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Evaporative cooling (like a "swamp cooler" for residential homes) is how most data centers in the US are cooled. The water is primarily consumed by evaporation. When you continually evaporate water from a system, eventually the remaining water in the system gets concentrated in salts and other minerals and is dumped and replaced with fresh water.

Much of the day/season, evaporative cooling is not needed and data centers can pull in outside air. Ultimately you state the main reason in your comment: using outside air + evaporative cooling is cheaper and consumes less power than any other approach.

In a lot of cases, even if the server chips themselves are liquid cooled (for example, in an NVIDIA GB200 rack), then liquid is then air cooled through a cooling distribution unit (basically a giant radiator.


It's a shame that Lua did not evolve in a more backwards-compatible manner. In addition to Roblox, lots of others projects started adopting Lua 5.1 as a scripting language in the late 00s. Lua itself is now at 5.4, but it did not keep backwards compatibility. LuaJIT and related projects pretty much only support 5.1. It's similar to the situation Python had with 2.x/3.x, except that the majority of Lua users I am aware of are preferring to stay with the older 5.1.


I think it's even worse than that, luau and luaJIT have evolved in different directions than the official lua project, such that they are now all sublty incompatible with each others. They all branch from lua 5.1 but it feels like there isn't an offical standard anymore.


At the very least, there's a common core of Lua 5.1 that works across Luau, LuaJIT, and PUC Lua, so it's not as if there's no standardization here. We definitely aspire to include _more_ than just Lua 5.1 in Luau though.


The huge difference is that the Lua community doesn't attack people publicly for maintaining backward compatibility, so it's generally pretty easy to write code that works across a wide range of Lua versions.


It's hard to get reliable numbers on this but I believe 5.1 and 5.2 are both more popular than 5.4 which has been out for five years now. And I don't think 5.3 ever surpassed either of them. I'm not sure about luajit it gets a lot of attention but I don't see it around all that much.


LuaJIT includes features from newer Lua versions (5.2 and 5.3), and more.

See https://luajit.org/extensions.html.


I agree with starting with a specific repair is ideal. One thing about electronic repair is devices that need repair and are easier to repair will often have walkthroughs on forums, blogs, or YouTube. Starting with projects that others have solved will be an easier ramp up than starting with an obscure repair.

For example, I had a pair of Samsung LCD monitors that stopped working. I looked up how to repair them and found that they suffered from leaking capacitors. Some video showed how to identify the capacitors and how to desolder an solder replacements. I followed the instructions and got the monitors working again. Another example is I have a Delco car radio from the 90s with burnt out illumination bulbs. Again there are walkthroughs on repairing these.


For in-person roles in larger cities, there is usually one or more tech community Slack groups with a job channel. It's a good format because often the roles are posted by a member of the community, so you can check their message history or DM them for questions.


The IRS does have an option for tax payers to electronically fill and file those mail-in forms directly. [0] No printing or mailing required, and there's no income limit. It's called Free File Fillable Forms, and I've used it for the past 4 tax years.

[0] https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/free-file-fillable-form...


Having grown up in Arizona and attended ASU, ASU has always been this way. ASU has always accepted students at a high rate and has always been sure to structure degrees and classes to meet existing accreditations. "New American University" has always been more marketing rather than some radical change. There are several public universities with similar goals across the country, such as Colorado State or Indiana.

It's a great model for churning out highly educated workers. We need that, and there is a place for higher educational institutions that do that well. But for all of its graduates, ASU doesn't produce many thinkers, founders, philosophers—people who are going to move the needle of our society. To see this, compare the notable alumni lists of, say, ASU and Stanford (both founded in the same year). Look at Turing Award recipients, Nobel Laureates, etc. It's not a new American university - ASU is the same as it's always been.

When I look at the largest universities in the US by enrollment, I think the closest university to a true "New American University" is UIUC (no affiliation) in Illinois. Enrollment is in the top 10, similar in size to ASU. They have multiple programs ranked in the top 10 including computer science. While past success doesn't predict the future, there are some heavy hitters on the UIUC alumni list - Marc Andreessen, Steve Chen, Max Levchin. Would love if anyone happend to attend both ASU and UIUC and could compare the two.


As a CS faculty member at Illinois (aka UIUC), I don't think that we fit this model.

At least according to my quick reading of the article, ASU has a significant focus on inclusion as a core value. Overall Illinois does admit a large percentage of applicants: about 50% over recent years. (The number dropped a bit after we began participating in the Common App, which makes it easier for students to increase the number of institutions they apply to.)

However, that number hides the fact that admission to top programs like computer science is extremely selective and exclusive. Admission rates to CS have been around 7% recently. And while we've made a CS minor somewhat more accessible, we've also closed down pathways that allowed students to start at Illinois and transfer into a computer science degree. (At this point that's pretty much impossible.) We do have blended CS+X degree programs that combine core studies in computer science with other areas, and those are less selective, but they have their own limitations—specifically, having to complete a lot of coursework in some other area that may not interest you.

I think what's fooling you about Illinois is the fairly odd combination of a highly-selective department (CS) embedded in a less-selective institution. I'm sure that there are other similar pairings, but overall this is somewhat unusual. If you think about other top-tier CS departments—Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, CMU—most are a part of an equally-selective institution.

So with Illinois you're getting the cache of an exclusive department combined with the high acceptance rate of an inclusive public land-grant university. But on some level this is a mirage created by colocated entities reflecting different value systems. And, unlike places like Berkeley and Virginia, which have been trying to admit more students into computing programs, no similar efforts are underway here at Illinois. (To my dismay.)

Overall, unfortunately it's still very obvious to me that exclusivity is part of what we're selling to students as a core value of our degree program. You're special if you got in—just because a lot of other people didn't. Kudos to anyone moving away from this kind of misguided thinking.


I imagine location is a big part. That said it's probably an unfair comparison to put a wealthy private school to a public school, especially when prestige is so essentially self-reinforcing. ASU is obviously a fantastic school, but it's ability to offer attractive faculty positions to top researchers will be limited compared to schools that are essentially the educational arm of a hedge fund.

You bring up Stanford, a school with a sort of comparable start historically would be Clark University (which might surprise some it's notability has somewhat waned in this century). I think Clark's trajectory would demonstrate the importance of location. Both UIUC and Stanford have enough nearby schools where it doesn't really compete heavily for resources, but also enough where you get strong collaborative efforts. There's also a technology bias in both who we're looking at as notable alumni, as well as where both schools are pretty much best known for. If we were talking about financiers, we'd probably see more UMich and UVA I'd hazard.


I know that UIUC is huge, but my understanding has always been that it was extremely difficult to gain admission to. Northern Illinois, Iowa and Purdue are filled with kids that couldn't get in...


UIUC published stats for 2022[1]: 1 in 4 for engineering and business (roughly top-50 university odds), 1 in 15 for computer science (roughly top-10 university odds), a coin flip or better for most other majors. General admit seems pretty relaxed at 44.8%.

[1] https://www.admissions.illinois.edu/apply/freshman/admit-rat...


Thanks, that's better than I had imagined.


Usually a combination of the following:

- Delivering on business goals

- Hiring and retention

- Growing and promoting engineers

- Feedback from engineers

One big difference in determining performance for a manager versus an engineer is the length of the feedback cycle. A software developer can start getting feedback after a few code commits. A manager needs a few months at a minimum at most companies to assess progress towards goals, hiring, etc. Unfortunately this means a bad manager can wreak havoc and jump ship before upper management notices.


Criteria:

- Compensation: This is one of the few things that I know before accepting a role. The larger the company the more comp I expect.

- Culture: generally I look for roles where I could wear any hat. Anywhere where employees are empowered to fix problems.

Red flags:

- Team activities: I do not want to play volleyball, paintball, or go to the CEO's house for cornhole on the weekend. Occasional lunch or happy hour is fine.

- Adtech, blockchain, or crypto: nothing against folks who work at companies in these spaces, but I have never been interested in these domains and probably never will be.


My biggest regret is drifting apart from family members and friends. I moved to a new state which was great for my marriage and my career, but it has slowly distanced me from the rest of my family.


I quit a previous job in 2016. The role had transitioned from software development to system administration. I realized it was no different for my career's future to just stay home instead of upgrading build servers. I gave a two and a half week notice and quit.

I was fortunate to have little debt, plenty of savings, and a supportive spouse. I ended up playing a lot of Counter-Strike Global Offensive and other computer games. I attended more meetups. I applied and interviewed for jobs that sounded interesting. I turned down two offers and accepted a third. In total, I took 9 months off work.

There's a piece of me that wished I had been more productive during that time off. But it was relaxing, and I attribute that time off as my best career move yet. The job I finally took paid 2x more to start and I still feel like I am thriving at my "new" job 5 years in.


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