MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by saghm | 2025-11-29 04:15:18+00:00
I'm not sure, mostly because it's hard for me to feel confident in figuring out what to attribute to that versus other facets of how he did things. Overall, I have an extremely positive view of how he ran things, but I also personally found him great at a lot of the other things that go into a technical leadership position (making good decisions about what to prioritize, having a consistent vision of what our long-term goals were, not falling into the trap of micro-management, having enough technical skill to be able to help out with the higher-level issues while still respecting the areas where others were more knowledgeable, going out of his way to try to address issues that people raised with the idea that retaining talent long-term was hugely important, etc.), so I honestly don't know how much things would have been different if he didn't also have this level of retention of details. It was impressive still though, not in small part because I don't have any trouble imagining someone in his position just genuinely not caring enough to do it even if they were capable.

Maybe the genuineness that it seemed to come from really is what made the difference in the long run; I obviously don't know how everyone else felt about it, but in other jobs I haven't found it particularly difficult to notice when the general perception of higher-level managers is a lot more positive or negative than my own, so my instinct is that most people probably also liked him, and I do think that makes some amount of difference. Having a "glue" person who is more detail-oriented is probably fine if the reason the actual authority figure doesn't retain the details is just not having that particular skill, but if it's because they genuinely think that the people beneath them in the org chart are just resources they can use to solve problems rather than actual people who will work better in the long term if treated well, then no, I don't think it would be as effective.
by bigiain | 2025-11-29 04:20:28+00:00
I'm not sure that's necessarily "opposite"?

I feel much the same as the article author in that

"this place is for doing this thing, now you do it too"

Is somehow powerfully motivating. But at least for me it's about the place, not the other people in the place.

I had the same covid-related journey from an office worker to unexpectedly fully remote. But I'm also lucky/privileged enough to be able to dedicate a room in my house that's quite separate from the rest of the house, and for me that's "where I work". I had coworkers who started out having to work from their kitchen table, some with housemates or children around - pretty sure that would have completely killed my productivity.

I do sometimes resent losing that room, effectively subsidising my boss by relieving his office rent costs. It used to be my "workshop" where I used my 3D printers, built drones, tinkered with electronics, and repaired stuff that broke - and I just don't do those things much any more because going into that room now feels way to much like "work" not "hobby or play".
by saghm | 2025-11-29 04:21:10+00:00
I don't think that's equivalent. If you were responsible for trying to make sure each of those students were getting good grades, keeping track of each of their GPAs, and getting involved proactively whenever signs that someone's grades might be slipping, that might be comparable. There's a difference between "knowing something general about each person" and being able to keep track of the same general detail about all of them and not ever getting mixed up. If anything, I'd imagine that the facts known about each person were more likely to be things that stood out compared to the others rather than 200 difference instances of the same detail.
by kragen | 2025-11-29 04:21:15+00:00
It's just that people are somewhat rational.

There are no big wins left in bridge building, so there is no justification for taking big risks. Also, in most software project failures, the only cost is people's time; no animals are harmed, no irreplaceable antique guitars are smashed, no ecosystems are damaged, and no buses of schoolchildren plunge screaming into an abyss.

Your software startup didn't get funded? Well, you can go back and finish college.
by spankibalt | 2025-11-29 04:22:05+00:00
Abnormal is a completely unscientific and immoral word to use in the context of consentual sexual behaviors for it is factually wrong (see the distribution of homosexual or bisexual behaviors in mammal species including humans), and also invoking a moral presciptive by declaration "what should be normal" via telling other people what "is not normal".

You fall into the same trap ("non-standard", "atypical"); you just stepped on the euphemism treadmill.
by saghm | 2025-11-29 04:23:28+00:00
I responded to a similar question in more detail from a sibling comment, so I won't repeat it all here, but to briefly summarize: yes, I think he was a great leader, but it's hard for me to tell whether it had much to do with that capability specifically. I certainly don't think it's a requirement for a great leader, but I also think it probably helped at least a little, even if it just ended up being a minor convenience for him and one of many small signals that helped convey that he genuinely cared about trying to do his job well.
by g4cg54g54 | 2025-11-29 04:23:51+00:00
without an airport near "my current location" is my goto. is there a direct link for this? (otherwise i may hack together some userscript that clicks that button for me...)

"my assumption" would have been some x/y/angle/zoom params on the url, maybe even with some of the settings encoded in... (autorotate, render-radius or terrain height would be first to come to mind)

my "not getting any tiles" must have been 2 or 3 days ago - and from the last time i had to mess with tiles i do remember that to be fairly ugly in regards to performance/scaling so i feel you ;)

also addon after trying the "direct link to an airport": - this still loads at the random-US-airport first. with some tweaking there is likely an entire tilefetch you can save^

thx!
by cyberax | 2025-11-29 04:24:10+00:00
> Ultimately Kerberos is used to authenticated basically everything in a Windows on-prem environment and in a way that is largely transparent to the user. Silent SSO is a very nice feature.

When it works. And when it doesn't work (which is most of the time if you're outside of corporate LAN) you simply can't debug what's happening.

> MIT Kerberos on Linux is not really compatible with Windows Kerberos

It actually is! Long, long time ago I managed to join Windows into a pure Kerberos domain. Everything worked, including things like GSSAPI authentication in Putty or MySQL. It involved some `ksetup.exe` incantations, I think this guide might be still relevant: https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19316-01/820-3746/gisqf/index.ht...

Of course, there was no group synchronization (because no AD).

That was about 20 years ago. Back then, I was working on helping companies migrate to Linux, and I toyed with an idea of having a background service to periodically sync groups from the Linux SMB server with the local users.
by rapjr9 | 2025-11-29 04:24:21+00:00
Yes, it was supposed to be an alternative graphic for a cockpit radar display in a jet fighter. The goal for any such display is to convey maximum information at a glance. I got feedback from a fighter pilot who said he wouldn't use it. Most people don't think in 3D, they think in 2D. Pilots have to think in 3D to some extent, but in a battle a fighter pilot wants to know what they immediately need to pay attention to, which is usually something heading directly at them (another jet or missile) and they mostly want to know the direction it is coming from, not so much what its altitude is. I made the path histories fade out so they didn't get too long and clutter the screen. The vertical bars were calibrated to indicate a specific distance so they also gave an idea of velocity. It would be possible to add/remove things from the display based on some automatic assessments of priority (i.e., remove everything not headed at the pilot, though having things appear and disappear can be confusing also). The aircraft icons were actual wireframe models representing the type of the aircraft, but had to be oversize to see them, which added some confusion also. The pilot found a fixed size icon with a few numbers next to it and highlighting for approaching/receding much more useful. Took me a long time to digitize them with just a ruler. While such a display may not have a technical use, it might be useful in advertising, showing travelers at an airport what is going on around the airport at the moment for example.
by yyyk | 2025-11-29 04:25:45+00:00
It's clear humans have several networks working together. Some Mathematicians report they 'see' the solution, these rely on a visual network *. Others report they prefer to do math symbolically (relying on the language network?).

Perhaps there are also multiple human paths to higher-level thought, with Keller (who lost her sight) using the language facility while others don't have to.

* Given Box 1 contents, the article authors seem unaware of the research on this? e.g.

https://www.youcubed.org/resource/visual-mathematics/

https://www.hilarispublisher.com/open-access/seeing-as-under...
by buu700 | 2025-11-29 04:26:19+00:00
> Probably because we all know "cancel culture" was an invented, highly partisan and ultimately fake concept.

No, we don't all know that. There's a whole Wikipedia article on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancel_culture. Denying its existence is just a lazy rhetorical tactic to deflect criticism of antisocial behavior and censorship.

> stating a fact is not what "virtue signalling" means and I wish people would bother to learn what words meant before they repeated them

Non sequitur. The factuality of cancel culture's non-existence is immaterial here. If a piece of writing includes a tangent that serves no other purpose than to signal to a subset of the audience that the author is "one of them", that's virtue signaling.
by tjr | 2025-11-29 04:28:14+00:00
As an aerospace software engineer, I would guess that, if this actually was triggered by some abnormal solar activity, it was probably an edge case that nobody thought of or thought was relevant for the subsystem in question.

Testing is (should be!) extremely robust, but only tested to the required parameters. If this incident put the subsystem in some atmospheric conditions nobody expected and nobody tested for, that does not suggest that the entire QA chain was garbage. It was a missed case -- and one that I expect would be covered going forward.

Aviation systems are not tested to work indefinitely or infinitely -- that's impossible to test, impossible to prove or disprove. You wouldn't claim that some subsystems works (say, for a quick easy example) in all temperature ranges; you would definite a reasonable operational range, and then test to that range. What may have happened here is that something occurred outside of an expected range.
by naikrovek | 2025-11-29 04:29:13+00:00
Kubernetes is an operating system on top of an operating system. Its complexity is insane.

The base OS should be providing a lot/all of these features by default.

Plan9 is as you describe out of the box, but what I want is what plan9 might be if it were designed today and could be with a little work. Isolation would not be terribly difficult to add to it. The default namespace a process gets by default could limit it to its own configuration directory, its own data directory, and standard in and out by default. And imagine every instance of that application getting its own distinct copy of that namespace and none of them can talk to each other or scan any disk. They only do work sent to them via stdin, as dictated in the srv configuration for that software.

Everything doesn’t HAVE to be a file, but that is a very elegant abstraction when it all works.

> call the ip() command and run your app in an isolated namespace with a single command if you wanted to.

I should not have to opt in to that. Processes should be isolated by default. Their view of the computer should be heavily restricted; look at all these goofy NPM packages running malware, capturing credentials stored on disk. Why can an NPM package see any of that stuff by default? Why can it see anything else on disk at all? Why is everything wide fucking open all the time?

Why am I the goofy one for wanting isolation?
by smcin | 2025-11-29 04:29:17+00:00
Leetspeak (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet), and similar things obfuscating letters with numbers/ punctuation/ symbols (or subsequently, obfuscated with Unicode or lookalikes).

Now experiencing a renaissance on YouTube et al. to legitimately refer to terms like murder, suicide etc. which will typically get a channel or user demonetized/banned/blocked by internal search engines/etc.
by alwa | 2025-11-29 04:29:40+00:00
FWIW @cindyllm’s [dead] reply below made sense, made me smile a little, and struck me as at least principled:

> The option that involves goading everyone into being their worst selves

Because you people don't deserve to be your best selves living your best lives

Nothin' confusing about that

Doesn’t make this the place for that, but I appreciate the neo-Dadaist intentionality.
by keernan | 2025-11-29 04:29:55+00:00
SCOTUS has yet to rule on whether the Trump tariffs are a revenue-raising alternative to income taxes, rendering them an unconstitutional intrusion into the exclusive power of Congress; or regulatory tools for foreign affairs, which would bring them within the power of the Executive Branch...

...seemingly an odd time for Trump to make the statement that income taxes could be eliminated soon due to tariffs.
by xcf_seetan | 2025-11-29 04:30:49+00:00
> and manpower to repair it and use it are available everywhere

So why each time i announce myself as working with computers, there is always someone that approaches me saying "great, i have a problem with my computer, can you ..."? I just make them stop and ask "Are you talking about Windows?", and when the answer is affirmative i just say "Sorry, I only work on Linux." and they go "What is that?", lol, i would like you to see their faces when i say "It's a professional system!" and leave. :)
by tripletao | 2025-11-29 04:32:19+00:00
After more investigation, I'm not sure what question was asked. I quoted that exact language from Apollo, and the Census Bureau uses very similar language in the spreadsheet with the aggregated responses, at

https://www.census.gov/hfp/btos/downloads/Employment%20Size%...

I'm unable to find a questionnaire with that language, though. I found a different questionnaire with many AI-related questions, some of which I believe would usefully capture both your situation and my hypothetical above. None closely match that language, though. The closest might be question 23, but that asks about use "in any of its business functions".

https://www2.census.gov/data/experimental-data-products/busi...
by tibbar | 2025-11-29 04:32:58+00:00
I think this is true for engineers as well! I enjoy getting to know the "theme" of my favorite coworkers over the years. There was:

* The fellow who always looked for the simplest hack possible. Give him the most annoying problem, he'd pause, go Wait a minute! and redefine it to have a very easy solution. He typed very slowly, but it didn't really matter.

* The one who truly loved code itself. He would climb mountains to find the most elegant, idiomatic way to express any program. Used the very best practices for testing, libraries, all that. He typed very fast.

* The former physicist who spent all his time reading obscure mailing lists on his favorite topics. His level of understanding of problems in his domains of interest was incredible.

I could go on and on! It's such a fun taxonomy to collect. All of these friends were marvelous at solving their particular flavor of problem.

As for myself, I like to think that my "trick" is to spend a long time poking at the structure of a problem. Eventually the solution I was looking for doesn't matter anymore, but the tools I developed along the way are pretty useful to everyone!
by tjr | 2025-11-29 04:33:38+00:00
Not involved with this particular matter. What I would want to see is logs of the behavior of the failing subsystem and details of the failing environment. This may be able to to be reproduced in an environmental testing lab, a systems rig lab, or possibly even in a completely virtual avionics test environment. If stimulating the subsystem with the same environmental input results in the error as experienced on the plane, then a fix can be worked from there. And likewise, a rollback to a previous version could be tested against the same environment.
by alwa | 2025-11-29 04:36:16+00:00
I think you and gp may be speaking about different stages. Gp seems to be saying that a plane being designed and specified today would use technologies hardened against this type of error.

That even though they’re in widespread operation today, the aircraft types in question were designed (and certified) many years ago, before ECC was the norm. My impression is that, once their type is certified, new airframes are built to pretty much exactly that specification even all these years later.
by gizmo686 | 2025-11-29 04:36:23+00:00
That can only go so far. Assuming there is no container/VM escape, most software is built to get used. You can protect yourself from malicious dependencies in the build step. But at some point, you are going to do a production build, that needs to run on a production system, with access to production data. If you do not trust your supply chain; you need to fix that.

If you excuse me, I have a list of 1000 artifacts I need to audit before importing into our dependency store.
by naikrovek | 2025-11-29 04:39:22+00:00
> The fact that tools like docker, podman and bubblewrap exist and work points out that the OS supports it

Only via virtualization in the case of MacOS. Somehow, even windows has native container support these days.

A much more secure system can be made I assure you. Availability is important, but an NPM package being able to scan every attached disk in its post-installation script and capture any clear text credentials it finds is crossing the line. This isn’t going to stop with NPM, either.

One can have availability and sensible isolation by default. Why we haven’t chosen to do this is beyond me. How many people need to get ransomwared because the OS lets some crappy piece of junk encrypt files it should not even be able to see without prompting the user?
by tsycho | 2025-11-29 04:40:11+00:00
Short the stock, go long the appropriate index.

eg: If you think NVDA is overvalued relative to the overall tech sector, you could short NVDA, go long QQQ.

And if you have a more opinionated trade in the same currency, eg: you think AAPL will be fine if the AI trade pops, you can do short NVDA, long AAPL.

Finally, an even more advanced version would be to go long on something else in the same sector, but which is less overvalued in your opinion. eg: Short ORCL, long NVDA.
by HDThoreaun | 2025-11-29 04:42:29+00:00
Learning stuff that doesn’t help in work(calculus is not helpful for 99% of software engineering) is really hard if you don’t base it in reality I find. Maybe it’s just me but I would never read a text book for fun so suggesting learning by reading a text book seems crazy. Calculus can be fun and interesting but the teacher has to actively try to make it so. The learning will take longer but you’re more likely to see it through and I think it’s more likely to stick long term too.

I learned way more reading crafting interpreters than I did in my compiler class for example.
by pxc | 2025-11-29 04:43:05+00:00
> Wherever you think is the right effort/benefit threshold, it will turn out to be different in a few weeks.

Very true. And experiencing this has absolutely been a useful lesson to me. I remember feeling pained over some code I wanted to write in a more robust and principled way in front of a big deadline, and after a bit of friendly push and pull with my manager, I agreed to console myself by throwing in some TODOs and FIXMEs in the comments instead of getting carried away overengineering or burning rubber just beautifying my style. I remember this ritual feeling painful at the time, though it helped me cross the finish line sooner. A few months later, it was clear that ~80% of that code would be good enough for the next year or so— by which time other parts of the application would have evolved as well. I even ended up glad I'd deferred a few of those changes just so the small refactors could be informed by things we'd learned in the meantime.

Sometimes it goes the other way, or course! Many times I've been glad for some extra care I put in early, or regretful about some I didn't. But you're right that that balance always seems to change in retrospect, one way or the other.
by kev009 | 2025-11-29 04:46:41+00:00
The Megahertz wars in the 1990s made it really difficult to understand relative performance across even the same ISA like this, and I think computers with the 603 CPU were a bit of a wrench in people's perception of the Mac.

The 180 or 200MHz 603e with 16k L1 cache in that Performa 6400 wasn't slow by any stretch, but it probably didn't have L2 cache. Coupled with the gradual transition to PPC native code of the OS and apps, these machines were often a little mismatched to expectations and realities of the code.

Meanwhile that PowerTower had a 604e with 32/32k L1 and 1MB L2 cache. That was a fast flier with a superscalar and out of order pipeline more comparable to the Pentium Pro and PII.
by majormajor | 2025-11-29 04:49:56+00:00
I think the engineer jumping between giant companies for three years or less every time rarely works on particularly key things. Big tech companies do a LOT of stuff, and most of it is crap that isn't moving the needle. This post describes teams that are constantly changing priorities (chasing trends?) and IME that's not true of the really core, central functions at companies. But very true of the "support/enabling" or "what else can we do?!" side functions.

For instance, Github Actions being a meh product is called out in the article - that's a classic "check the box" feature that's good enough for a lot of people (let's not forget that Jenkins was no picnic before it) but is never gonna massively increase GH's bottom line.

Those sorts of projects are easy places for politics to fester since they are easy to ignore for the most influential-and usually strongest-parts of leadership.

On the other hand, if you're on a core, mission-critical team and other people's code is turning into your bad performance review, you need to figure out if the problem is (a) bad/toxic manager or (b) a failure to keep your management chain informed at what the root issues are and how you can improve it.
by aidenn0 | 2025-11-29 04:52:40+00:00
Python 3.11.13 (main, Jun 3 2025, 18:38:25) [GCC 14.3.0] on linux Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> 2**1000 10715086071862673209484250490600018105614048117055336074437503883703510511249361224931983788156958581275946729175531468251871452856923140435984577574698574803934567774824230985421074605062371141877954182153046474983581941267398767559165543946077062914571196477686542167660429831652624386837205668069376 >>> _/2**999 2.0