skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>When was the last time you saw a car on the side of the road with its hood up and steam pouring out of the engine compartment?

Friday afternoon. Although to be fair it was gray ATF smoke and not steam.

I stopped and asked the guy what was up because I probably could have helped if it was easy and the details of the situation favored doing so.

Turns out "muh million mile 4Runner" had sprung a leak in the transmission cooling plumbing. Based on the age of the vehicle I decided it would be better for him to get it towed than have me attempt a field repair so I lectured him on the basics of how an automatic transmission works and why he would be maxing an expensive gamble with bad odds if he were to pour a couple quarts in it and try to make it a few miles to where he was going rather than tow it.
> What's with this obsession to 'get back to where we were before'?

> Where we were before was broken,

Not for the people with dominant power over society, including over the media organizations that write the narratives fed to the masses.

And that's the answer to your question.
You're getting shafted
I would just say that choosing to work more than 40 hrs per week is very different to being forced to work 40 hrs per week. Simply because someone can happily choose more work hours does not mean that the de facto standard should be that high or even at 40 hrs.
Sounds like he needs to hire some help.
> Especially in industries that require deep thinking, the output doesn't necessarily scale with # of hours a worker puts in, not every hour is the same.

Its not about the number of days per week, it's also about the frequency of the thinking you put into it. If you do a 4 days break between two work days, I'd be very surprised if you remember anything in detail of your previous work period.
Recently:

Human Rights Watch: South Korea problem with digital sex crimes [pdf] (https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/media_2021/06/southk...)

4 points|belter|3 days ago|2 comments

South Korea's spy camera epidemic has women fearful they are watched everywhere (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-17/spy-cam-sex-crimes-in...)

2 points|adrian_mrd|4 days ago|0 comments
I think the point is not that there’s something wrong with hour long lunches, but that people have to find ways to fill up their day if they’re expected to be “at work” for 8 hours a day and can only be productive for a fraction of that.

As a “productive” software engineer, in the sense that I have gotten positive feedback in my career and never had a problem “getting enough done” to satisfy my superiors, it took me a long time to come to terms with the fact that I cannot productively apply myself to work for 40 hours a week. When I have to be in the office for that long, I end up slacking off for hours and hours (like reading HN). I thought for a long time that maybe I was just flying under the radar and I would eventually “get caught” but at this point I’ve made peace with the fact that my productivity comes in bursts and as long as my employer is happy with my output I don’t sweat it too much.
360° Lives
Yea, I haven't heard of a job that wouldn't have an hour long lunch. It's a part of labor laws at least in Illinois.
Furthermore, people are so worked to the bone that they forgot about having kids and raising families.
FYI: "Silice is an open source language that simplifies prototyping and writing algorithms on FPGA architectures."
I understand Ford asked "what if we treated people well?", but he did it in the context of "useless extra billions" (to use your language) - he paid people a little bit better than his competitors in order to enable a competitive advantage which earned him more money. If treating them worse would have earned him more money, he would have done that instead. (n.b. that the increased wage also came with a bunch of moralistic lifestyle strings attached that were rigorously enforced.)

My point is that there exist businesses and business owners who aren't solely motivated by increasing their share of the profits (even though our system strongly encourages this) - I just don't think Henry Ford just is a good example of that.
It depends on what you mean by “education.” In the US, the high school graduation rate of women has exceeded that of men since at least 1940. The 20th century fertility rate peak happened in 1965, which also coincided with peak religiosity. During the first part of the 20th century, fertility rates, high school graduation rates, and church attendance all went up at the same time.
It's not overtime/overwork that causes declining birthrates in Japan.
You are a statistical anomaly.

Most people are not letting "never in a lifetime" frequency events have more than tertiary influence over major purchasing decisions.
No, you're expected to eat at your desk and type while chewing.
I strongly suspect this has to do with Japan's low birth rate. But I would love a society where you only need to work three or four days a week. As they always say no one says on their deathbed I wish I spent more time at the office
I read it more as "no one is having 40 hours per week of productive work continuously".

Even in your example, being productive for 60+ hours is possible, but for how long? There might be extreme (extreme!) outliers, but I think it's fair to say that at some point you will increase your productivity by putting in less hours.
Even if the patents are accepted, you will still have to defend it in court because other patents could have been filed earlier which have significant overlap of your patented idea which could invalidate everything. I have personally seen engineers getting patents granted for technology which is obviously already in use elsewhere and is already patented. USPTO is a joke especially for software based inventions. I just want to know, how can anyone even claim to know they aren't infringing on some part of one of the nearly 300,000 patents granted yearly?
This really shows in the products Amazon offers to developers. Everything that isn’t already an entrenched business success is some random internal tooling that got productized because everything does.
You could even automate the task with more robots.
'Sesame Street' introduces family with two gay dads
From what I have seen 30 mins is standard but some companies have an hour lunch and ask you to start 30 minutes sooner.
Sounds like car tech is getting better and better
Finding the Bottom Turtle
Well, that is the implication I took away from your comment - I've re-read it, and I'm still getting that from the part where you talk about short-term gains and long-term costs.

Maybe it's just my different life experiences, but when I think about anti-inflammatory treatments I see the balancing of long-term gains versus long-term costs. Indeed the short-term effects of steroids are pretty awful!
Yes, if you're starting your own business then it could help you to work as much as you can.

However, most people do not run their own business. Most people are low-level code monkeys in large firms where individual efforts aren't business critical. When your project gets cancelled for the 3rd time and you still get a raise, it finally clicks that your work doesn't really matter. This takes a psychological toll. As a result, most people I know in FAANG who are 28+ years old will sheepishly admit that they do very little actual work (30 hours max per week). That's the whole point of hiring people straight out of college: you get ~5 years out of them before they realize what the game is. The ones who are happy with the "truth" become managers, and the ones who aren't opt to keep their head down and coast, or just quit from "burnout".
I think restraint and common sense are key here (once you're comfortable typing the non-ASCII characters). In parts of my code it's much more intuitive to use \Omega or \Sigma and \mu than giving them ASCII names, and others looking at my code will immediately understand what the matrices and vectors do.

On the other hand, if you're going to use \mathfrak{i} to index a simple loop you're doing it wrong.
> are the sole founder in the company

yeah in this case, if its really your dream, go right ahead.

most workers aren't the founders of the company.
If you saw any blue badge employees with a yellow/red/purple border around their badge, then that signifies how long they've been at the company.

Saying someone is a yellow badge badge is saying that they are a full time employee with 5-9 years of tenure, most SDEs don't work with contractors so we don't talk about yellow badge contractors all that often.

If you're interested in this sort of thing, the color is actually supposed to be orange, but the color came out yellow.
I don't think NixOS is getting too much credit. This is an accomplishment, even if it was built on the shoulders of giants.
> Companies that shuffle things up to prioritize productivity over simply showing up will be set to succeed over the next generation.

I tend to disagree, but don't argue either way for four or five day weeks, but because it seems success and productivity are only loosely coupled.

Company financial success, and / or long term viability, I believe, is largely random. Large, already successful companies will, largely, continue to be so, small to medium enterprises will survive the next five years at about the same rate they historically have. Small business will continue to fail all over the place.

People will continue to be super intelligent, flawed and incompetent, easily distracted, lack focus, and easily corrupted by power and vice.

And start ups, to anyone who's been paying attention, is almost entirely a branch of gambling for a specific type of whale.

I predict that on the whole the next decade will be largely like the last ten years, and there's approximately nothing to be gained from chasing tiny productivity gains.
Not really possible. If everyone is an owner, no one is an owner. You can try completely abolishing the worker/owner dichotomy though, which is very difficult but probably possible.
I wonder if it's also an open secret that 99% of office jobs today are typewriter jobs of a few decades ago - soon to be gone.

Good riddance if people with a working brain were given any power, we'd all be at 2-3 hours of work per day with robots doing the rest by now.
The ability to recreate a binary image from the same set of source files and getting that binary to be identical to the package-provided binary.

This is useful form of ensuring that nothing is amiss during compile/link time.

Today’s GNU toolchain clutters the interior of binary files with random hash values, full file path (that you couldn’t recreate … easily), and random tmpfile directories.

The idea is to make it easier to verify a binary, compare it with earlier-built-but-same-source binary, or to be able to reverse engineering it (and catch unexpected changes in code).
Totally agree. My experience is my own and definitely not reflective of everyone else who works at Amazon. They employ tens of thousands of engineers and many of them are happy. I just wanted to share my story - not trying to generalize this for all of Amazon.

But I wouldn't say it's a minute exception with so much of it being revealed. For every story that's revealed you can assume that there are others in a similar situation who do not publicly share their story.
I can work 55 hours a week in perpetuity as a founder, with the exception of four off grid, week long vacations a year. Even two weeks over 60 hours (e.g. fundraising across timezones) and I rapidly lose it.
By that logic universal healthcare isn’t a social program either, it’s government mandated health insurance.
I'm a mechanical engineer by training, and a software and control systems engineer by trade. IMO, neither alternative is a good one. I prefer to write out the un-abbreviated form wherever practicable. ex: "microradians", "microseconds", "permeability", etc.
Look at dang's top five matches.
Yugos had Fiat engines in them. They got a bad rap when they were shipped out with valve clearances not setup - this was supposed to be done at the dealership. Dealers commonly sold the cars without doing the initial and essential setup / maintenance and the car was blamed.
> You can already verify that a
> toolchain wasn't backdoored )
> today

How, exactly?

If we both compiled hello.c (a prototypical hello world program), and exchanged binaries; how would you verify my build wasn't malicious?
Honestly I think the biggest benefit of reproducibility is just debuggability. We both check out the same git repo and build it, we can later hash the binary and compare the hashes to know we're running the exact same code.

On security, if you really care about compromised build servers you might as well just build from source yourself. I think reproducibility might matter most in systems where side loading is hard/impossible like app stores, but I'm not familiar with the current state of the art in terms of iOS reproducable builds and checking them.
Tangential, but how many of us need a dedicated work time period at all?

I have a 15 minute standup every day, an hour long 1 on 1 once every two weeks, and the occasional meeting where I am genuinely needed and maybe 3 hours talking to another developer.

I would love to convert my job into a purely objectives driven thing with the only requirement being that I am online/in the office for those specific 5 or so hours a week.

I will take the risk that what I think takes a week of work runs over (forcing me to work on weekends) in exchange for that kind of flexibility.
> Many companies would agree if you offered them to work 3 days a week for 60% of your salary. I've done it.

My last employer refused to even accept 4 days a week for 80%.
Manager brought up how much the company had invested in training me as a grad (which, to be fair, they did), and that cutting my hours would have meant that investment had gone to waste.

I now work for them 0 days a week. Funny how that works.
Of all places, that this is coming from Japan is astounding. The culture of "company man" in Japan is notorious for essentially absorbing and erasing the line between family life and company life for an employee.

There are horror stories floating around on the internet that explain how many stay in office, often later than their boss, just to look like they are working hard.

And I have experienced it first hand. Went to Mitsubishi factory in Takasago on a company visit. I asked the employees there, why do you stay late, and they answered, everyone has to stay late.

I genuinely believe that an alternative to the 4-day week, is to allow employees to switch off their work emails and phone calls on Friday evening. No use in having a 4 day week, when your mind-share is extended to a 6 day week.
Perhaps we should finally just start blatantly cloning their patents and products like they/ve done us, see how far that goes. It's obviously gotten them far.
Policies that make the poor less poor
That's really useful, thanks.

My rules of thumb are based entirely off experiments I've done with Datasette, which tends towards ad-hoc querying, often without the best indexes and with a LOT of group-by/count queries to implement faceting.

You've made me realize that those rules of thumb (which are pretty unscientific already) likely don't apply at all to projects outside of Datasette, so I should probably keep them to myself!
I'm sure mine would too but whenever I think about the trade, I'd rather have more money and work the full time. Then I can buy an investment property and relax on the gains on the land.
"But I'll argue that Accessibility is actually more important than Security because dialing Accessibility to zero means you have no product at all, whereas dialing Security to zero can still get you a reasonably successful product such as the Playstation Network."

This is gold :D
I tend to agree, on pragmatic bases.

However in alternative universes, with different underlying constants, chemistry and biology might differ somewhat, possibly in unexpected ways.

That said, in this particular Universe, I suspect life is reasonably likely. Intelligence may be impossible, however.
Perhaps because without the intervention, they weren’t doing it.
> I'd look into ways of expanding your social needs outside of work, be it The local pub, church, sports club, makers group, library or whatever else, I'm sure there's something around that fits your needs.

This is fair, but what you have to understand is that you're taking away something work used to provide, and asking the employee to provide it for themselves. There is a group of people for whom "work friends" are really important. Whether work friends are their only friends or just a subset of friends, the low-pressure friendship of only socializing with somebody because you have to is a different relationship to clearly indicated socializing with somebody because you want to.

And so for those people who really value the "work friendship", that is essentially part of their compensation. Companies need to understand that for some demographics (especially the young nerds that make up so much of the workforce in tech) if they aren't providing low-pressure socialization opportunities, they need to consider what alternative strategies they can use to retain staff.
I was just looking at this site earlier today independently of HN. I revisit it several times a year, mainly because I can’t get enough "scale of the universe" comparisons (if you know any good ones, please send them my way).

I especially love the light speed auto-scroll because it does a great job of visualizing just how slow the speed of light is (or how vast space is).
They're not assuming/under the impression that all 40 hours are spent working. This wouldn't work because this type of tacit admission works for everyone when they need it, even if that happens to be continuously.
Scott Manley had a recent video talking about the work involved in moving the Earth, that you might find interesting. Basically the most "plausible" approach might be to move the moon and use it to drag the Earth. Similarly the best way to move another large object might be to carefully move other objects small amounts to do precise gravity assists.

https://youtu.be/5StYppuJ_lg
If the government doesn't make laws that define broad principles, capitalism will eat you alive.

Employers are greedy and evil. Their focus is profit maximization. Not employee well being.

Given the chance, do you really think employers will even give vacation days to employees? No way. They will want you to work 24/7 if the govt. is ok with it.
>So if you read my comments you’ll know that I really can’t stand the automobile culture on America. Just want to get that out of the way.

disclaimer : i've enjoyed 'automobile culture' my entire life, and have touched nearly everything that it has to offer.

the 'automobile culture on America' , at least applied to the United States specifically, is absolutely compatible with a better managed use of public places; I'm not sure why you framed your comment in such a way as to hint at an incompatibility between the two concepts : automobile culture and citizen-centric management of public spaces and infrastructure. The two are absolutely compatible.

I'm not saying that there aren't problems that are caused just-about-entirely by the automobile culture, but improper use of already-inhabited suburban sprawl isn't one of the major ones unless you want to paint all of 'suburbia' to be a 'Bad Thing' and condemn automobile culture simply due to the enablement of commutes and suburban enclaves to exist.
I worked in a couple of Japanese tech offices. Contracts and salary included prepaid overtime, to get around the government saying ALL overtime should be paid. But they must have also allowed up to 40 hours per month to be considered "reasonable", so that number was in the contract, and I'd only get overtime if I went over it. Felt like a shitty loophole to agree to, but luckily both companies were super cool and overtime was uncommon, but happened sometimes. So it felt like they'd just put it in as a convenience, like saying "there might be some overtime, but let's not deal with paperwork unless it gets out of hand". And the "40 hours" was paid regardless.

It would definitely be a convenient loophole for companies to continue shitty practices, so I think I just lucked out with the places I worked at.
Does anyone know who else was involved in constructing this memo?

"There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team’s data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever"

Was Bezos deeply enough involved in Amazon's engineering to set those rules himself, or was the text of the memo influenced by a senior engineering group that he was working with?
Is this the same doc as "Distributed Computing Manifesto" mentioned in Werner Vogels' blog? [1]

These legendary Amazon Memos haven't leaked, unlike Billg's various memos [2]. That is... journalistically unfortunate, I would say. I even wonder current Amazonian actually has the access to these docs.

[1] https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2019/08/modern-applicat...

[2] https://lettersofnote.com/2011/07/22/the-internet-tidal-wave...
On lead: I think that’s true of a lot of spices.

On black pepper: sure, but curcumin like Meriva absorbs even better. Meriva is sort of like the creapure (aka German creatine) of curcumin.

On a brand to use/look at: I like solaray/jarrow/now. Jarrow meriva is what I use and they claim to test all products for heavy metals, but dont have COA (certificates of analysis) readily available so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> There are horror stories floating around on the internet that explain how many stay in office, often later than their boss, just to look like they are working hard.

The horror story there is in how late that takes them to in many cases. A friend spent a year in Japan. Leaving by 8 was apparently a good day.
But my comment isn't about individuals trying to manage their own health as best they can. It's about what kinds of questions researchers ideally should be asking.

Those are wholly different topics.
I specifically bought a Pixel 3 recently because it had LineageOS support. Never again will I buy a phone that's locked into the manufacturer's Android releases.
Don't take this the wrong way, but I think you qualify as a nerd. :)
Yeah, or you can avoid all that by going to startups.
I wonder if the vibrations from the fans cause the coils to change shape slightly, preventing them from supporting the higher frequency of coil whine?
c is relatively slow

Only from our point of view. Photons have zero travel time from their perspective (thanks to Einstein). When you go with different speeds, approaching c, you see different distances (and things), and with just 1g acceleration, the same that pulls you down right now, you can go to the stars, galaxies and… well, just watch yourself:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=b_TkFhj9mgk (30min)
> It was the 5-6 day week that built modern Japan

Are you sure that is because of employees slogging in factories?

Productive people outside of work will develop and nurture their passions. That is a net positive effect on the economy. This leads to new innovations, companies and benefit to the economy.
which library do you use for databases?
when i checked a while ago, the situation was not very good
and the best option was the JDBC interface

is this still the case