skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> all I know about OKRs is from reading "Measure What Matters" and implementing it in my own company. Reading this article makes me feel like someone took an incredibly simple idea and decided that what it needs is more complication.

I know this is HN and you could totally be Drew Houston; but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that your company has fewer than 500 employees.

The problems the OP is describing are, in my opinion, usually present at a large, bureaucratic company. There is no strict size definition for this (I've seen incredibly bureaucratic 50-person startups), but Dunbar's number [1] is a good rule of thumb.

> You WILL fail at your first few OKR cycles, but you're supposed to use those experiences to change your company into one that CAN set and achieve objectives.

Once you get into a bureaucratic company, it's largely about avoiding failure or the perception thereof. Since you own your company, it's easy for you to take this overall view of "if it failed, it failed". Any mid-level manager or individual contributor is going to be incentivized to avoid the perception of failure since it's super-bad in a large organization. Google is often used as a counterexample, but I'm not entirely sure that Google is a company that's good at making products. Also, Google uses the approach of "Hire extremely smart people and throw a truckload of money at them" approach which most companies under discussion (including yours) likely don't; which (IMO) is a far better predictor of success than OKRs.

> The objections to OKRs mentioned in the article don't make sense to me, because it seems to follow a different definition of what OKRs are.

This is the No True Scotsman fallacy. The reality is that the "cascading" nature of OKRs often gets lost in translation and doesn't take into account macro-level changes in your specific vertical. Yes, the company's goal is to become a leader in the field of underwater baskets; how does this translate to me rewriting that terrible frontend code that the cofounder's buddy wrote in 2007 and has never been touched since? Doing that translation will become more difficult year by year due to how technology evolves; and most people in "leadership" suck at doing that translation well. That's what the article is talking about.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
The higher performance is not free. Fear makes you accept a higher risk of injury.
Were you alive in 2010?
Is this solving "where are my HDFS files" ?
If you use leverage and take options you can put in 1k and get 200k back.
The company I work for (mostly standard Web Dev) uses almost exclusively Elixir for any backend work. Only the fanboys of Elixir and functional everything are happy with it, just to be different to everyone else.

The experience is terrible: Tooling (editor plugins, tests runners, IDEs (oh, there are no IDEs...), debugging) is like going back 20 years.

There are no libraries for the most basic stuff you get almost by default on the Ruby, Python, Node or Java ecosystems. So we end up reinventing half assed solutions to anything we need to do.

Some days I think we would be sooo much better by just using Rails or Django.

Of course, concurrency and the Erlang VM are awesome and the perfect fit for the web... if your problem is performance, it will solve that problem for you of course... other than that, is all wasted time in my opinion from my experience after years of using it.
I'm in your boat. The tastes good and bad coffees can bring are so diverse. Every few years I even feel a sudden urge to drink a particular instant coffee (Nescafé Gold). The bitters, acids that rise to my nose, a snarky taste with a little bit of burned butter odor. Just great. It reminds me of going on holidays, of rebuilding houses when all you have is hot water and of holiday jobs as a teen. Coffee is a most sentimental drink for me.
Might be because of:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23895684
Added this to my UUID as a Service API! [0]
Just add ?readable to any endpoint!
Eg. https://uuid.rocks/json?readable

[0] https://uuid.rocks/
And precisely none of what you just said addresses my point.
Unix Family Tree
Being in a global pandemic is arguably much more stressful than work. I'm much more stressed than I would be in an office. Could be the particular variety of stress, but that's post-hoc rationalisation.

A good piece of general evidence I once heard against this is: premature births & miscarriages did not increase in London during The Blitz (I think they may have even reduced). There's a big narrative around stress and all of its wild short-term health implications, but I'm not convinced it translates into reality. It's not easy to measure.
This is becoming more common in retail now. It requires a common set of systems and databases for both the retail and eCommerce business. (Side note - this is the scope of The Phoenix Project)
I did a similar thing to replace my personal workflow that I'd been using a home instance of JIRA for for some time.

I thought about opening it up, but TBH there's loads of these things already, and the real value for me is that I built it myself and it conforms perfectly to what I need. I looked at a few others, but the overhead of grokking someone else's tool was just too much of a hassle for me.

The ergonomics of these things are really close to perfect when you decide yourself what features you want and how they should be implemented.
I think social media might just be the wrong format for it. Something non-addictive, such as a book, or a long-form news article would be a much better way to know the evils of the world.
Decades of Fuck ups on every corner of the planet !
The content unbundling problem that’s stifling us
Show HN: No Code tool to create native apps from your iPhone/iPad
Fact-check of viral climate misinformation quietly removed from Facebook
So under your logic we won’t have any idea that we are close to having agi until we have a machine that can reason... which is agi. You are missing the big picture
Their products, especially their mobile products.

Take, for example, Google Tasks. It has, roughly the same number of features, with the same design as when it launched two years ago. Presumably there are engineers assigned to it. What on earth are they doing? Meanwhile, Microsoft Tasks has subsumed all the features of Wunderlist and has become a far better to-do list app. It's a small example, but it's emblematic.

The same applies to Google Apps. Google Docs, Google Sheets, and the rest haven't had any substantial new features or (more importantly) performance improvements in 10 years. Try loading a hundred-page Word document in Google Docs and it still lags out.

And then there's chat. Oh, lord, Google's chat applications. How many do they have again? Five? Six? Which ones are they canceling this year? Every year, they promise that they're going to "unify" [1] chat, and every year they fail to deliver on that promise.

The only product at Google that actually seems to get updated and maintained is search. Everything else is either a half-baked science experiment that is soon to be canceled or a stagnant leftover without a clear product roadmap. You can quibble that this is bad product management rather than bad engineering, but as far I'm concerned, bad product management is bad engineering.

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/01/report-google-planni...
What Is The arrow Operator in C++? (2009)
Automatic Birthday Wisher Using Python
Amazon used to always be cheaper. not any more. amazon has realized people shop it for convenience and not mainly for price.
Fun fact; democracies tend to be much better at fighting and winning wars than other forms of government.
For me it’s performance passes a usability threshold for human + machine collaboration.

It is possible to use it to generate texts which can be quickly curated or edited by a user.

Specifically this could be useful in authoring fiction (sci-fi novels, game dialog, etc.).

Imagine the Star Trek holodeck characters. It’s dialog quality is nearly good enough to make that level of interaction feasible.
So, while not just use distribution package creation and managing tools, like the Debian ones? Or even better Guix?
I got my Nikon 200-500mm tele lens off Amazon, and it was sold by Amazon. It was also, by its serial number, a gray-market item manufactured for the Chinese market, and not covered by warranty when sold in the US. But you can't find that out until you have it in your hands.

It worked perfectly as I got it, and the model had been on the market past the early peak of the bathtub curve, so I kept it. Still works perfectly
today, too. But it taught me a valuable lesson about how far Amazon can be trusted on high-ticket items.

These days the only camera gear I get from Amazon is trivial niche stuff like eyepiece diopters that aren't worth anyone's trouble to gray-market or counterfeit. For everything else, there's my local camera store, or B&H or Adorama.
I should also follow up with a technique that might be of interest to programmers. Some Minecraft blocks have textures that appear rotated in one of four ways. Turns out this rotation is pseudorandom, the rotation number is a result of seeding Java's rand.nextLong() with the (x,y,z) coordinate of that block.[0] This has been used for "malicious" purposes such as finding the location of a base from a single screenshot, which can lead to its destruction on anarchy servers. The author of the linked video used a CUDA search to find the location of a wall of netherrack.

[0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=6__hO4cc1pA
Fun, primarily. I also use it in some of my other projects for UUID generation.

It's built on Cloudflare Workers so it scales fine and doesn't cost me anything since I use Workers for other projects anyway.
There are many vaccine projects showing promising results.

> there is a lot of conflicting information available

That's the nature of science. There is conflicting information because it is unknown what works yet. There are many approaches that show promise.. until they don't.
Neither is impossible to enforce.
So, you've created a conservative echo chamber?
I couldn't agree more. BunnyCDN is founded and managed by some of the most passionate and caring people I've had the pleasure of interacting with.

I would recommend BunnyCDN every time without hesitation.
> cmake's main problem is it's appalingly poor documentation and user experience.

"I thought I was dumb until I realized it's the book".

Top Amazon review of the top book on CMake. And I am still wondering whether it is the book, or the tool.
I hear this come up so much and it's just trite.

I don't think anybody in Silicon Valley would say the _definition_ of a Founder is someone who takes VC money.

All companies require capital to operate. All capital has a cost. In many high growth companies, the amount of time it takes to build a product and go to market has a significant effect of how much market share that company can acquire. Selling equity or taking on debt is how many companies can reduce that time and acquire more market share.

It just happens to be that the companies Silicon Valley is most interested in are companies that have to raise capital this way, with very very few exceptions.

Now more than ever, VCs will happily tell a a founder "your business is not a business that fits with the VC model well, don't raise VC money." The VCs who say that do not think the people they are are saying that to "aren't founders" - their business just doesn't need VC investment.
true. becoming more and more leery of knock off items on amazon.
Thanks for the explanation ;)

> Each version of GPT has exponentially increasing parameter count
What are parameters in this context?

> Now people are wondering what GPT-4 can do. If you can write human-level coherent articles or if it passes the turing test or something [...]
Well, when I first heard about "text generation" last year what I first raised to my friends was "surely this will make fake news even worse". But well, any technology come with a bright and dark side. I try to not be pessimistic in these moments hehe
If customers aren't returning pods, what are they doing with them?

Cardboard is biodegradable, but waxed cardboard is lined with plastic meaning it needs to be handled separately, and if your recycling center doesn't handle it, it goes in the trash where it doesn't biodegrade because it's coated in plastic.

The reason the plastic lined pods are important is because it means you can't just chuck them in your household recycling, they have to be sent back to Nespresso. Anyone who doesn't send them back to Nespresso is throwing them in the trash, or throwing them in household recycling, where they're separated from and put in regular waste.
It's simple and easier to read.

A slightly lower contrast may look nicer (and be more accurate to printed text) but often sites are excessive with it. It may not even be exactly the designer's fault since their monitor's gamma and contrast will probably be better than the average visitor.

Another related problem is that of font weight. Fonts too thin can also hamper readability but the weight on-screen will be variable with the user's font settings and how exactly it's set up with aliasing, shaping etc. To add to that some digital fonts are displayed at the wrong weight because they were designed with bleed in mind.
I know of a lot of Muslims to whom people can openly say that they're atheist.

For example, my grandfather was a Muslim. His wife was Christian. His son - my father - is an atheist, and so am I.

It sounds like your problem isn't with Islam, but rather with a strawman that you have constructed.
I sometimes wonder if these @Home projects are actually a net good. Due to the lower energy efficiency of old hardware, or just the higher overhead from running multiple less power full machines, it might be a lot cheaper and more environmentally friendly if these users would directly donate the money that they are spending on their electricity bill.
I love your mindset and I am not too far off myself.
For me it’s not about being able to buy luxuries but to “buy time”.

Time is - in my opinion - the most valuable resource that we have. Working for the man is trading your time with money given a specific conversation ( your salary ). I’d like to shoot to have a better conversation (I’m EU based and salaries here are not so great compared to the US) while not being tied to a specific location. With the plus of being able to work on whatever you fancy.

I think becoming rich is less about spending that money but more about the financial independence. So it’s not about not going to work but to don’t have to go to work.
Moore's law is exponential. If parallel processing power continues to rise exponentially...
You're not missing anything. The problem is indeed technological - client devices are not built for mesh networking, and it shows.
I remember watching ~50 MB RMVB anime fansub releases circa 2004.
Diffracting a Beam of Organic Molecules
Do you have a suggestion for a "non-hypocritical" title for that article? Or are you saying NPR shouldn't be reporting on the cessation of one of the few pandemic response programs that help the average person?
A list of useful resources for devs
Ask HN: Reddit for Engineering Tips and Tricks?
Hi all - is there anywhere that is a semi-structured repository for people sharing engineering tips and tricks? I feel like we're constantly "discovering" hacks and approaches that I'm sure countless others have before, and would love to share and consume these. Hell, I feel like a good chunk of HN comments are along these lines "This one time doing thing X, I had problem Y and hacked around with solution Z"
Self-documenting code is all code. The only thing that speaks to what a piece of code does is the code. Comments aren’t syntax, so they don’t help you there. I’ve never seen a codebase that does a good job of documenting the system architecture, expected usage patterns, and why the code is built the way it is. And I don’t know that having all that be inline to the code would be helpful anyway.

I find it far less error prone to just read the code and determine its purpose and allowable modifications from that. I am thinking about what a citation or footnote system might look like for code now though. That has the potential to provide context on-demand without needing to separate out all the pieces of the code into little silos that are hard to piece together.
UI for Neovim Plugins in Lua
My labor and delivery nurse MIL speculates it is because of the increase in fevers associated with Covid. More young moms coming in with fevers and testing positive with Covid.
My experience is 3-4 day old ground coffee was still notably better tasting than freshly ground coffee with the hunk of a grinder I used to use. It obviously depends on how much you drink (our house goes through about 1 bag per week), but as a starting point it's likely to be better than pre ground supermarket coffee, and more accessible than a decent burr grinder.

Telling someone who uses a Nespresso to shell out 50 bucks for a Hario skerton, and spend a couple of minutes cranking the hand grinder is probably not going to be the most successful conversion path!
Thanks for your comment. I'm agree with your second sentence.

For the first, I would shy away from discussing rise and decline in purely geopolitical terms. I'm more referring to internal aspects of decline -- social cohesion, creativity, quality of governance, and so on. It's possible to be in relative geopolitical decline but culturally and economically quite vibrant e.g. with Austria-Hungary between 1866 and 1914, and I wouldn't say they were in decline then.
I was a mail administrator for around 10 years in a fairly small business and I can’t imagine why anyone would want to host their own email. My old employer contacted me because a system I had built finally died and they wanted to build a new one. Once I got over the shock that they had still been using it I suggested going with a hosted solution. I mean they’re relatively cheap for good service and avoids a world of hurt for the inexperienced mail admin. At first they insisted they wanted to keep it in house so I went over what all they needed to build a new system. About a week and several “how do I” emails later I get one more: “we decided to go with a hosted solution.” I was happy. They are happy even if they don’t know they are. It’s more of a commitment than I think some folks often realize.
Everyone is replying to you mentioning HLS, which (as your edit mentions) isn't described in the article.

Which is... a bit shocking. From the title of the article, I assumed the content would be related to hosting video. HLS was the first thing that came to mind and I assumed it'd be mentioned up top. I clicked to see if it listed any HTTP-related considerations I wasn't aware of in addition to HLS.

Turns out it's just an advertisement for a (very non-video-specific) CDN service, with some lines tacked on at the end telling you to use Handbrake (oddly, the cli, rather tham ffmpeg???)
> "I don't know if I'll ever share new prototypes or keep them to myself."

Please keep open-sourcing your work, everyone benefits including you. This is incredibly rare in my experience, and you can see from the reactions that it is not acceptable behaviour.

On the plus side, many people opensource complex projects to get no feedback at all, so at least you're rattling a few cages! ;)
I checked the plot against an old school project where I investigated binary search, and I got similar numbers for the "standard" binary search (std::lower_bound in my project): For N=1000,10000,100000 it took 713,925,1264 us (compare to the author's 750,960,1256 us).

In my project I didn't test "quaternary search", but instead the winner was the Eytzinger layout that others have discussed, with 570,808,1044 us (compare to author's quaternary search: 557,764,1009 us).

It would be interesting to try a 4-way Eytzinger layout.

My project report, if anyone's interested: https://dl.strova.dk/ksb-manuel-rav-algorithm-engineering-20...

EDIT: I reuploaded the linked PDF since the first one I uploaded was missing the source code.
It's probably financially ok if you run it in winter when you have to heat your home.
What's "Adidas" to you then? the examples show nouns or adjectives that turn out to be the inventor's name (like PageRank, you think it's from "web pages", but oh, it's from "Larry Page", or "Main Street", where you think it's because it's the primary street, but oh, it's actually named after a Mr. Main).

So what noun or adjective is "Adidas"?

I'm going to complain about being downvoted and I'm gonna grumpily say even HN isn't immune to anti-intellectualism...
GPT-3 is (the process of) general AI being born in front of our eyes, catching us unprepared, making us realize that the we may be a bit rigid in understanding of what intelligence really means. If primed correctly, can GPT-3 produce worthwhile improvements to its own paper or implementation? Can GPT-3 be made to prime and query itself in a loop, by asking it to produce a better query for itself? Can its knowledge be already used to disrupt existing frontiers of human thought? The simple and safe answer here is that we don't know yet.

In a world full of ideological adversity and cold-blooded corporate competition, slowing down the release of technology which may or may not be capable of a runaway effect (a.k.a. technological singularity) in the hands of an adversary is an intelligent and prudent thing to do.
https://github.com/github/view_component
> But wow, look how far we've arrived!

But how far? And by what measure? If we had awe-inspiring technological progress, but only increased the suffering of sentient beings, is that a win? Or is somehow scientific understanding, in and of itself, a worthwhile pursuit, and damn the consequences?

As it stands, we don't really have an accurate hedonic utilitarian measure we can use to decide if sentient beings are better off, even for humans. Though a cursory search leads me to the 'Gross National Well-being' measure, but such self-surveys aren't known to be reliable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_National_Well-being
off topic question: what’s the idea behind “EDIT: typo”? HN doesn't indicate in any way that your post has been edited and certainly you’re not changing the meaning in a tangible way warranting the etiquette. Nobody is going to fault you for fixing a typo.
Doom SNES source code released
Corporate activism should be more than just a marketing gimmick
Can you use FreeBSD for a Developer Machine in 2020?
There are a lot of suggestions for "long form" and "books" here. Are none of you keeping up with this pandemic and what your country/state/city recommended behaviours, laws and bylaws are?
How startups should think about growth
It depends on your market. If you're aiming for people at home in Seoul, yeah that's probably alright. Their connection should be great and stable. If you're aiming at people transiting in Mumbai and watching stuff on their phone in the local train, 720p won't do.
There is a demo page, it's just that the link to it is buried right at the bottom. You'd think that it'd be better to just embed it on the page itself.
One project comes to my mind:

https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube

it uses web-torrent so you safe allot of bandwidth.
I've never published a BBC (or any journal) article before publishing a paper. As far as I know, the reviewers at Springer Nature could not care less if there's a press release attached to your manuscript, and some reviewers in medicinal journals would prefer groups don't publicize on media like Twitter to avoid biased reviews.

I must have just missed the "mass press release" portion of peer review.
Yes! I encountered these "Lexit" guys too and couldn't believe what I was hearing when they were telling me about how they voted Brexit and why, it just seemed incredibly naive.
This can be easily solved by presenting an option set like "slow/fast/HD" to the user, then stream accordingly. Open source has always been about lots of choices anyway!
Grids for Instagram 2020
Why the bioinformatic industry needs to privatize