out by an anchor as an accident, it was literally a ship putting down its anchor just before the cable and then dragging it over the cable. In other words, sabotage. There's no point in trying to color any of this with rose tinted glasses when it's clear who's done it and why.


  • New comment by teruakohatu in "20 years of Google Scholar"
  • Content:

    The best thing, by a long way, that Google Scholar has achieved is denying Elsevier & co a monopoly on academic search.

    In most universities here in New Zealand, articles have to be published in a journal indexed by Elsevier's Scopus. Not in a Scopus-indexed journal, it does not count anymore than a reddit comment. This gives Elsevier tremendous power. But in CS/ML/AI most academics and students turn to Google Scholar first when doing searches.


  • New comment by mvkel in "The tragedy of running an old Node project"
  • Content:

    > time to run it after not touching it for 4 years

    > Two hours of my life gone...

    Two hours of work after 4 years sounds ... perfectly acceptable?

    And it would have run perfectly right away if the node version was specified, so a good learning, too

    This feels like making a mountain out of a mole hill


  • New comment by jp57 in "Air traffic failure caused by two locations 3600nm apart sharing 3-letter code"
  • Content:

    FYI: nm = nautical miles, not nanometers.