(I have the same feelings as mhh__ in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38967529. Just a remarkable and extremely slow miscarriage of justice.)

I love peoplemovers (like the Hong Kong Central-Mid Level escalators and the delightfully bouncy SFO walkways) and always wondered what would have to be different for us to get super-fast ones for transit.

In Boston, IMO they would be at least as good as the Green Line :)

The past year or so of published literature on LLMs has been kind of hilarious because there is a substantial chunk of stuff whose contribution is "putting this extra English sentence into the input produces measurably better output".

It's like watching alchemists puzzle out chemistry, or like watching wizards fill their spellbooks. What a cool time.

In this vein I think about nelhage's "Computers Can Be Understood" from time to time - https://blog.nelhage.com/post/computers-can-be-understood/ .

Some of the best ambassadors for Brutalist architecture I've experienced are the Barbican in London and the Bonaventure in Los Angeles. They make good spaces for people.

Did the company just write off that shipment and keep selling them?

I went looking for articles about this recently and couldn't find them any more. Did I imagine this happening?

* the 2019 update that someone re-evaluated the risks and thinks the retrofit might not have been necessary after all ( https://www.nist.gov/publications/wind-effects-tall-building... )

* the identification of the person who called LeMessurier in 1978 and whose questions made him redo the math (whose name is not listed in the New Yorker article) as Lee DeCarolis ( https://onlineethics.org/node/41606 )

In the version of the story I read, Diane Hartley flagged the risk to the engineer by writing a whole thesis about the building (see e.g. writeup at https://www.lemessurier.com/sites/default/files/publications... and https://onlineethics.org/cases/engineers-and-scientists-beha... ).

It's interesting how, the closer you look, reality grows more complex than the stories we tell about it.

* each person in the room pulls up the stem when their individual second hand is pointing at 0, and also sets the time to the prearranged hour/minute,

* then everyone waits a bit longer until this is done;

* after another minute, everyone pushes down the stem simultaneously

Is there an alternative where you could have some way to force your second hand to the 0 position rather than waiting up to a minute for it to get there on its own then freeze it?

I do see why hacking is nice for time zone changes.

I like the suggestion to rethink whether you actually need to be doing asynchronous computing with a message broker/queue/stream or whether you can represent your work another way.

I loved seeing the genuine joy our PMs had whenever they found an honest to goodness calc bug and could get it reproduced and fixed in The State Machine. It was also a delight to see the web app approach parity with the desktop client experience -- we got to listen to a wide swath of users and build out the stuff we thought would be most useful to the most folks. And I loved our group PM's insight about what the heck Excel could be good for versus purpose built BI tools, other web sheet apps, pure SQL, etc.

This is a very fun kind of product to create and it's awesome that you were able to ship it in a way people could use!

I originally picked up the book because I was trying to understand Euler's polyhedral formula better -- which in retrospect is kind of like reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance because you wanted to fix a motorcycle.

I'm not wired for pure math -- I loved real analysis then quit while I was ahead. Still it's fun to pretend sometimes, and Lakatos does a great job of making you feel like you're learning inside knowledge about what mathematicians do. He introduces fun concepts like "monster-barring" (the way people sometimes carve out special cases in a proof when they encounter counterexamples).

I've never made it the whole way through, but I like to go back every few months and absorb a little more.

edit to add: I just now skimmed the author's Wikipedia entry and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's story about the author's interaction with someone named Éva Izsák and I have a ton of questions.