Hacker News: rbetts

New comment by rbetts in "IBM orders US sales to locate near customers, RTO for cloud staff, DEI purge"

rbetts — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 19:37:34 +0000

The claim we are arguing is "anti-DEI stuff is predicated on the idea that civil rights are bad and that white (straight dude) rule is good.". You said this claim is an ad hominem fallacy. I quoted someone in the administration who is literally saying "competent white must be in charge," an exact example of what the claim is stating.

New comment by rbetts in "IBM orders US sales to locate near customers, RTO for cloud staff, DEI purge"

rbetts — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 17:02:27 +0000

Uh huh.

> U.S. State Department hire Darren Beattie wrote on X: "Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men."

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-darren-beattie-state...

New comment by rbetts in "ICE Agents Realize They Arrested Wrong Teen, Say 'Take Him Anyway'"

rbetts — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 15:03:26 +0000

I regularly receive responses from my reps here in Massachusetts. They also hold town hall meetings where you can ask questions and listen first-hand. I attended one last night and spoke 1:1 with my Congresswoman for a moment afterwards.

I'm sure there are districts where this is not the case in the US - but I hope everyone with concerns reaches out to their elected officials and takes an hour once or twice a year to listen to them in person when they are present in their districts.

If your rep doesn't answer you, tell your neighbors and vote for one who will.

New comment by rbetts in "America Is Backsliding Toward Its Most Polluted Era"

rbetts — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 14:28:20 +0000

There are some US States that participate in solar credit markets. Basically, utilities are required to purchase some number of solar production credits. Solar energy producers can sell their credits to these utilities.

https://www.srectrade.com/markets/rps/srec/

New comment by rbetts in "The 'Judicial Black Hole' of El Salvador's Prisons Is a Warning for Americans"

rbetts — Sat, 05 Apr 2025 14:42:29 +0000

Perhaps we agree that sustaining fair societies is a continual march of institutional and cultural building - not something imposed by a document or stamped by 1800's England. I would never argue that US-Iraq style nation building would succeed, for example. In fact, it is a counter example of violence being sufficient to get from 0 to 1. The US applied extreme violence over a population and failed to establish a persistent democratic order. The basis of civilization, as I read history, is more a consequence of surplus than violence.

I see, in the chaos of Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, as examples, the results of institutions and cultures effectively destroyed by outside violence, in many cases regressing from 1 to 0.

Thank you for sharing your point of view - certainly thought provoking for me.

New comment by rbetts in "The 'Judicial Black Hole' of El Salvador's Prisons Is a Warning for Americans"

rbetts — Sat, 05 Apr 2025 04:17:54 +0000

So easily you gloss over millions of Americans who fought to end slavery, who fought for women's right to vote, who fought for desegregation, who fought for labor rights,... The "comfortable life" in America isn't a 300 year old gift of extra judicial killings - it's a continued culture across 10 generations of individuals and communities fighting for ever fairer freedoms under a shared rule of law.

New comment by rbetts in "NOAA Weather will delete websites using Amazon, Google cloud services Saturday"

rbetts — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 14:17:58 +0000

They were fired by the administration. Looks to me like the system working. Government agency does something stupid. Congress investigates. Situation corrected. I'm looking forward to that oversight of the current administration. Enjoy your kite.

> In November 2024, FEMA fired a supervisor for directing relief workers to avoid assisting homes displaying support for President Donald Trump in the aftermath of Hurricane Milton. In response, the House Oversight Committee launched an investigation into political discrimination at FEMA and held a hearing with former Administrator Deanne Criswell. This week, FEMA informed the Oversight Committee that it has terminated three additional employees for failing to uphold the agency’s standards of conduct. The agency is also implementing additional training to reinforce that political affiliation must never be a factor in disaster relief efforts.

https://oversight.house.gov/release/comer-applauds-fema-for-...

New comment by rbetts in "US Administration announces 34% tariffs on China, 20% on EU"

rbetts — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 18:11:47 +0000

The problem isn't not enough money. It's not enough distribution of money. Income inequality in the US is at 1929 levels.

New comment by rbetts in "US Administration announces 34% tariffs on China, 20% on EU"

rbetts — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 12:17:32 +0000

It seems more likely that the EU will retaliate by taxing (or prohibiting) US services.

New comment by rbetts in "In Jail Without a Lawyer: How a Texas Town Fails Poor Defendants"

rbetts — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 14:33:17 +0000

It is easy to under-estimate the diversity across US States. I don't think many Europeans look at Hungary, Poland, or Bulgaria's justice systems and extend that to an opinion on EU justice in aggregate.

This isn't to excuse the abysmal state of affairs in large swathes of the US. Just to say that the US is rarely sufficiently uniform to summarize as a single entity, especially in topics like justice systems where States have significant sovereign power.

New comment by rbetts in "We're Still Not Done with Jesus"

rbetts — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 12:12:38 +0000

Diminishing sectarian hierarchy and placing the church above everything else is a clever strategy for an organization seeking to control your thoughts, your actions, your relationships, your financial obligations, and even your eternal fate.

New comment by rbetts in "Tencent's 'Hunyuan-T1'–The First Mamba-Powered Ultra-Large Model"

rbetts — Sun, 23 Mar 2025 19:20:39 +0000

A comparison of testing criticality across countries would be interesting to read if someone knows a decent reference. My sense (which I don't trust) is that test results matter at-least-as much or more in other places than they do in the US. For example, are England's A-levels or China's gaokao tests or Germany's Abitur tests more or less important than US SATs/ACTs?

New comment by rbetts in "What made the Irish famine so deadly"

rbetts — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 11:53:04 +0000

On the topic of the colonization of India, "Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India" is an illustrative book - especially if you want more context to draw conclusions about the scale of wealth taken from India.

New comment by rbetts in "Performance of the Python 3.14 tail-call interpreter"

rbetts — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 13:13:48 +0000

Thank you for doing work that makes python better for millions of people.

New comment by rbetts in "Intel delays $28B Ohio chip fabs to 2030"

rbetts — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 20:47:43 +0000

I'm unaware of ways to prevent abuse of the environment by corporations other than regulation. Do you have some evidence or documentation that these standards are applied differently to Space-X than other similar companies? Can you show some paper trail that the submission wasn't processed in good faith?

New comment by rbetts in "Intel delays $28B Ohio chip fabs to 2030"

rbetts — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 14:59:04 +0000

A quick search finds the environmental impact report that is the basis of this story: https://www.faa.gov/media/76836. To land a spacecraft in the ocean required a certification by the FAA. That certification required an environmental impact assessment.

Perhaps you prefer a world in which corporations can dump (even more) waste in the ocean?

New comment by rbetts in "The best way to use text embeddings portably is with Parquet and Polars"

rbetts — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 13:27:20 +0000

Columnar storage systems rarely store the raw value at fixed position. They store values as run length encoded, dictionary encoded, delta encoded, etc... and then store metadata about chunk of values for pruning at query time. So rarely can you seek to an offset and update a value. The compression achieved means less data to read from disk when doing large scans and lower storage costs for very-large-datasets that are largely immutable - some of the important benefits of columnar storage.

Also, many applications that require updates also update conditionally (update a where b = c). This requires re-synthesizing (at least some of) the row to make a comparison, another relatively expensive operation for a column store.

New comment by rbetts in "Ask HN: Do US tech firms realize the backlash growing in Europe?"

rbetts — Sat, 22 Feb 2025 15:01:37 +0000

The United States, by total value, is the second largest exporter in the world, with $1.86 trillion dollars in exports in 2023. https://oec.world/en/profile/country/usa.

New comment by rbetts in "DOGE puts $1 spending limit on government employee credit cards"

rbetts — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 22:46:42 +0000

Lately, I feel like I'm living in the William Gibson "Bridge" trilogy meets Douglas Adam's Zaphod Beeblebrox timeline.

New comment by rbetts in "Zed now predicts your next edit with Zeta, our new open model"

rbetts — Fri, 14 Feb 2025 13:09:24 +0000

I've been using Zed (with python) for the last few weeks (coming from vscode and nevim). There's a lot I like about Zed. My favorites include the speed and navigation via the symbol outline (and vim mode). I'd have a hard time going back to vscode. The LSP configuration, though, is not one of its best parts, for me. I ended up copy/pasting a few different ruff + pyright configs until one mostly worked and puzzled through how to map the settings from linked pyright docs into Zed yaml. Some better documentation for the configuration stanzas and how they map across the different tool's settings would be really helpful.

I still, for example, can't get Zed / LSP to provide auto-fix suggestions for missing imports. (Which seems like a common stumbling block: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/13522, https://github.com/zed-extensions/java/issues/20, https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/13281)

I'm sure given the breadth of LSPs, that they all have their own config, and use different project config files, makes it hard to document clearly. But it's an area that I hope bubbles up the roadmap in due course.