Idea: create a website that hosts the questions and responses from summarizers and language models on a webpage like StackOverflow. If Google implemented this it could save their business from ChatGPT.

Worth noting that you can’t conclude time travel is impossible or irrelevant just because other people have. There could exist time travelers who secretly have control either of your life or the world with advanced technology (potentially up to the level of mind control chips) who are keeping the evidence from getting out.

People who read this would probably be interested in one laptop per child, which was a nonprofit effort to provide $100 laptops to students throughout the third world. There is no need to buy cheaper used laptops when the laptops can just be manufactured more cheaply to begin with. A lot of what people are spending their money on is the software like that of the operating system which is not strictly necessary for young students. The actual components of a barebones computer are dirt cheap.

I don't think OLPC has much if any advantage over Chromebooks today. IIRC the OLPC laptop (not tablet) never reached $100; it was more like $200 with specs (e.g. VIA processor and 7.5" screen) that were weaker than even the cheapest $200 Chromebook.

The lack of details make it tougher to side with the apparent victim here. I'd like to know whether she really did violate DRM in a meaningful way and the closure of her Kindle account was an appropriate response. I wouldn't go so far as the author and claim that DRM means you merely rent books from Amazon and they can be taken away at any time. This is likely something that affects a very small percentage of users and is like a freak accident when it happens, though according to radical skepticism, freak accidents may be much more likely than we intuit. However I agree that the response from the Amazon representative must have been very frustrating to receive and this would cause Amazon significant problems if the same thing happened to a large number of users. In the end I hope writing such articles about the problem helps resolve it before it does affect a large number of users.

> The lack of details make it tougher to side with the apparent victim here.

What do you mean? The victim provided every detail (and in fact, she later got her account restored, no apologies or explanations given -- again). All details missing are by Amazon, which is precisely the problem: the company can terminate your account and delete the items you bought while providing absolutely no information whatsoever.

It's as if a brick & mortar book store reserved the right to enter your house and take back a book you bought, without explaining everything besides "you broke a rule".

The glitch in their fraud detection system is not the biggest issue; glitches happen. Their total lack of transparency and explanations is the problem.

Many commentators have blamed climate change for the fires because it is fashionable, especially on the left, to do so. The reality is that the very small change in temperatures produced by climate change isn't sufficient to produce a change in the rate of fires. We'll have to wait a long time for climate change to produce such effects, if it ever does. I would lay the blame more on our society's technological stagnation in terms of its inability to come up with better technologies than those that have existed since the 1950s to fit fires. We haven't buried our power lines, we don't have strategically positioned water storage systems, we don't have huge drones specifically for firefighting that could dump more water on the fires than an ordinary helicopter could.

I'd say this article barely meets HN's standards of something that garners intellectual interest and is more the type of thing I'd expect to see on Reddit alongside cat videos. And then of course there is the environmentalist bent that the redwoods of at most sentimental value were the important thing that burned down, rather than things of material value to people. I wonder if anyone ended up homeless as a result of the fires.

According to the theory of radical skepticism it is very tough to put a probability bound on supposedly low probability disasters like fires, and so we must be prepared for them.

Today, there's more low hanging fruit in the world of fire prevention than fire fighting. It's mostly low-tech work that just needs adequate funding and the political will: manually clearing out brush, using grazing animals like goats, controlled burns. Ultimately, the overgrowth has to go, one way or another.

Controlled burns especially have become politically unpopular in recent decades, but they're tremendously effective. With controlled burns, we can burn small amounts of brush when the wind is blowing gently away from major population centers. If we want to fund technical solutions, I'd invest in software that models the best times and places to conduct these controlled burn operations FAR before we start discussing firefighting drones.

You need to live in California where these fires have been ravaging the state year after year for the past decade.

[citation needed]

Kubernetes was released only 6 years ago so I'd imagine there is still a lot of legitimate evolution left in the ecosystem. I'd have to compliment you for choosing a project like this rather than something that had no chance of working because the ecosystems are completely set, like a new programming language. I believe there will be a distributional challenge for you in getting people to use this software. You can't pay for an advertising campaign. Maybe the most you can do is post on HN, but after that, people will forget about it. The fact that once it's used once in a GitHub project others will be forced to use it provides some hope. You say you want to be like JQuery over javascript. It may be worth it to you to figure out how JQuery solved their distributional challenge. Just as nobody needs to use JQuery, nobody will need to use your software, and there will be a strong temptation for people to bypass it and just use raw Kubernetes.

It is amazing the complexity of modern software projects like Kubernetes and I'd agree they have challenges in creating a simple interface that everyone will like while still getting the software to work consistently. According to the principle of radical skepticism it's amazing that anything so complex works at all.

OP - it can be done.

Reach out to the CTOs and VPs of Engineering that list Kubernetes as one of their core technologies. They're most apt to choose K8s for their own team.

Ask them if they've had any issues with Kubernetes, specifically mis-configuration or slow turn around times for configuration changes.

Explain your framework in one or two lines. Pick out one or two _specific_, common problems with K8s and ask them "Are you experiencing X? How about Y?" Talk to them like you already know and feel their pain. Because you do (you wouldn't have created this framework otherwise).

You'll learn a lot. And maybe get adoption and mayb a consulting gig out of it. :)

Use the advanced search on Linkedin to find these people. Make sure your Linkedin title has something to do with being a Kubernetes expert.

If you're in a big city, find those clients that are local first, as you can visit them in person (that goes a long way).

e.g. Senior DevOps Consultant, Specializing in Kubernetes/HyScale.

Here's the people search you need. Use Hunter.io to find their emails.

https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/people/?facetGeoUrn=...

Client outreach can be successful if it's specific and serving a genuine need.

"Most experts would agree that clear writing should have an average sentence length of 15 to 20 words."

This quote is so preposterous it almost made me want to stop reading the article. Different types of writing should have different sentence lengths. I'm quite sure the sentence length for a math textbook and a Clorox ad should be different. There's a reason it's not common practice to measure one's average sentence lengths.

Like most material written on language, this article says almost nothing and is basically filler. "Don't be afraid to give instructions". "Use lists where appropriate". Well of course we know we can give instructions! I recently read a famous book called "How to Read a Book" that in a similar vein struggled to find anything non-obvious to say about language. It just comes so naturally to people that it's difficult to comment on. This article is coming from an organization called the Plain English Campaign that's been around since 1979. I wonder what they can have claimed to have accomplished since then.

This article reminded me of arguments I always read in philosophy about tough subjects like radical skepticism where the authors fail to make any points beyond the obvious. Sure, certain knowledge is impossible for humans to attain, but can you say anything else!?

The page has many useful tips on how to avoid writing in a bureaucratic, distant, formal, long-winded style.

I see lots of text daily that fit the antipatterns mentioned in the article. Sometimes the writer doesn't know better. Sometimes they internalized some prescriptive hard and fast rules that are supposedly mandatory for pro writing (no split infinitive! No sentence started wit "so"!).

But more often, I think, obscure and pretentious writing is a feature for the writer. It creates distance, formality, passive aggressively signals "leave me alone" and "you are a small cog in a powerful machine", "we have authority over you", it allows for better plausible deniability, and CYA. Or said in a different way from the writers point of view: if I wrote this too plainly, more people will feel compelled to write to me as if I was their buddy and will guide them through everything. By writing formally, I put up a wall and make my life easier. People will actually have to take time to decipher it all, so its also a natural filter for attentive readers.

Respectfully, I strongly disagree. If we assume that your intent is to convey meaning in an accessible way, you should be precise. Expansion on concepts should be clearly separated. There is rarely a communicative need to conflate more than two concepts in a single sentence. That said, if your intent is artistic expression, then a different mode makes sense.

As a non-native english writer, I found the article quite good.

It reminds good practices for clear communication, which I wish everyone applied in my org.

Notably around me, people excessively use passive forms.

So, you weren't interested, but it doesn't mean it interests noone.

In order to communicate effectively you need a mental model of your audience. The same sentence can be cumbersome to some readers, just right for others, and even condescendingly simplistic for a small minority.

The fact that you found the article to be useful simply means that you are part of their target audience, which is great. Just keep in mind that the same advice will not work as well when you communicate with a different audience

I'll keep it in mind :-)

My context with using english in general (like here on HN) is communicating as a non-native with both native speakers and non-native speakers. For some of those, just reading english is a challenge.

Since I also know I can easily write nonsensical sentences, I thought this article was a good reminder on how to safely stay in the "I make sense" area in this context, and as so disagreed with person I replied to ^^

I would definitely have higher ambitions regarding "tone" in my mother tongue though, but for english writing, I'll be happy if I can be clear !

It's slightly misleading to say that there were better yields for 5nm than 7nm because according to the graph in the article the yields have been almost exactly the same, maybe slightly lower. The article's assertion that the defect rate is a key metric seems dubious since it seems to have been roughly the same for the last three generations of chips and thus kind of a nonfactor. But in fact low yield rates were the reason Intel famously had to delay its 7nm processes. The fact that defect rates have been kept roughly constant seems to suggest they can go even further into 3nm processes, but this is the problem with extrapolating from graphs with too little data - at 3nm they'd run into very challenging physical limits and it's not clear we'll ever get a 3nm chip.

It is amazing to me that we can achieve such low defect rates on projects so complicated as highly brain-insecure sticks of meat that evolved to hunt and forage. Under the principle of radical skepticism the true defect rates could be much higher.

It sounds like you are conflating "Defect Density" and "Yield". These are not the same. Yield is a function of Defect Density. The function is exponential. Even the appearingly "slight" improvement shown in the Defect Density shown in graph is significant in terms of Yield.

It would be quite interesting to know how this data is actually used on Amazon's servers. It reminds me of the criticisms of government data collection programs, that they just hoover up every bit of data that's available without actually knowing what to do with it. Suppose you train some AI to predict what pages in a book will be most engaging to the reader. Since your interface to the book is still just going to be something where people can turn the pages what are you actually going to do with that information? It's a massive sacrifice of the privacy of the user for small gains at best in getting insight into the user's behavior. I wouldn't be surprised if this information is sitting in a database somewhere at Amazon completely unused.

The philosophy of Amazon appears to be to do as much as possible in the hopes that one day it will be useful. This is at odds with the principle of philosophical skepticism, that because we can't be sure of the consequences of our actions we should strive to do as little as possible. The data could be hacked and leak out, for example. There is tremendous uncertainty around things like that.