Spending programs work that way. Money gets authorized for certain things but people have to fill out paperwork and do this and that and it's common for it not to all get spent.
For instance the 'Inflation Reduction Act' authorized a certain amount of spending to build pipeline networks to capture carbon from industrial sites and inject them underground.
Turns out the Midwest doesn't want it and they probably won't get as many takers down South.
People quote eye-popping numbers for Ukraine aid but the fact is this is mostly sending them weapons that we already bought. Maybe we replace them, maybe we don't, maybe we replace them with something better. Weapons have a shelf-life and after a certain point you either have to use them in anger or use them for training or dismantle them at great expense. Might as well give them to somebody who needs them. (e.g. the world is full of anti-ship missile that are just slightly expired, probably good enough if you want to use them in anger)
The context of this was that Zelensky was being asked about corruption in Ukraine, and he was hinting that maybe USAID and State Dept might also have a problem.
I don't think it would be corruption there tbh. More like bureaucracy, red tape. Like the OP says a lot of such funding is conditional or earmarked for specific things and checking all that is difficult.
100% appropriate for a small to medium business with under 50 employees. The founder really is the face of the company full stop.
For Delta Airlines or a university with 20,000 students the media doesn't expect to hear straight from the president. When they do offer that audience to the media it is something special and they very much are expecting to get hagiography for it.
I read On Lisp by Graham recently and first thought "this is the best programming book I read in a while", and then had the urge to make copy editing kind of changes "he didn't define nconc" and then thought "if he was using Clojure he wouldn't be fighting with nconc", and by the end thought "most of the magic is in functions, mostly he gets efficiency out of macros, the one case that really needs macros is the use of continuations" and "I'm disappointed he didn't write any macros that do a real tree transformation"
Then a few weeks later I came to the conclusion that Python is the new Lisp when it comes to metaprogramming. (and async in Python does the same thing that he coded up with continuations.) I think homoiconicity and the parenthesis are a red herring, the real problem is that we're still stuck with parser generators that aren't composable. You really ought to be able to add
unless(X) { ... }
to Java by adding 1 production to the grammar, a new object for the AST tree, and a transformation for the compiler that rewrites to
if(!X) { ... }
probably the actual code would be smaller than the POM file if the compiler was built as if extensibility mattered.
Almost all the examples in this book (which claims to be a tutorial for Common Lisp programming)
are straightforward to code up in Python. The main retort to this I hear from Common Lisp enthusiasts is that some CL implementations are faster, which is true. Still, most languages today have a big helping of "Lisp, the good parts". Maybe some day the Rustifarians will realize the wide-ranging impacts of garbage collection, not least that you can smack together an unlimited number of frameworks and libraries into one program and never have to think about making the memory allocation and deallocation match up.
Just imagine what a godawful mess it would be to write really complex libraries that are supposed to be composable in C. (I'm going to argue this is why there is no 'npm' or 'maven' for C)
The point of programming C is it is very low level and you have complete control over memory allocation so you're losing much of the benefit of C if you have a one-size-fits-all answer.
The application might, in some cases, pass the library a buffer that it already allocated and tell the library to use it. In other cases the application might give the library malloc and free functions to use. It gets complicated if the application and library are sharing complicated data structures with a network of pointers.
In simple cases you can find an answer that makes sense, but in general the application doesn't know if a library is done with some memory and the library doesn't know if the application is done with it. But the garbage collector knows!
It is the same story in Rust, you can design some scheme that satisfies the borrow checker in some particular domain but the only thing that works in general is to make everything reference counted, but at least Rust gives you that options, although the "no circular references" problem is also one of those design-limiting features, as everything has to be a tree or a DAG, not a general purpose graph.
Personally I am inclined to flag any link to X, but especially any link to an Elon Musk post.
I'd have no problem with the content if it was in the mainstream media or some kind of analysis on a blog.
My own taxes are crazy because my wife runs a riding academy, we have a rental house, etc.
My son was a candidate for the 1040EZ back in the day (he only had a W-2) but Direct File was an unmitigated disaster for him last year because he had trouble creating an account, probably because he'd never filed a tax return.
While we were on the phone trying to get support (we put it off too long) I was able to download the 1040 and the corresponding form from New York and we filled it out, hung up, and mailed it the next day.
I often find primary sources of news more interesting than analysis that mostly summarizes widely-known facts. Nothing against, say, The Verge -- but their article about this will probably just summarize things folks here already know about the program. I also don't think, for example, linking here is a better experience for HN: https://www.rawstory.com/elon-musk-irs-easy-filing/ or the right wing version: https://nypost.com/2025/02/03/us-news/elon-musk-claims-far-l...
And with traditional news outlets, sometimes they make it impossible to find the actual primary source because they refuse to hyperlink things (though the Verge is good about that).
Then again, if the entire front page were X links, I'd find that less interesting than more thoughtful, longer analysis. So I agree and disagree.
My take is that POSSE [1] is the way to go. (Though I really should get back to blogging to prove my commitment)
Big F Federation in the Fediverse is less important in my mind than the small-f federation that I see something cool on Mastodon I should be able to link to it from Bluesky or Threads or whatever. The notifications and all that are just the cherry on top.
The principled reason to "never link to X" is that X will suppress your visibility if you link out of X. If X punishes you from linking to an HN discussion I think HN shouldn't be linking back to X. The same holds true for Facebook, Threads and Instagram, though it is unusual for someone to get the idea that the HN audience would care about any content on those sites.
There's the "Sears" kind of photo where somebody unskilled works a camera installed in a studio which is not too expensive.
There's something a step up from that (maybe $100) where a pro photographer does the same thing.
I do environmental portraits, often with a 90mm or 135mm prime, sometimes with a wide zoom. Sometimes I discover places where I can get a great photograph of anybody in terms of lighting and background. It can be really special if you get a photo of somebody in an environment that's special to them but I don't think that's what you want for a dating site. But one of my generic environment shots would really be a winner, and I can shoot one in ten minutes inclusive of the walk to and from my office.
I'm not good at the people part of it. Some people photograph really well always (the alumni relations guy from my school, a disabled friend who might be high-functioning autistic) other people (me, my wife, my son) just don't. I can get a good photograph of somebody like that despite themselves but I have to try many sessions.
I've been doing sports photography seriously for about two years, lately I've come to see it as "people photography" and realized I do better if I think about it in terms of "getting pictures that make the players look great" as opposed to "following the ball". I am doing a volunteer gig that I'm treating as an audition for paying work and I'm planning to get a bunch of portraits out of it, so far as the technical stuff I went to the arena with my neurodivergent friend and used him as a stand-in. Now that I think about it I have two weeks to do something about the people side.
(1) I used to make those kind of non-informative scatter plots with xvgr when I was a grad student, this package does a great job for those kind of cases
even if you don't use it you can copy its patterns to make designs that work
(2) An obvious commercial offering for guys is a photography package. About 20 years ago I went to the biggest photog in my town and my publisher paid $100 for a headshot that was just a junior photog in the studio. If you were a bride you would get premium hair and makeup to go with your photography, even if you were appearing on TV you would probably get a little hair and makeup help.
(3) With the right choice architecture you could control things such as "the percentage of people that you like" or "the number of likes that you receive". For instance if you were going just on looks it would be easy to show people a stack of 10 photos and have them sort them in attractiveness; you could also show pairs of profiles and pick an ELO for each one. If you look at it as a relative ranking process you can peel off whatever percentage off the top that you want.
An obvious objection is that given such a choice the "hot" people will be the only ones that get chosen but a counter to that is that you can put an upper limit on how many "likes" somebody gets by not showing them to people.
This contradicts some things he says later on about things that help the apps retain people, but from the viewpoint of making an app that "works", girls who are looking for commitment really aren't benefiting from seeing profiles from hot guys who get a lot of attention and provide nothing but casual sex.
Competition makes life better, is my point of view. I started using electronic communication around 1985 when I got a 300 baud modem and I was dialing into BBS [1] with a TRS-80 Color Computer with a 32-column wide screen.
My expectation since then was that every few years there was going to be a new scene, at any given time I'd be involved in a few scenes, sometimes old scenes were going to fall away.
This cycle seemed to be interrupted around the time Facebook (and Twitter) came around. Some of it might be that normies aren't so inclined to be multi-scene. Some of it is that Zuckerberg knew what happened to MySpace and ever since he's been terrified that it will happen to Facebook. He know it's a matter of time, which is why he is "all in" on VR.
I've heard a lot about journalists, professors and other lefty "expert" types who feel stuck on X because that is where their audience is, they've been driven to Bluesky in waves and Bluesky has been giving them a lot of visibility with the algorithmic feed [2]
I think the basic problem is that these people think they have to commit to one platform, I think the real answer is
and that people should cultivate audiences across many platforms. I think people who were making the most in social in 2011 were thinking this way (it was the age you could get funding for something like id.me)
I think Bluesky is the best thing going. The best think about it is that they are not suppressing outside links (yet) so it fits the POSSE lifestyle. Actually I like the Threads approach to moderation that is even harsher about suppressing emotionally negative viral content but I don't like the anti-link policy. I'd be on that too, but for some reason they won't let me make an Instagram account and I don't know why.
[2] People think it's doesn't have one, but it does. Until two weeks ago I really loved my "Discover" feed because it was 75% less toxic (I looked at a N=100 sample) than my "Following" feed. In the past two weeks it has been overwhelmed with politics, particularly it seems to be including a sub-stream of posts from authors who also show up in a "suggested users" you can follow. It's trying hard to help these people get an audience and get their posts read in the immediate term so they feel like they can switch.
I sure hope they quit showing me politics in my "Discover" feed because there is only so much I can take thoug.
I've worked for orgs that thought about Kubernetes but not any that pulled the trigger. Let's face it, we used to run web sites that had millions of users out of a single instance of mysql 20 years ago. You could fit all the people who admin web sites that really need distributed systems in a big conference hall in Las Vegas, if you deleted Google you could fit them all in the Moscone Center. (SV companies wouldn't send a bunch of kids to Vegas though because they wouldn't trust not to get in them w/ the alcohol, the cards and the hookers)
I'm not impressed that anybody got something done in two years with 100 engineers that got paid $300,000 per year and aren't saving a dime because they're paying it all to landlords who were far sighted enough to buy property around the San Francisco bay before there was a Google. I am impressed when 2 or 3 people that could have starred in a Wix commercial and live in a flyover state get something done over the weekend.
I love being able to make a smart RSS reader, an image sorter that works with my tablet and my VR headset, web applications for car dealers and vineyards, social networks for secret societies and a great web site for searching public opinion data that makes our competitors look like a bad dream. Sure it took me a while to stop worrying and love React but I think it's a great time to be alive.
For instance the 'Inflation Reduction Act' authorized a certain amount of spending to build pipeline networks to capture carbon from industrial sites and inject them underground.
Turns out the Midwest doesn't want it and they probably won't get as many takers down South.
People quote eye-popping numbers for Ukraine aid but the fact is this is mostly sending them weapons that we already bought. Maybe we replace them, maybe we don't, maybe we replace them with something better. Weapons have a shelf-life and after a certain point you either have to use them in anger or use them for training or dismantle them at great expense. Might as well give them to somebody who needs them. (e.g. the world is full of anti-ship missile that are just slightly expired, probably good enough if you want to use them in anger)
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