skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This sounds surreal. If that is true, this person had to deal with horrible things at work:

- “You are a skinny kid with no experience. Nobody cares about what you do. Just put your head down, shut your mouth or get yourself fired”.

- “You escaped a war zone; it is obvious you have many mental problems. ”

- “Just leave Apple before they kick you out. This is exactly what happened to the previous guy we fired.”

- “My husband worked for FBI and I can get you deported on a cargo boat if I want.”

- “How much do you drink? Do you do drugs?”
Never too young either... I guess never a bad time!
Are you expecting them to name real names and give specific enough details where they're then identifiable?
Yup, certain types of brake pads still use asbestos to this very day.
Most calculators at the time were mechanical and also very expensive. So there was money to be made with expensive alternatives. Everything is expensive at first (low volumes, new factories and processes, research and development), so if a market can't support that it won't get made at all.
This is great news. One of my customers owns a small chain of pizza restaurants. One of the delivery apps kept hounding them to sign up, but they already offer delivery, so they repeatedly declined. Eventually the app listed them on the app without their permission, using their logo and everything, and set the prices lower than what it was sold for. Every time an order came in, someone from the app would call the store and place an order for pickup and then one of the drivers would pick it up.

Disgusting business practice.
nobody https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/JoinMarket
> The survival and progressive sophistication of human society and culture has always depended on the effective function of community-level values -- whether understood in terms of duty, honor, shame, mores, rule of law, or other mechanisms.

IMHO progressive sophistication of human society goes hand in hand with replacing informal relations and processes (like duty, honor, shame, charity) by formal laws and institutions (rule of law, public welfare).

There are always some necessary compromises of individual liberties, but that can be handled by formal institutios, which generally have limited scope all control mechanisms compared to informal but unchecked power of society.
> reasonably expensive

The USS Ford is said to cost around 13 billions. I wouldn't call that "reasonable" :)

https://usadefensenews.com/2020/11/13/meet-the-us-navys-13-b...
Website to guess whether it's school or prison
I hope they make a modern version of 1984 where Winston is forced learn a lot of new pronouns.
It’s ironic that I still get lag with my vim setup running on the latest MacBook Pro today but ran a 486 and was able to write code back then with about the same or better responsiveness. Biggest issue seems syntax checking and code folding on files over 3000 lines long. Yes I know long files aren’t ideal but also for the specific project I’m currently working on it’s somewhat better than a thousand 3 line files.
> I’m ESL, how far should the “thou should pluralize a loanword as it was in the original language” rule go? It seems to be not universal.

The basic rule of thumb is: assume it doesn't apply. That is, for most foreign words, -(e)s is usually an acceptable plural word, and even if it isn't, people will understand what you mean.
For big companies like FANG culture can be very team dependent. There are great teams and awful teams.
i would say to emphasize bibliometrics measures of productivity less (how much you publish) and emphasize measures of social impact more. But it easy to say...
So it's not possible to steal accounts - sounds like a good thing to me
The elephant in the room, IMO, is that there is only so much ground to be broken. The physical world is fundamentally limited and limiting. There's a limit to how much there is to know about it, and as we come to know more of the big things, it becomes more and more difficult to learn the smaller and smaller things. This outcome -- that the rate of groundbreaking research is slowing -- is what we should expect, even under a consistent policy.
Honestly why do people think that cannot happen at Apple ? That kind of thing can happen in any company. Apple is thousands of employees, it only requires a few bad people to create a situation like that.

I'm not sure though, creating a post like that is the best thing. I don't know what exists in the US, but in France, you can sue your employer for free (You don't even need a lawyer), and if you are able to show a few emails showing abuse, there is like almost 100% chance the company will loose

EDIT: To the people who downvote me, seriously why ?
Saw this in a comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25490527 , seemed worthy of a post of it's own.

They were teaching the "autists have no ToM"-claim as fact to clinical psychologists in universities in Norway ten years ago at least, don't know if they still do. From reading the article, the claim seems completely baseless and potentially harmful (but perhaps there are counter-arguments / better studies they're not mentioning?).
Congraturations on paper acceptance, but joy is very optional in research. Joy is emotional and it clobbers logical insight. Peer review is an attempt to guarantee a steady firm progress. It is a matter of taste --- do you want progress or just want to be comfortable? If you want joy, better to be a SF writer... Still, strong results with good execution are allowed to enjoy some freedom.
NYSE to delist three Chinese companies on U.S. executive order
There have definitely been cases of astroturfing and vote bombing in the west, but it seems to be much less common these days because it almost always seems to get found out. If you think about it, the employees doing it aren't zombies, as soon as they leave the company they've got no reason stay loyal. News organisations are all over stories like that. The resulting bad press can be catastrophic for a company, far worse than any conceivable benefit from the behaviour itself.

For governments in democracies it's even worse, this is why most government conspiracy theories don't make sense. Why would government employees or even soldiers criminalise themselves to benefit a political party or president they might not even personally support? Once particular president is out of office, there's no reason to stay personally loyal to them so leaders can only rely on people's loyalty to the nation as a whole.

Conversely the CCP simply suppresses all discussion about the suppression, and disappears anyone who becomes too problematic. There are no divided political loyalties and no other political faction or press to go to. What's anyone going to do?
Nope, in fact it’s quite possible that any reasonably priced substitute will have similar properties given the current state of materials engineering. Of course if cost is no object something like aerogel may work even better.
In such situations always gather evidence and hire a lawyer. HR are there to protect the interest of the company, you need someone that you employ to protect your interest.
Boring is often a good thing, not just in science. There's a reason that "May you live in interesting times" is considered a curse.

Think about the year we just had. Whatever else you might say about it, it wasn't boring.

[Clarification] Individual local experiences may have been boring at times, but the year as a whole, from a historical point of view, was not. And the things that made it non-boring also made it suck big fat honking weenies. IMHO of course, but I'm pretty sure most people on earth would agree with that assessment.
> If this means training millions globally to give vaccines, do it.

AIUI, production and distribution, not people who can give an injection, are the bottlenecks.
This is really sad and I can't imagine going through that. I think we've also heard time and time again that HR is not out to protect you but rather the company. I understand that this is this person's first job but they should have understood that this is not normal behavior. You should always put your (mental) health first and seek other forms of employment, even if you are on a visa, if this type of abuse is occurring.
Stepping back a bit, I feel the argument is analogous to how music is becoming more mainstream and generic, how casual gamers "corrupt" the art form of gaming, how clickbait and stupit stuff is overshadowing lovingly curated independent websites, eternal September etc.

One answer to all these propositions is that the valuable stuff is still there, you just have an additional flood of mediocre boring predictable stuff. You can still find enough indie music and games and movies to spend all your free time on.

Similarly, if you know where to look and whose papers to watch out for, you can read more interesting stuff. The existence of more bullshit makes the filtering somewhat more effort, but it's bearable.

Most papers are never deeply read anyway, outside of the reviewers. Even citations don't mean someone really read the paper in depth.

So, most medíocre, boring papers get ignored.

It's an illusion to expect that every researcher can pump out multiple really interesting non-boring papers every year. So we pretend. We write, we cite, we present, overiflate, overpromise etc. It must look like there is steady hard noble work and toil. It's like a ritual. The scientists are writing all these papers so tax payers can sleep well that their money is paid for hard work.
> That’s not how the Tesla subsidies works and that is a naive interpretation of what I said. The tax credits were a transaction between the Federal government and Tesla’s customers. Tesla still got paid the $7,500 and there was no fanciful economics there.

Actually it isn't, and you are only focusing on the Federal Tax credit whereas I purposely mentioned California's EV program in my statement (but didn't elaborate for brevity's sake) that deducts the sticker price for the end consumer in various ways [0] with State/Local Government based subsidies that make Tesla's product (and other EVs for that matter) more accessible to the end consumer.

In the end I think its one of the few examples of a good use of taxes, unlike the Ag based subsidy model; but to deny it isn't a direct benefit to Tesla is to deny reality as most EV and Hybrid deliveries take place in California by a significant margin and thus proves my actual claim that you see these practices in Ag as well.

https://electrek.co/2020/11/17/california-adds-1500-incentiv...
Move to HQ, toil for the promotion there and those nice grants that come along with it. Return back to the home country/city.

This was a common strategy at a FAANG I was at. People wiped off generational debts with this strategy because strong dollar and bull market.
No post on state machines would be complete without mention of the superset concept of Petri nets [1]. I have used Petri nets to build my own workflow engine previously. Building a workflow engine is one of those things... nearly every enterprise app has one, and normally you shouldn’t need to build one if you can source one... but it is an exercise that makes you a stronger engineer/developer too, deepening understanding of the patterns that lie beneath most systems.

Back when I was building, openly available workflow engines, BPML, BPEL etc. were not really a thing yet, so it made a little more sense to be building one.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petri_net
Largely inapplicable beyond applied sciences.
Automotive Emotions – Feeling the Car
You are literally using a tangible benefit right now.
"“This transformative hospital price transparency rule has been fought at every step by the swamp and defenders of the status quote,” White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said in a statement."

Is "the status QUOTE" actually a thing now?
The people who fund research look too hard for ROI. The funds that get invested into research buy hours of time of people doing research and maybe gear. They cannot buy discoveries. Until this mismatch is addressed broadly, we will continue to have both a reproducibility crisis and ‘boring’ papers.
I think we need to take Vox documentaries with a grain of salt. They’re not as thorough as the Economist, etc. and have their own agenda mixed with YouTube content engagement metrics. You can argue that’s the case with any publication but IMO YouTube forces content makers to do crazy shit like exciting facial expressions in thumbnails for better engagement.
No way to say if this is a legit story, but I have seen this kind of thing at Intel, a subsidiary of comScore and a subsidiary of Siemens.

Toxic workplaces exist, and toxic teams within divisions exist.

When I saw this stuff, I was too young and inexperienced to recognize bad behavior and recognize my own power to go fish for something else. I did not have immigration issues to think about though, which adds a whole other dimension to getting stuck in something like this.

One time I saw this guy in the company softball league charge the pitcher over whether a pitch was a strike or a ball. It was absolutely not okay and the senior manager in the division said the guy was a "teddy bear" and "had kids" and that I needed to drop it.

I learned later that he was a major producer in sales engineering for the company's leading product.

Sometimes you get unlucky and are placed in a group like this. Powerful engineers probably have more control during the interview stage, and some companies can be good at getting rid of bad behavior. However results and loyalty can outweigh bad behavior.

Something that people should think about is their ability to manage emotional barriers. This isn't something I was taught growing up, but I hope young people are more familiar about asserting these today.

If people take advantage of you in your personal life, and you have the bad luck of being placed into a workplace with predatory personalities, they will take advantage of you there. Since that is your livelihood, it can be scary.

I'd advise people who experience toxic workplaces or think that they are in them to consider whether they themselves are lacking in the ability to assert their own boundaries and act on those assertions when they are broken repeatedly.

If you are not able to do this, use your health insurance to seek professional help because you'll need this ability in professional and personal environments for the rest of your life. Better to learn about yourself now than later.

If you don't have health insurance, there are communities on reddit and elsewhere that support people dealing with emotional abuse. Which is basically what this stuff is. You can learn a lot by reading and anonymously participating in these communities.

If at all possible get professional help even if it means cash out of pocket, because your mental health is among the most valuable investments you can make.
Israel has led the way here: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/israel-proves-the...

They've had efficient desalination tech for several years now deployed in the country. My understanding is they use lava stone to make the membranes more efficient. 55 percent of their fresh water now comes from desalinated salt water.
Mobile games. CSR2, Harry Potter, Empires & Puzzles, Words with Friends, Zynga Poker.

Yearly revenue around $1 billion.
I don't think that is the point though. Perhaps trying to show historic causality is a lost cause anyway, so instead showing cross-discipline progress at least portrays the co-dependent nature of history, progress, etc.

A comment James Burke makes is that the non-interdisciplinary approach has been the norm for too long (and I think its shortcomings and flaws are worse).
Your source is not a credible one. It is merely speculative armchair history along the lines of a Gavin Menzies or Graham Hancock.
Sadly, you can fill in the blank with any FAANG company with this story. I’ve heard it a thousand times. Toxic management. Sorry you went through that, sorry that was your first taste of engineering out of college. Glad you stuck with it.

It’s a tough spot to be. Do you roll over and do the job your being yelled at to do even though you know any concessions are BS? Or like the senior folks, do you walk? It’s a really hard choice.

Does Apple not have manager feedback mechanisms?
I've noticed that a lot of those small arm chips are designed for external ram. I wonder if physically shared ram could overcome the I/O limitation.
Canadian here! Socialized medicine is, in fact, good. I think the US has gone about as far as it can go with crowbarring healthcare into an insurance model. Moving from Canada to the states as an adult I can sincerely tell you that healthcare here is an utterly terrible experience on every level, from check-ups to clinic visits to overnight emergency room stays. At a certain point it becomes more ideological not to have socialized healthcare. And that point was passed long, long ago. Twisting a few dials & pulling some levers on a machine that is fundamentally profiting off of people being sick will just never cut it. Nothing can overcome that underlying incentive.
I think they're also popular because

* people have wood anyway so they might as well use it for something

* it often suits the design of houses here which were historically built for a central stove burner like this

* many people have wood-burning stoves for cooking that are extremely large and heavy permanent fixtures in their kitchen and cannot easily be removed or adapted and are designed to permanently be burning wood so you can't really turn them off either

* people like the smell and aesthetic (note this article is in just about the most middle-class publication there is in the UK)
I have to ask, why is it so hard to criticize or show Apple in a negative light on HN?

If this was a post thrashing Google, it would already have over 300 upvotes, and "necessary" comments how there are already people who are "de-Googling" their life...

I mean there are already skeptic comments regarding the author's intentions and experience?

The fact is that out of all FAA(M)NG companies, work experience in Apple is by far the least known online, some might even say it has tendencies with a cult...
That says that I can't arrange for delivery without approval to take orders and provide delivery. It doesn't imply that I need approval to take orders if I'm not providing delivery.
There were like 3-4 variants of Farmville 2 and FV3 is out in some countries: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zynga.farm...
I disagree - boring is critical in science. Good science means detailed record keeping and precise experimentation. It's good if the results are exciting, but the process of doing good science is typically quite boring when it's done right.

Edit: This comment makes no sense, because I misread the comment I was responding to as saying "just not in science" not "not just in science"
It reeks of marketing, which is antithetical to the hacker spirit?
Many countries have (or used to have) similar stored-value cards. They are really useful for some use cases: Given that they are very cash-like (transferable, anonymous unless registered), they are usually available to foreigners and minors without any formalities.

Japan‘s version could at one point even be used to purchase games in Nintendo‘s eStore by tapping a transit card on a game console – genius, given that a big part of their target audience doesn‘t have a credit or debit card.
Probably glass fiber. Though its still harmful to breathe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_fiber
'TRL' ?
I left academia for industry, so my opinion might be colored by the transition.

The way I see it, the easy problems that can be solved by one or two individuals are mostly gone. You need large diverse teams to tackle interesting problems.

To translate this into policy, you need opportunities for many more first authors, and you need to try to incentivize completely different departments to work together.
Languages with garbage collection and/or tons of reflection (requiring memory for bookkeeping) and/or JIT (requiring memory for on-the-fly jitted code) would indeed be a problem due to the overhead of those technologies.

Python is not as "bad" as dotnet and go I'd think, as most of python is reference counted garbage collection (with a "full" GC just to break up cycles) while go and dotnet use essentially mark-and-sweep GC strategies which require a lot of object moving and thus scratch space.

Running a dotnet hello-world (on x86_64 linux admittedly) gives an RSS of 26MB, most of it mapped libraries and .net assemblies, some libraries shared between processes of course, like libc/libm/ld.so. But it also maps a ton memory for the JIT and the GC (including scratch space to move objects into during gc). With some swap, it may survive on a system with 25MB of free memory, but I'd think there'd be plenty of swap-thrashing and gc thrashing going on, making that less fun.

Running a python3's hello world comes in at 10MB RSS, but a large part of that is the shared libraries like libc/libm/ld.so. With some memory-conserving programming some real python programs may run just fine without excess swapping.

For comparison, a hello world in C maps about 1M RSS, while a rust one maps 2MB RSS, both times a big chunk in shared libraries specially libc.
What are people from the community here going to start to learn for the first time this year? I'd be interested on hearing a range of different plans; creative, personal, business, technical and so on.
How is a business to reasonably identify all the different platforms listing their info without their permission? Opt out isn't a good model.

There's also a _ton_ of these businesses that aren't tech savvy. It's way too big an ask
If this is true, it’s really sad, I’ve read the whole thing. I had an experience, not as bad as yours but I know the feeling.

I really hope you will go public about this experience and share it, Apple aren’t the “virtuous” company as they pretend to be.
i think this has always subconsciously confused me whenever people talk about state machines, and your comment clarifies what i think ive felt. what would qualify as not a state machine in the broad sense?
> As a hypothetical business owner, shouldn't I have the right to prevent delivery platforms from using my restaurant without my permission?

> The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

We certainly agree on both of these counts!
I'd encourage you to take a look at some health economics literature, instead of accusing me of being an ideologue.
Either Connections or Cosmos even specifically explored Newcomen's engine and the pumping out of mines. (I don't recall if the need for copper-clad ships preceded it though.)

Edit: Yes, "Connections", episode 6, "Thunder In The Skies", about 22 minutes in: https://archive.org/details/james-burke-connections_s01e06
Seems like you could just add some sugar to the definition process, eg an Any State or more than one source state per transition.
Nation states and adversaries can also fabricate these stories, especially since the damage to western brands is best done at the root - attraction of talent and sowing doubts.

On the other hand, it sounds believable that these things happen in a big Corp like Apple.

Not trying to be conspiratorial, just to keep in mind - what you see on HN should be taken with a clear headed mind that some of this public information isn’t verified by a reputable newspaper with any anon source.
> Wood burners cause less indoor pollution than open fires. “But every time you open the door, you reduce the stove to an open fire and particulate matter floods into the home,” he said. The peaks take an hour or two to dissipate. “But by the time it comes down, someone opens the door again to refuel and you get spike after spike,” Chakraborty said. Some burners have filters, but these only reduce the pollution being vented outside.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/dec/18/wood-bur...