MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by azangru | 2025-04-14 09:49:23+00:00
I've skimmed through the comments; and seen that most people have commented on the cog in the machine thing, or on layoffs in general and how they suck.

To me, the shock from this blog post was about seeing a Chrome developer relations engineer whom I have grown to admire and who has been doing a stellar job educating web developers on new html and css features, get the sack. He was one of the best remaining speakers on web topics at the Chrome team (I am still sad about the departure of Paul Lewis and Jake Archibald); and produced a lot of top-notch educational materials (the CSS podcast; the conference talks; the demos).

What does this say about Google's attitude to web and to Chrome? What does this say about Google's commitment to developer excellence?

I understand that this is a personal tragedy for Adam; but for me personally, this is also a huge disillusionment in Google.
by dandelion9 | 2025-04-14 09:50:44+00:00
- 90% of abstraction is dreadful. That means _your_ particular abstraction is almost certainly bad, and we don't want to learn it.

- There is a lack of respect for the history of programming. IMO it has caused the industry to be stuck in a perpetual cycle of half-baked rediscovery.

- Similarly, a type of "FAANG-syndrome" exists and allows sub-par ideas to take over mind share of the industry. Once a technology picks up enough momentum, it will snowball and we're stuck working with legacy trash almost immediately. Developers legitimately seem to believe each trend is good.

- Our industry's shared vocabulary is too weakly defined. Phrases like "The right tool for the job" are ubiquitous but essentially meaningless and used as a form of shorthand "I currently feel this is correct". If we had a real professional lexicon, the first thing juniors would learn would be to enumerate reasoning to a precise degree. IME most "senior" devs can barely do it.
by mcherm | 2025-04-14 09:52:08+00:00
> US laid off employees also get 3-6 months of full pay and benefits.

Some employers may decide to give a few months of pay and benefits to laid off employees (although 6 months would be unusually large) but it is definitely not required and is not always done. Mass layoffs of 100+ people need to be announced 60 days ahead (but without naming who will be laid off) but there are no requirements for any kind of severance.
by spacebanana7 | 2025-04-14 09:52:38+00:00
Henry Ford made an interesting argument for printing money to fund productive enterprise in the context of a gold standard currency.

Just as it's okay to print money corresponding to central bank gold reserves, so too it's okay to print money to pay for the construction of the gold mine. Either way currency holders have real gold on the other side of the ledger.

Taking this one step further, it should be okay to print money to fund any enterprise whose output can be traded into gold. For example if we printed money to build a silver mine then the silver could be traded for gold at some ratio, so the currency holders would be in a protected position.

In fact whether the enterprise produces silver, timber, cars or software doesn't really matter as long the output is tradable for gold; and produces enough "gold value" to justify the newly printed currency.

I think the economics on this actually checks out. Although politicians in the real world would realistically use money printing for consumption rather than production.
by knorker | 2025-04-14 09:55:42+00:00
Well, two points to that: 1) If this person doesn't use Google products, then they are going out of their way to avoid Google. They are then very aware that their values are overruling technical benefits. 2) Surely if they are this invested in Firefox then they know who's been funding Firefox for years?

I'm typing this from within Firefox, which I switched to over the adblocking changes. But I'd say that claiming Google has contributed nothing to society is silly.

There's also the AI stuff with transformers, running the deepmind work with alphafold, alphago, alphazero. And GSOC.

And the papers on bigtable, spanner, mapreduce, etc… bootstrapping modern big data, spawning many opensource copycats.

And Android? I used a linux based Nokia N900 before Android, but clearly the world preferred Android.

Hell, Google Search itself was once a paradigm shifting improvement over alternatives.
by hnbad | 2025-04-14 09:56:28+00:00
> we're now entering some kind of abstract space that cares not for the stated intentions of humans

But that's the thing about systems: they may involve humans but they don't necessarily reflect the intentions of the individual humans involved. Even when a system is created with a stated intent (i.e. for a stated purpose) that doesn't mean it will actually behave in a way that aligns with this intent. Logically you then shouldn't take the human intent into consideration when analyzing a system's actual effects and outcomes (except to determine whether it aligns with those but that's secondary).

IOW the purpose of a system (i.e. "what it exists for") can be different from the purpose for which it was created (i.e. "what it is meant to do"). I guess "purpose" in this case is an overloaded term because the former more uses a meaning that more closely aligns with "function" (like the function of a predator in an ecosystem may be controlling prey population but that doesn't suggest intent nor design) and the latter uses a meaning that more closely aligns with "intent" (like during wildfires controlled burns are performed with the intent of stopping the spread of the wildfire).

But I'd say it's a stretch to apply this to statements like "the purpose of organisms is to increase entropy" because that strongly implies intent rather than function (because the latter could also be simply expressed as "organisms create entropy").
by hnlmorg | 2025-04-14 09:56:44+00:00
I've heard this type of comment a lot but in my experience there isn't any shortage of tech companies in the EU.

What EU regulations hamper isn't job creation, it's employee and customer exploitation. The distinction between "job creation" and "employee exploitation" is important.

What the former means in practice is that there is a massive contractor market in the UK and EU. So if companies need temporary staff, they'll hire a contractor. If they need permanent staff then they'll hire an employee. And contractors in the UK & EU are paid significantly more than their employee peers. In fact their pay is much more equivalent to US employees. So companies will make constant tradeoffs between more expensive labor for short-lived projects vs cheaper staff and knowledge retention but stricter employment laws. It's a fair trade most of the time.

So a more accurate way of comparing US vs EU businesses in terms of employees would be US employees vs EU contractors. Things then begin to look a lot more equivalent.
by rickdeckard | 2025-04-14 09:57:08+00:00
> We love to complain about Apple, but I don’t see many old timer Mac users now extolling the virtues of Windows.

This might be true, but macOS in general is not what made Apple one of the largest companies on the planet.

That's not about complaining, it's about correlation and causation. It's like saying Apple's Wi-Fi routers must be the best because Apple became one of the largest companies on the planet.

I'd say without the iOS ecosystem they would be a well-respected company in the premium tier of their industry, like Dyson or B&O.
by Terretta | 2025-04-14 09:57:21+00:00
Also missing, any discussion of equity-like or profit-participatory structures from LPs (limited partnerships).

Technologists joining one of these should know the "business domain" "partners" are either buying into or awarded partnership interests, but structures can be available for non-business domain roles (in firms that think technology isn't in their business domain cough), such as "profits interests", "synthetic equity", "phantom equity", or etc.*

If the firm has a product and you're helping build it, look for equity-like that let you not only share in profits (if any, most starting things don't have profits) but have a stake in capital events (from asset sale to IPO).

Think of these two forms as something like dividends and something like a combination of options and RSUs. If the profit component is intended as part of annual comp, it should pay at 100% from the start even if you don't "own" it until you vest. Meanwhile if it's a future reward, then both it and the capital-like would have a "tail" that remains in effect if profits or a capital event happens after you leave.

These are very complicated and very bespoke per firm since they are 'made out of' the partnership interests of the LP where ownership is handled as "capital accounts" and may have no accounting method for "goodwill" value separate from partner capital accounts. In such cases, generally partners have shaved off some portion of their rights and allocated those rights to employees, and the mechanisms of this "waterfall" amount to where you stand in that line if at all.

Ideally (a) seek advice from someone experienced with these that (b) you don't have to spend $1200 an hour on.

* Partnerships that understand their business domain is in the technology business — since technology is just another word for tools, and business humans should be tool crafters too — will be using this and have told you about it during interview, and it will all go more smoothly.
by Ukv | 2025-04-14 09:57:24+00:00
> But one of the most contentious bits — rivaling even the socialist policy proposal — was the suggestion that some differences were attributable to sheer luck: “chance acquaintances who steer you to one line of work rather than another, the range of jobs that happen to be available in a particular community when you are job hunting”

This use of "luck", just expressing that someone got a favorable/unfavorable outcome by random chance (or at least, unpredictable/chaotic happenstance), seems fine to me.

The version of luck in the "cursed" engagement ring example, where it's supposedly a supernatural force attached to some person or object increasing likelihood of those unfavorable outcomes, should in theory be feasible to debunk (but probably then comes with nebulous stipulations about how it evades being tested).
by noodletheworld | 2025-04-14 09:57:59+00:00
Some of the other issues are less important than others, but even if you accept “you have to take responsibility for yourself”, let me quote the article:

> As mentioned in my multi-agent systems post, LLM-reliability often negatively correlates with the amount of instructional context it’s provided. This is in stark contrast to most users, who (maybe deceived by AI hype marketing) believe that the answer to most of their problems will be solved by providing more data and integrations. I expect that as the servers get bigger (i.e. more tools) and users integrate more of them, an assistants performance will degrade all while increasing the cost of every single request. Applications may force the user to pick some subset of the total set of integrated tools to get around this.

I will rephrase it in stronger terms.

MCP does not scale.

It cannot scale beyond a certain threshold.

It is Impossible to add an unlimited number of tools to your agents context without negatively impacting the capability of your agent.

This is a fundamental limitation with the entire concept of MCP and needs addressing far more than auth problems, imo.

You will see posts like “MCP used to be good but now…” as people experience the effects of having many MCP servers enabled.

They interfere with each other.

This is fundamentally and utterly different from installing a package in any normal package system, where not interfering is a fundamental property of package management in general.

Thats the problem with MCP.

As an idea it is different to what people trivially expect from it.
by Retric | 2025-04-14 09:58:55+00:00
> In 2018 Trump cut $200m worth of aid to them [1] then in 2021 Biden restored it [2].

I am not referring to US politicians here. This has nothing to do with republicans and democrats. I am referring to what propaganda from Israel and Palestine directly + groups paid and unpaid supporting their agenda.

> Ok, but that's every politician

Politicians don’t just talk about the same thing one may highlight poverty and another jobs etc.

Here each side (Israel, Palestine) is taking about the same topic (location, war), trying to gain sympathy by talking about bad things that happen to specific people recently, etc

> Your argument reads like a general frustration with politics

If I was equally uninterested in politics and everyone was always talking about the deficit I might feel the same way. But this really does seem unusually similar.
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-04-14 09:59:06+00:00
GP glancing at the pseudo-code is certainly an efficient way to dismiss an article, but something tells me he missed the crucial sentence in the abstract:

>"We believe this work takes a first step TOWARDS introducing a new family of GRADIENT-FREE learning methods"

I.e. for the time being, authors can't convince themselves not to take advantage of efficient hw for taking gradients

(*Checks that Oxford University is not under sanctions*)
by spacebanana7 | 2025-04-14 09:59:18+00:00
Retirement savers should never react to the news cycle.

Even if you make a good trade and your hedge protects you from a downturn, you've "broken the seal" on trading. Amateur traders almost always lose money in the long run, and once you make a bunch of money on your first trade it's hard to stop. Like the curse of beginners luck on slot machines.
by chippiewill | 2025-04-14 10:00:01+00:00
The legal responsiveness for contractor disputes is definitely not as good as employment. Messing up employment relations in Europe ends up really expensive in most jurisdictions because there'll usually be some mix of unions, government agency or charity that'll have the employee's back.

Contractors don't have that kind of support pretty much anywhere (that's sort of the point), and it's just a standard contract dispute that lawyers argue about.
by pambrus | 2025-04-14 10:00:11+00:00
Khatabook, a leading Indian fintech company (YC 18), replaced Mixpanel with Mitzu and Segment with RudderStack to manage its massive scale of over 4 billion monthly events, achieving a 90% reduction in both data ingestion and analytics costs. By adopting a warehouse-native architecture centered on Snowflake, Khatabook enabled real-time, self-service analytics across teams while maintaining 100% data accuracy.
by lelanthran | 2025-04-14 10:01:03+00:00
If we're using "did not meet the stated goal" as a bar for success, then Java also "failed", because it was developed as an embedded systems language and only pivoted to enterprise applications after being a dismal and abject failure at the stated goal.

If Java is not a failure then neither is Go.

If Go is a failure then so is Java.

Personally I think it is inaccurate to judge a mainstream, popular and widely adopted language as a failure just because it did not meet the goal set at the initiation of the project, prior to even the first line of code getting written.
by EncomLab | 2025-04-14 10:01:46+00:00
"Complexity" is a hugely problematic term when used in this way - remember that entropy and complexity are related, but they are not interchangeable. A complex system can have lower entropy than a simpler system, and conversely, a system can have high entropy but be relatively simple. By mingling these terms without specifying objective reference points, it all just comes out as word salad.

This paper just reads like an attempt at sounding smart while actually saying little.
by danielovichdk | 2025-04-14 10:02:01+00:00
Been riding steel, carbon and titanium frames. Steel failed the most, especially after many years (+30) of service. Weldings doesn't last.

Carbon frames and forks I have seen in freak accidents. Like snap-cracking by not even hitting some hard. This too me has been pure structural issues, since with metal, it has always been the weldings.

Titanium I have seen tore apart as well, again all about the weldings.

As for component failures, I have experienced rim-walls explode due to brake heat, rimes fall apart on flat tires, chain snapping and seat post clamps suddenly break and riders losing their saddle :)

I am going for a ride in a few hours. Can't wait!
by lapcat | 2025-04-14 10:02:38+00:00
This article was actually posted 3 days ago. I saw it back then and read the comments. You can see the old timestamp here: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fnerdy.dev%2Fex-googl...

I think this is what HN calls the "second chance pool".

I absolutely hate when HN reposts an article and alters/falsifies the timestamps. It's so incredibly misleading.
by ithkuil | 2025-04-14 10:03:24+00:00
ok, but my answer was about was how to react to request pacing.

If the abuser is using request pacing to make less request then that's making the abuser less abusive. If you're still complaining that request pacing is not pacing the requests down enough because the pacing is designed to just not bring your server down and instead make you consume money, then you can counteract that just by tuning the rate limiting even further down.

The 10s of thousands distinct IP address is another (and perfectly valid) issue, but it was not the point I answered to.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-04-14 10:03:30+00:00
> you know your program can get even faster than corresponding C/C++ programs

I have seen this argument a few times here are HN. To be clear, I interpret your phrase that Rust "will eventually" be faster than C or C++. (If I read wrong, please correct.) However, I have never seen any compelling evidence that demonstrates equivalent Rust code is faster than C or C++ code. Some lightly Googling tells me that their speeds are roughly equivalent (within 1-2%).
by mcny | 2025-04-14 10:04:57+00:00
> Oh, and of course my house.

It is so frustrating explaining to people that for the ordinary folks who only own one home or even a dozen homes, it is NOT a good thing that home values are reliably trending up over time.

If you own thousands, sure. But everybody needs somewhere to live do if you own one home, you don't really come up on top.
by logicchains | 2025-04-14 10:07:22+00:00
That's how the current system works too: newly created money goes through the banks, and so the ones who spend it first (and benefit from seigniorage) are the financial industry and its customers: corporations borrowing to invest in productive activity. The key thing to note is that this system (and Ford's) represents a system of continuous wealth transfer from the working class (who hold most of their money in cash or low interest savings accounts, and suffer the most from inflation) to the owners of the means of production.
by stefanfis | 2025-04-14 10:08:48+00:00
Yes, I see the reasoning, but it really is a tiny fraction of mankind dealing with this issues. And, as you said, there’s tech for that. One design flaw of your solution is the complicated math to go from classic time to GPTS. Time zones may be annoying, but in most cases, we just have to add full hours. New York is six hours behind the time of central Europe. That is easy math. Another aspect, perhaps I missed it: How does GPTS handle daylight savings, especially when some regions switch on different days? The conversion from GPTS to classic time and vice versa has always to be dependent on the current location. And finally, what about frequent travelers? Any time zone they visit will have vastly different opening times of shops or bars. They’d be forced to do the math everytime.
by cik | 2025-04-14 10:09:47+00:00
It depends which series of risks (or sequences) trouble you. Global diversification, in this instance has proven problematic - as evident by the varying (related) drops.

Personally, I view my market investments as already fixed. I'd like a non-correlated asset, which means I'm looking at real estate. In my case, this goal isn't growth, inasmuch as defensive capital, or forced savings. I have the exposures you do, but added several, multi currency risks.
by jrmg | 2025-04-14 10:10:59+00:00
And if house prices are lower, it’s cheaper for you to get a better house. I always try to think of our house as ‘well, no matter the economy at least we own a house to live in’ rather than think of its monetary value.

House prices being higher are good if you are planning to downgrade when the children leave the nest though. Or I guess if you reverse-mortgage it when you retire.
by mycatisblack | 2025-04-14 10:11:33+00:00
Having worked in a (now defunct) US co in West-EU I can say it’s a subtle blend of the two. The layoff was announced, shortly after a few people received a call by HR, were escorted to their desk by security and had to turn in all company belongings on the spot. They were not allowed to touch a computer or telephone and were then escorted out of the premises. Afterwards, we learned that they had received a severance package that met local rules.

Most of my colleagues were shocked by the treatment. Moral took a dive after that.
by ssrc | 2025-04-14 10:11:35+00:00
What's remarkable about Infocom's z-machine is the level of sophistication and polish vs the intended application, maybe unsurprising coming from MIT graduates with access to a PDP-10 as a development platform. Otherwise the use of virtual machines was, maybe not common, but not unusual.

* TinyBasic (1975) was specified (and sometimes implemented) as a VM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_BASIC

* Apple Pascal (1979) was a UCSD Pascal system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Pascal

* The COSMAC VIP computer/console's (1977) games were programmed in CHIP-8, a VM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIP-8

* Scott Adams' text adventures (1978+) used an application-specific VM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_International

* Wozniak's SWEET16 contained in Apple II Integer Basic (1977) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWEET16

* If you count Forth as a VM, it was pretty common. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forth_(programming_language)
by rickdeckard | 2025-04-14 10:11:45+00:00
From my experience that often just prolongs the process, but doesn't change the management culture.

An employee decided to be laid off is equally written off immediately, it's just delegated to the regional/local HR to "manage the rest".

If you're not escorted off-premise, you get to enjoy some additional days/weeks of colleagues and managers telling you how surprised they were...
by lesostep | 2025-04-14 10:12:02+00:00
>> many web forum software that's left and not enshittified yet that came after the PHP age

I am a part of a community that is run on a slightly modded FluxBB. It has more comments per hour than hacker news. Maybe even 10 times more. And new threads are started almost daily. I think this particular forum is almost ten years old? We did change platforms, but this was more then 7 years ago for sure.

And the code base isn't maintained, since moderators aren't very tech savvy.

That's to say: php forums are pretty robust, don't discount them! You can always migrate, if something better will come up. Older versions are just as good, as the enshittified ones.
by fragmede | 2025-04-14 10:12:40+00:00
If you have a better idea you could get millions in VC funding to pursue that. Chat is where it's at. It's fine to think that it's not gonna be the be-all and end-all of AI, but it's pretty fundamentally how we interact with each other, so I don't see it going away any time soon. There's also a thing as being too generic. So really they just hit this sweet spot.