this page seriously undersells the versatility and utility of the units program
how long will my laptop take to charge at its current rate of charging?
You have: (22.8 Wh - 16.8 Wh)/7.4W
You want: time
48 min + 38.918919 sec
how long will a 2000mAh 18650 cell take to discharge at 2.5 watts, using a nominal voltage of 3.7 volts?
You have: 3.7 V 2 amp hour / 2.5 watt
You want: time
2 hr + 57 min + 36 sec
what energy density is that, so i can compare it to the volume needed for other forms of energy storage?
You have: 3.7 V 2 amp hour / circlearea(half 18 mm) 65 mm
You want: MJ/ℓ
* 1.6105936
/ 0.62088909
what's the specific energy of stoichiometrically mixed oxyhydrogen fuel?
You have: 44000 J/mol / ((2 hydrogen + oxygen)g/mol)
You want: MJ/kg
* 2.4423711
/ 0.40943818
okay but how much volume? say at atmospheric pressure?
You have: 3 mol gasconstant tempC(20) / 1 atm
You want: l
* 72.165351
/ 0.013857066
so that's how much energy density?
You have: 44kJ/_
You want: J/l
* 609.71089
/ 0.0016401216
(i may be off by a factor of 2 here)
how much energy can this capacitor hold?
You have: half (10V)**2 47 uF
You want: mJ
* 2.35
/ 0.42553191
how much energy density is that?
You have: half (10V)**2 47 μF / 15mm circlearea(3mm)
You want: J/ℓ
* 5.5409499
/ 0.18047447
how thick of a cable do i need to support me in a lightweight fabric-sling chair (or, from a different point of view, to pose a risk of accidental strangulation)? suppose its tensile strength is 2.7 gigapascals
You have: 120kg gravity / 2.7 GPa
You want: mm2
* 0.43585111
/ 2.2943615
You have: _
You want: circlearea
0.00037247244 m
You have: _
You want: mm
* 0.37247244
/ 2.6847624
note that this is the radius of the cable, not its diameter!
the datasheet says this 400×240 display uses 175 μW if all the pixels flip once per second and 60 μW for a static display. how much energy is that per pixel flip?
You have: (175 uW - 50 uW) / 400 240 1 Hz
You want: nJ
* 1.3020833
/ 0.768
if i overclock it to 60 fps how much power will it use?
You have: 60 Hz 400 240 1.3nJ
You want: μW
* 7488
/ 0.00013354701
and how many pixels is its diagonal?
You have: 400**2+240**2
You want:
Definition: 217600
You have: _**.5
You want:
Definition: 466.47615
what is the visual angle subtended by the sun as seen from earth?
You have: 2 sunradius/sundist
You want: milliradians
* 9.3049358
/ 0.10746984
You have: _
You want: dms
31 arcmin + 59.280781 arcsec
okay, how does that compare to the moon?
You have: moonradius 2 / moondist
You want:
Definition: 0.0090426639
on average the moon looks a little smaller, which is why annular eclipses are so common, but we can also calculate that total eclipses are possible because sometimes the moon looks bigger
You have: moonradius 2 / moondist_min
You want:
Definition: 0.0097530864
what percentage of this copper sulfate is actual copper?
You have: copper / (copper + (sulfur + 4 oxygen))
You want: %
* 39.813395
/ 0.025117175
how fast can i write to this slc flash chip without wearing it out in 53 years, assuming perfect wear leveling and no write amplification?
You have: 100 thousand 128 MiB/53 years
You want: bytes/second
* 8024.8943
/ 0.00012461223
how much fuel will this truck need to get across the country?
You have: 4000 km / (6.5 miles/gallon)
You want: l
* 1447.4744
/ 0.00069085852
how much is that per kilogram of lettuce or sodium lauryl sulfate or whatever?
You have: _/28 tonnes
You want: ml/kg
* 51.695513
/ 0.019344039
okay, but how much energy is 52 mℓ of diesel per kg of lettuce?
You have: _ 38.6 kJ/l
You want: kJ/kg
* 1.9954468
/ 0.5011409
how much data can i transfer overnight during unmetered hours on a 2400-baud modem?
You have: 8 hours 2400 bps
You want: MB
* 8.64
/ 0.11574074
how much power does the earth receive from the sun, assuming a solar constant of 1400 W/m²?
You have: 1400 W/m**2 * circlearea(earthradius)
You want: petawatts
* 178.52313
/ 0.0056015152
what would the equilibrium temperature of an object be if it were illuminated at that brightness and had a flat emission spectrum?
You have: (1400 W/m**2 / stefanboltzmann)**(1/4)
You want: tempC
123.24583
how about here in buenos aires at the winter solstice? first, what angle is the sun at anyway? we're at 34°36’ south, and the sun's latitude at the solstice is 23°26’
You have: 34° + 36' + 23° + 26'
You want: dms
58 deg + 2 arcmin
so that reduces the peak insolation to how much? here underneath the atmosphere we only get 1kW/m²
You have: cos(_) 1000 W/m^2
You want: W/m^2
* 529.4258
/ 0.0018888388
and that would be what temperature in equilibrium?
You have: (_/stefanboltzmann)**(1/4)
You want: tempC
37.698189
(integrating the sun's angle over the course of the day as the earth rotates is sadly beyond its capacities)
how much money could a sensible heat storage reservoir of 15 kg of water save me over 16 years? say power rates go down to only 2.5¢/kWh because of solar
You have: 1500 kcal/day * 16 years * 2.5 cents/kWh
You want:
Definition: 254.69556 US$
what's the surface area of a 300mm × 400mm × 150mm backpack? like how much cloth?
You have: 2 (300mm 400mm + 400mm 150mm + 150mm 300mm)
You want:
Definition: 0.45 m^2
okay but in cm²
You have: _
You want: cm2
* 4500
/ 0.00022222222
what's the electrical impedance of a 1000 μF cap at an audio highpass frequency of 20Hz?
You have: 1/(2 pi 20 Hz 1000 uF)
You want: ohms
* 7.9577472
/ 0.12566371
what's the time constant of 100 pF (roughly the smallest capacitance you can get in a macroscopic circuit with any degree of precision) and 1 MΩ?
You have: 100 pF 1 megohm
You want: ms
* 0.1
/ 10
okay. so how long will an 0.1μF cap take to discharge through a 100kΩ resistor from 5 volts down to a 1.3 volt threshold?
You have: ln(5V/1.3V) .1 uF 100kilohm
You want: ms
* 13.470736
/ 0.074234991
how many bits of precision does a linear adc need to be able to measure a difference of 1.8 millivolts if 1.5 volts is full-scale?
You have: log(1.8mV/1.5V)/log(2)
You want:
Definition: -9.7027499
if this oxygen absorber contains 7 grams of iron which oxidizes to Fe₂O₃, how much air can it remove all the oxygen from? air is 21% oxygen by volume (and roughly by mass) and weighs 1.2 grams per liter
You have: 3 oxygen / 2 iron * 7 g
You want: g
* 3.0082138
/ 0.33242318
You have: _/21%/(1.2g/ℓ)
You want: ℓ
* 11.937356
/ 0.083770641
i've lost 7 kg over the last two months; how much of a caloric deficit does that represent in my diet?
You have: 7 kg 3500kcal/pound / 2 months
You want: kcal/day
* 887.30034
/ 0.0011270141
if you were to spread the moon evenly over russia, how deep would it be?
You have: spherevol(moonradius) / area_russia
You want:
Definition: 1286134.4 m
how big is nigeria compared to massachusetts?
You have: area_nigeria/area_massachusetts
You want:
Definition: 33.793093
how many ounces of platinum is a ton of oil worth at 40 dollars per megawatt hour?
You have: tonoil 40 dollars/MWh
You want: platinumounce
* 0.58368883
/ 1.7132416
or in grams?
You have: tonoil 40 dollars/MWh / platinumprice
You want: g
* 18.154752
/ 0.055081997
Currency exchange rates from FloatRates (USD base) on 2023-08-03
3539 units, 109 prefixes, 111 nonlinear units
You have: dBm(0)
You want:
Definition: 0.001 kg m^2 / s^3
You have: pH(0)
You want:
Definition: 1000 mol / m^3
You have: gasmark(0)
Argument of function outside domain
You have: gasmark(0.25)
You want:
Definition: 380.37222 K
You have: gasmark(0.5)
You want:
Definition: 394.26111 K
You have: gasmark(0.75)
You want:
Definition: 401.20556 K
You have: gasmark(1)
You want:
Definition: 408.15 K
You have: gasmark(1.25)
You want:
Definition: 411.62222 K
You have: shoesize_men(0)
You want:
Definition: 0.20955 m
You have: shoesize_men
Definition: shoesize_men(n) = shoe_men0 + n shoesize_delta
n is dimensionless
You have: bril(0)
You want:
Definition: 2.5110222e-27 cd / m^2
You have: airmass
Definition: airmass(alt) = 1 / (sin(alt) + 0.50572 (alt / degree + 6.07995)^-1.6364)
defined for 0 degree <= alt <= 90 degree
You have: airmass(0 degrees)
You want:
Definition: 37.919608
You have: atm_transmissionz
Definition: atm_transmissionz(zenith) = exp(-extinction_coeff airmassz(zenith))
defined for 0 degree <= zenith <= 90 degree
You have: atm_transmissionz(34 degree)
You want:
Definition: 0.77637004
You have: atm_transmissionz(0 degree)
You want:
Definition: 0.81063327
You have: vmag(-1.46) # Sirius
You want:
Definition: 9.746164e-06 cd sr / m^2
You have: vmag(0) # Vega
You want:
Definition: 2.54e-06 cd sr / m^2
You have: baume(0)
You want:
Definition: 1000 kg / m^3
You have: search gauge
brwiregauge <piecewise linear>
drillgauge <piecewise linear>
gaugepressure <nonlinear>
plategauge <piecewise linear>
screwgauge <nonlinear>
standardgauge 4 ft + 8.5 in
stdgauge <piecewise linear>
wiregauge <nonlinear>
zincgauge <piecewise linear>
You have: plategauge(0)
You want:
Definition: 0.0079375 m
You have: wiregauge(0)
You want:
Definition: 0.0082514628 m
You have: sugar_bp(tempF(250)) # candy boiling point
You want:
Definition: 1475.0252 kg / m^3
You have: degF(30)
You want: sugar_conc_bpe # computed via this
86.975291
You have: sugar_conc_bpe
Definition: interpolated table with points
sugar_conc_bpe(0) = 0 K
sugar_conc_bpe(5) = 0.0788 K
sugar_conc_bpe(10) = 0.169 K
sugar_conc_bpe(15) = 0.2729 K
...
sugar_conc_bpe(99.6) = 70.1448 K
sugar_conc_bpe(99.7) = 76.7867 K
You have: apidegree(0) # petroleum degree
You want:
Definition: 1076.0456 kg / m
You have: ipv4subnetsize(24)
You want:
Definition: 256
You have: ipv4subnetsize(26)
You want:
Definition: 64
You have: gaugepressure(0 psi)
You want: psi
* 14.695949
/ 0.068045964
nonlinear and even non-affine measurement units are everywhere man
You've got the analogy right in that the internet is like a public park. Where your analogy goes wrong is in the fact that these service providers have set up a bakery in the park, and are trying to charge anyone who merely smells the bread, and then accuse people of stealing when they refuse to pay for the act of inhaling while walking through the public park.
The internet is a public resource. Your website is a guest on my computer. I will do with your website what I will. The one and only choice you have is to not serve it to me. Once you have served it to me, you don't get to dictate how I use it.
I've contracted an ex Azure DNS team member to write up articles about DNS [1] and published it for free. I considered my DNS knowledge okay, but I learned something every article he wrote.
If you want to be better at DNS than >99% of your colleagues for the rest of your career, then invest a single day in reading those.
I don't want America to become like Russia or China, but I fear that it will if we keep abusing our democratic system to create a "vetocracy" where nothing can ever be done. Eventually people will rebel and elect totalitarians to force things through. Either that or totalitarian nations will leave us in the dust while we do paperwork.
Our major cities are full of tent city slums because NIMBYs won't allow housing to be built. We have hundreds of gigawatts of renewable energy in the 'planning' stage stuck behind mountains of red tape. California has spent billions on high speed rail and they've barely started to lay track and only after scaling the project back to the point that it'll be near useless (it doesn't even connect the major cities!).
I got a chance to connect with OP -- thank you again for your thoughtfulness and balance.
While I (and YC) am trying to help founders create postive interview experiences for candidates, there's clearly more work to be done. As I mentioned previously, I give hiring/interview training for our founders. From our conversation (and this broader thread), I need to reiterate/add points to my training around:
- More education to founders around who should/shouldn't be hiring. This market is (and will continue to be) tricky to navigate, but that's not an excuse for rescinding an offer. (We actually do a lot of training -- and our partners repeatedly tell our founders not to overhire, but we can do more here, especially now.)
- Paid trials are good. From my conversation with job seekers -- and with OP -- this is a good practice to respect an interviewee for their time, and more founders should do this.
- Keep trial periods short. 1-2 weeks is a good amount of time; any longer and you risk wasting the candidate's time, which a founder/hiring team should be respectful of, always.
Again, there's more to do, and I'll try to work more closely with our startups to really dig into their hiring plans for 2023. I don't want job seekers to be experiencing this kind of thing (on workatastartup.com or otherwise), so we'll do what we can within our network to prevent it.
It's any valid question at all, it needn't be yes or no. Humans have, at minimum, red, black, brown, blonde, dyed, grey, white, and no hair. Learning what colour hair a person has eliminates the other categories.
The way to think about the information content of a problem or of something you learn is exactly what you're suggesting. If you numbered every living person on earth, it'd take more than 32 bits and not quite fill the 33rd bit.
If you then learn a person's gender, you can eliminate all the people with the incorrect gender, which is going to leave you either 31.x bits (assuming binary gender) or 25-27 bits of remaining entropy (assuming some non-binary gender and, say, a 1-3% incidence rate).
When the parent you're responding to says you get 3 bits for knowing someone plays chess, they're guessing that 1/(2^3) = 1/8 of people, in an undifferentiated sense, play chess. Of course if we knew someone's age or gender or country of origin, the conditional information value in knowing they play chess could be greater or lesser. And realistically no one is ever trying to identify a human among all humans (partially because it seems highly unlikely that there are many questions that could equally implicate the president of the United States and a six year old on the Marshall Islands in their answer). Each bit of information represents a halving of the entropy of the target surface.
I think you got to within 1 bit of the answer from first principles ;)
My favorite way to handle these types of situations is to contact any lawyer you trust and ask them to recommend someone. They will not only know the correct discipline for your particular scenario, but being in the industry, they’re a better judge of quality than just picking someone randomly out of a search engine.
The first time I needed a lawyer to review business paperwork, I called a local personal injury lawyer who I knew had a good reputation, and they gave me a reference to someone who barely had any marketing presence at all, but was an excellent lawyer. 10/10 would do again.
I like Ruby, Javascript, and lifestyle posts. The next guy likes x language and y technology and lifestyle posts. I ignore his tech posts and he ignores my tech posts but we meet in the middle through lifestyle posts. The larger t he community grows the more engagement each post gets but the most engagement goes to lifestyle posts. Since posts rise due to how much engagement they get, you are destined to see more and more lifestyle content dominate the front page as the community grows larger.
There is a subset of every community that hates something and you seem to hate lifestyle posts but most of the community appears not too making this trend inevitable unless moderation decides to change the rules.
If you like podcasts, there is Advent of Computing. It's not chronological, instead covering a different topic every episode. Most recent episodes are about magnetic core memory, INTERCAL, a hypertext system developed by the US military, and the Analytical Engine, respectively. There's over 80 episodes now so there's a lot to learn about.
There is a joke I love that illustrates the concept:
"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, my client was nowhere near the scene of the murder, he didn't mean to pull the trigger, and that son-of-a-bitch had it coming!"
It's one that comes up, but first consider that it's not fundamentally clear to the layman that these values are actually completely "free parameters".
Imagine, if you will, benchmarking some unknown CPU, and determining that the fused multiply-add operation takes, idk, 17 times as long to execute as an increment operation. We might postulate that there other CPUs out there where it takes a different amount of time — arbitrary amounts of time! Alternatively, we might gain knowledge of the underlying CPU architecture and understand that fused multiply-add is implemented with a certain set of transistors, and that it's fundamentally more complex, though there's room for some variability based on the specific implementation. In such a world this "free parameter" is set as it is for a very specific reason: a transistor arrangement.
We have limited visibility into what's actually happening "underneath" our laws of physics. Some of the values we see could be truly arbitrary. Some of them might actually be controlled by some other field and change over time (though we haven't seen evidence of that so it seems less likely). Some of them could be a deeper artifact of the way the universe works.
If you look at things like string theory, which do try to describe in more detail and dial down the free parameters to just one ("length of the fundamental string" more or less) we are left with something that's frustratingly nonspecific until you locate a more-specific solution within the broader string-theory solution space and call it "the laws of physics." That specific location might indeed seem quite arbitrary; the question might then become, what relation does this hundreds-of-dimensional solution space have with our concepts of physical reality? And can other areas of that landscape be probed in any way meaningful to our experience of physics?
I think another aspect is that a lot of things don’t matter. For example, some employers have a better brand (as employers of tech workers) and some are worse. Some will also try much harder to present such a brand to people. But the effects of this brand may not actually be so important to the company if they can achieve their goals.
Examples of some employer reputations:
- Google and Facebook both have reasonably good reputations as employers. Facebook has a reputation for paying better than their typical competitors. But both had much better brands 5-10 years ago and they have since fallen out of favour (in hn comments a lot. Not super sure about programmers at large). A lot of it is also from their worse reputation in the public discourse[1]. I think to some extent they are no-longer new exciting companies, and they are now big enough that they will do more things (in absolute terms) that people don’t like.
- Amazon has a reputation for being bad at engineering, whatever that means, yet somehow aws does much better than the competitor from Google, a company with a reputation for strong engineering. Some people will tell you it’s about sales or customer support and other people will tell you it’s about not deprecating year-old apis that don’t even have the features of the things they replaced.
- Amazon has a reputation for being a bad employer (of engineers) with lots of turnover. Some evidence could be that they (would?) backload their equity vesting schedule because of this turnover but that could also be explained by hiring more people on the margin or putting more weight on retaining employees with more tenure.
- There’s a lot of ‘working at a startup is great fun and highly profitable’ sentiment that probably advantages startups. I think some of it is true, some of it reasonably organic, and some of it promoted by VCs like pg.
- Palantir is thought to be evil by some people.
- Microsoft is uncool (I mean come on, they use windows) and supposedly has terrible or undesirable tech processes (rebase hell due to discontinuous integration, no VC at all, backwards compatibility quagmire, no ‘big’ systems) and also supposedly got full marks on the Joel test 15-20 years ago.
- Apparently if you work at an investment bank you’ll be shouted at, work long hours, and be seen as less important than the bankers, but you’ll be highly paid. (Or maybe some subset of those things)
- Some smaller companies can get an outsize positive reputation by writing good/timely/popular blog posts (two that spring to mind are cloudflare and fly.io) or through positive blog posts by employees (e.g. read Steve Yegge’s old post about the ‘good agile’)
To some extent it feels like this sort of brand should matter, but I’m not sure that’s really true. If you only hire new grads then it is probably more important to provide a lot of good free food and fun at campus recruiting events. If you are already able to hire sufficiently many acceptable candidates at an acceptable price, maybe there is no need to increase that price by putting effort into the brand. I think it’s also true that many professional programmers don’t care about or share the opinions about companies that are frequently posted and highly voted on HN, and it is easy to ignore such opinions when weighing up other aspects of a job offer.
On the other hand it feels like some companies do poorly at this by not doing anything at all so improvements could be relatively easy like changing the interview process to avoid candidates feeling shit about it or ‘free’ cultural/process changes like making it easier for employees to produce quality company blog posts. Even a seemingly good organic reputation could be bad if it comes from the wrong place and if you don’t present much of a brand that can be a lot of what you’re left with. It’s also possible to get a poor reputation in a hard-to-control way like Citadel Securities (the market-maker) getting a poor reputation from people who believe what they read on Reddit (while maybe those Reddit true-believers wouldn’t be good hires there is likely still an effect on the margin)
If you’re applying for jobs then it might be worth keeping these reputations in mind: some companies could be better or worse than you’d expect because you’re naturally biased by their poor/good brand.
[1] I think partly they are rightly unpopular, partly the single (er, double) biggest threat to any publication, and partly an easy punching bag for politicians
If you ever see this phrase: 'public-private' partnership, you can be assured that the losses/costs will be public while the gains/profit will be private.
I'm a CPA and have undergraduate and graduate degrees in accounting. To be completely honest, the bulk of financial accounting is not that thrilling. The bulk of the profession is spent keeping up with the regulations for tracing numbers, reconciling schedules, and "accounting" for things.
But let me share what makes the field thrilling for me:
Accounting is a universal language for valuing time. Clocks allow us to measure time, but accounting allows us to assign time value. It, quite literally, allows us to compare apples to oranges (or Apple to Amazon).
This is important because time is the single most valuable resource any of us have. It's both the scarcest resource and the most liquid, but it's only liquid in one direction. Time can be exchanged for anything: food, drink, entertainment, love, death. But nothing can be exchanged for more time in my life.
We can, however, exchange our time for the time of others. Without being able to do this, our quality of lives would be terrible. But how many of my programming-hours is worth a T-shirt? How many chai-latte-making-hours is worth a heart transplant? It's not enough to count the hours, we have to assign value to the hours. Accounting is the system and language we use to value different units of time. It's a universally applicable language that is consistent in its application. It applies to a child running a lemonade stand and trillion dollar multinationals. Whether you're a charity or a bank, a government or a revolutionary, the rules of accounting are applicable to whatever it is that you're doing, whatever is it that you've done in the past, and whatever it is that you'll do in the future.
Currently, I work as a software engineer for a fintech company, and I find that the most fun I have at work is engineering something from scratch. Thinking of the architecture, mocking up the algorithms, and implementing a new solution to a problem is vastly more thrilling than maintaining existing systems or hotfixing minor bugs. Yet, the bulk of my job is maintaining systems that other people built. And, if I'm being honest, sometimes boring.
Similarly, the thrill of accounting is in learning how to more appropriately account for transactions, new goods, or new services. How should we account for someone who mines a crypto currency? How should we account for someone who trades a crypto but doesn't mine it? How do we account for auto insurance for self-driving cars? These are the thrilling aspects of accounting.
But for the bulk of the job, it's probably a bit boring. Working on a team to fix other people's technical mistakes. Reviewing documentation, getting access to various systems. Sounds a bit like software engineering!
The portrait modes on these are getting really good. The blur is pretty convincing looking. The only open-source software I know that does similar stuff is body-pix which does matting, but I don't think it generates a smooth depth map like this thing. It would be cool because then you can do a clever background blur for your Zoom backgrounds with v4l2-loopback webcam.
By the way, I decided to also quick summarize the usual HN threads that have the trigger word iPhone in it:
- No headphone jack
--- Actually this is good because ecosystem built for it
----- Don't think ecosystem is good. Audio drops out
------- Doesn't happen to me. Maybe bad device.
----- Don't want to be locked in. Want to use own device.
------- That's not Apple philosophy. Don't know why surprised.
--------- I have right to my device
----------- cf. Right to Repair laws
------- Can use own device with dongle.
--------- Don't want dongle. Have to get dongle for everything. Annoying.
----------- Only need one dongle.
------------- If only audio, but now can't charge.
----------- Use dongle purse.
--- Apple quality have drop continuous. Last good Macbook was 2012.
----- Yes. Keyboard is useless now. Have fail. Recalled.
------- I have no problem with keyboard.
--------- Lucky.
------- Also touchpad have fail. Think because Foxconn.
------- Yes. Butterfly? More like butterfly effect. Press key, hurricane form on screen.
----- Yes. Yes. All Tim Cook. Bean Counter.
----- Yes. Many root security violation these days.
------- All programmers who make security violate must be fired.
--------- Need union so not fired if manager make security violation.
----------- Don't understand why no union.
------------- Because Apple and Google have collude to not poach. See case.
------- Yes. Security violation is evidence of lack of certification in industry.
--------- Also UIKit no longer correctly propagate event.
--- Phone too big anyway. No one make any small phone anymore.
----- See here, small phone.
------- Too old. Want new small phone. Had iPhone 8. Pinnacle of small beauty.
------- That's Android. No support more than 2 months.
--------- Actually, support 4 months.
----------- Doesn't matter. iPhone support 24 centuries and still going. Queen have original.
--------- Yes, and battery on Android small.
--- Will buy this phone anyway. Support small phone.
----- No. This phone is also big. No one care about small hand.
------- Realistically, phone with no SSH shell dumb. I use N900 on Maemo.
--- Who care? This press release. Just advertisement.
----- Can dang remove clickbait. What is one-eye anyway? Meaningless. Phone no have eye.
--- Also, phone not available in Bielefeld.
--- Phone only have 128 GB? Not enough. Need 129 GB.
----- 64 GB enough for everyone.
------- "640 KB enough for everyone" - Bill Fence, 1923
You might want to re-read those threads, because the community takes were not as clear-cut as you claim. (If anything, large threads often are a sign of non-agreement, because people strongly disagreeing creates more comments) And of course not everyone participates in every thread, which makes judging overall sentiment even harder - that someone comments less or not at all on one thread doesn't mean they don't care about the issue.
My wife is a teacher and, like most people, she sometimes complain about her work. The most common complaint I hear is that students don't pay attention or do their assigned work, then turn around and complain that they haven't learned something or panic at the end of a semester and pester her for ways to improve their grade. Some of them exclaim that they are just too dumb to pass, so they wont even bother trying. When my wife advises these kids, she usually discovers that they have no (or very limited) career or academic aspirations.
I bring this up because I think a person's ability (intellectual or otherwise) is usually nurtured by a passion. People with a passion put extra effort into developing the skills required to fulfill that passion. People with no passion simply don't invest the same level of effort and so are sometimes perceived as "dumb" in comparison.
One of the ways in which my wife tries to help her students is by helping them find something to be passionate about. She talks to parents/guardians to help discover their passions and often references the Occupational Outlook Handbook to help the students and their guardians figure out what they can do with that passion economically and what to invest the most in academically.
I think a person's "intellectual potential" is linked to their passion for a particular academic subject. I also think that intelligence is not a finite resource, but passion is.
So when analyzing the opportunity cost of games like Factorio or Eve Online, I think you must consider their effect on a person's passion. If I stopped playing games like Factorio altogether and forced myself to invest all that time into improving my software development skills, I'm confident I would quickly "burn out" - or exhaust my passion for the subject. Rather than "sapping my intellectual potential", I think relaxing with games such as Factorio from time to time allows me to replenish my passion which fuels my intellectual potential. Everything should be enjoyed in moderation of course, but I certainly don't think the existence of games like those is a net negative for humanity.
It is comforting to see this discussion continues the great HN tradition of having a lively and wide-ranging debate about a complex scientific article or paper without ever bothering to read the article and paper.
This is a rather complex paper, so I perused it for about five minutes. As such I consider my self a one eyed man among a hoard of shouting extremely opinionated blind people, so you should all listen to me carefully and follow me as your leader.
And now that I have your attention I shall carefully summarize the paper so none of you have to undergo the indignity of perusing it for five minutes.
1. Leeds is not solely for energy efficiency but also for solving other environmental problems such as water use.
2. In buildings where the energy efficiency was the main problem to be solved, the leeds overhaul was actually effective at improving energy efficiency.
3. In buildings where water use was the main problem to be solved, the leeds process was also successful in reducing water use, but actually increased energy use. This is because the water reduction process invariably included complex electrical systems with a lot of sensors and control circuitry that ate up extra power.
4. Considering points 2. and 3. above when you add all the buildings up as a whole, on average energy use did not decrease after a leeds overhaul and certification.
My thinking here is that this does not mean LEEDS is a failure. The study shows that there was improvement in every building that underwent the certification, it is just that for some buildings energy wasn't the highest priority. In many parts of the US water use is much more important than energy efficiency.
So I am sure for many parts in the US it is a very good trade off to increase energy use for lower water use. (This would certainly be true for the entire southwest, at least).
But there is still a lot of room for improvement. The water preservation systems can themselves be made more energy efficient. At first glance, these systems do not do something that requires a lot of energy -- all they do is communication, sensing and opening or closing small water valves.
Generally speaking there is a lot to be desired of analog circuit design. Now that we are surrounded by always on always connected electrical devices, this is something we as a nation should start paying attention to. There are a lot of always on circuits that use 10 or 100 times the power they should, just because someone wanted so save 50c on parts or they simply did not how to properly design the thing.
OpenAI was built to influence the eventual value chain of AI in directions that would give the funding parties more confidence that their AI bets would pay off.
This value chain basically being one revolving around AI as substituting predictions and human judgement in a business process, much like cloud can be (oversimply) modeled as moving Capex to Opex in IT procurement.
They saw that, like any primarily B2B sector, the value chain was necessarily going to be vertically stratified. The output of the AI value chain is as an input to another value chain, it's not a standalone consumer-facing proposition.
The point of OpenAI is to invest/incubate a Microsoft or Intel, not a Compaq or Sun.
They wanted to spend a comparatively small amount of money to get a feel for a likely vision of the long-term AI value chain, and weaponize selective openness to: 1) establish moats, 2) Encourage commodification of complementary layers which add value to, or create an ecosystem around, 'their' layer(s), and 3) Get insider insight into who their true substitutes are by subsidizing companies to use their APIs
As AI is a technology that largely provides benefit by modifying business processes, rather than by improving existing technology behind the scenes, your blue ocean strategy will largely involve replacing substitutes instead of displacing direct competitors, so points 2 and 3 are most important when deciding where to funnel the largest slice of the funding pie.
_Side Note: Becoming an Apple (end-to-end vertical integration) is much harder to predict ahead of time, relies on the 'taste' and curation of key individuals giving them much of the economic leverage, and is more likely to derail along the way._
They went non-profit to for-profit after they confirmed the hypothesis that they can create generalizeable base models that others can add business logic and constraints to and generate "magic" without having to share the underlying model.
In turn, a future AI SaaS provider can specialize in tuning the "base+1" model, then selling that value-add service to the companies who are actually incorporating AI into their business processes.
It turned out, a key advantage at the base layer is just brute force and money, and further outcomes have shown there doesn't seem to be an inherent ceiling to this; you can just spend more money to get a model which is unilaterally better than the last one.
There is likely so much more pricing power here than cloud.
In cloud, your substitute (for the category) is buying and managing commodity hardware. This introduces a large-ish baseline cost, but then can give you more favorable unit costs if your compute load is somewhat predictable in the long term.
More importantly, projects like OpenStack and Kubernetes have been desperately doing everything to commodotize the base layer of cloud, largely to minimize switching costs and/or move the competition over profits up to a higher layer. You also have category buyers like Facebook, BackBlaze, and Netflix investing heavily into areas aimed at minimizing the economic power of cloud as a category, so they have leverage to protect their own margins.
It's possible the key "layer battle" will be between the hardware (Nvidia/TPUs) and base model (OpenAI) layers.
It's very likely hardware will win this for as long as they're the bottleneck. If value creation is a direct function of how much hardware is being utilized for how long, and the value creation is linear-ish as the amount of total hardware scales, the hardware layer just needs to let a bidding war happen, and they'll be capturing much of the economic profit for as long as that continues to be the case.
However, the hardware appears (I'm no expert though) to be something that is easier to design and manufacture, it's mostly a capacity problem at this point, so over time this likely gets commoditized (still highly profitable, but with less pricing power) to a level where the economic leverage goes to the Base model layer, and then the base layer becomes the oligopsony buyer, and the high fixed investment the hardware layer made then becomes a problem.
The 'Base+1' layer will have a large boom of startups and incumbent entrants, and much of the attention and excitement in the press will be equal parts gushing and mining schaudenfreude about that layer, but they'll be wholly dependent on their access to base models, who will slowly (and deliberately) look more and more boring apart from the occasional handwringing over their monopoly power over our economy and society.
There will be exceptions to this who are able to leverage proprietary data and who are large enough to build their own base models in-house based on that data, and those are likely to be valuable for their internal AI services preventing an 'OpenAI' from having as much leverage over them and being much better matched to their process needs, but they will not be as generalized as the models coming from the arms race of companies who see that as their primary competitive advantage. Facebook and Twitter are two obvious ones in this category, and they will primarily consume their own models, rather than expose them as model-as-a-service directly.
The biggest question to me is whether there's a feedback loop here which leads to one clear winning base layer company (probably the world's most well-funded startup to date due to the inherent upfront costs and potential long-term income), or if multiple large, incumbent tech companies see this as an existential enough question that they more or less keep pace with each other, and we have a long-term stable oligopoly of mostly interchangeable base layers, like we do in cloud at the moment.
Things get more complex when you look to other large investment efforts such as in China, but this feels like a plausible scenario for the SV-focused upcoming AI wars.
I disagree. There are many problems that can only be solved by a self-funding organization which sells its solutions to consumers - aka a business.
Suppose I would like to build entertaining, educational toys for children. Should I do it as a hobbyist? No. If I seriously want many children to benefit, I will have to get the toys to them, and producing them will take money. Should I get a grant from a charity? No: only children can judge whether a toy is fun, and if I ask charities to be the judge I will end up optimizing the toys to appeal to the charities, not the children. (The same applies to becoming a charity myself, or to asking for a government grant.) Instead, I should sell toys to children and their parents. That way, I may be able to tell whether I have succeeded in my goal.
The market is a discovery mechanism. If you are serious about achieving something, you should seek useful feedback. Willingness to pay is one powerful feedback mechanism.
The list of businesspeople who are genuinely interested in what they do is long. It ranges from Steve Wozniak down to your local bookshop owner. Paul Graham claims that the best businesspeople are always interested.
If you mean something like a sidebar that pops out, that's definitely possible via some clever CSS. Make the menu button a hidden checkbox and add a CSS transition to move your sidebar based on its checked state.
- Avoid printing section headers at the bottom of one page with the section content left headerless at the top of the next page.
- Prefer printing graphics and figures on whole pages instead of split across pages.
- Print out the URL of every hyperlink instead of having links only as useless underlined text.