skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem with any system is that people try to enforce it, military style. In my previous job, we did scrum, but not too strict. We had two week cycles, not-too-strict deadlines (most of the time) etc. If I finished my task early, I was free to pick up tasks from the planned list, without having to get permission from my manager. We also didn't agonize over story points, retrospective etc. We did it light hearted and quick. The only thing we religiously followed was daily, quick 15 min stand-ups. Everything else was flexible.

My current job is the opposite. Some tasks take 15 minutes of discussion (no, they aren't complex tasks) with people debating whether it is worth 5 points or 8. It is just tiring and pointless. And retro - gawd, I hate those. There are all kinds of stupid shit (people using references from music, movies etc, trying to make it "fun" and "hip"). I can't bring other tasks into the sprint, even if I finished all my current tasks, without my manager's permission. And on and on.

I was thinking the other day why this is so painful and awkward. I realized that it all comes down to "metrics" - end of every sprint, my manager has to present it to his bosses, with pretty graphs describing "velocity" and other buzzwords. So he has to do all kinds of jugglery to appear competent to his bosses and not alienate the team at the same time.

All of this could be avoided by treating the team as adults, instead of trying to "processify" or quantify everything.

However hard we try, human beings can't be slotted neatly into buckets nor can they be precisely quantified. However hard we try, estimating software projects will never be an exact science.
Title should say: any desired fixed linear transform.

(Which greatly reduces the number of applications of the technique)
Adopted a teenage daughter. Gave her a phone.
We had a 5 year cycle of deep depression on phone. Take away phone for x months. Teen becomes happy and full of life. Couple days after getting phone back she was super depressed again.
Every single time. No variation. Phone == depression no phone == happy teen.
Not perfect without phone by any stretch, but general mood was involved with family and cheerful.

This went on until she was old enough to move out so we would stop taking her phone away. A couple years later she finally realized what social media was doing to her and she turned it off herself. Started getting her life together.

Other daughters are pissed because they can’t have a phone. When I query about the friends. It’s the same pattern. Every friend with a phone is obsessed with it. The ones without are much more fun to hang out with.
> I think one weird difference is that we can passively observe things in the real world. But you can't passively observe an IP-address. You need to send data at it to see how it responds.

The other part of that is that you also can't passively show anything. The other side needs the actively respond with something that you can then observe.
It's tragic that we have to resort to these techniques because our culture has become so averse to offering honest feedback. It wasn't always this way.
And I suppose you get to decide what's dishonest and what's a smear, for all of our benefits of course. Maybe you should take a moment to reflect on the meaning of democratic principles.
Subsonic phone clients were kind of a crapshoot last I checked. Ultrasonic was the only one that kinda worked for me.

https://github.com/ultrasonic/ultrasonic
Ask HN: What have you done that mattered?
Nice to see big companies working like this. I wish more places would understand that different approaches work for different people, teams, products, technologies and contexts. There is no one true way, and most attempts to impose one tend to create something that is bigger and more complex than any single team needs. It's like the human equivalent of a code library that is trying to solve too many problems and so becomes an unweildy mess of config and options and meta-problems.

We (Bugsnag) are a relatively small engineering team, so have the advantage of low comms overhead, and we do have an overarching approach, but each of the teams works a bit differently. Even from project to project I'll adjust what makes sense based on complexity/risk/size.
Hi Comboy,

It's not trying to compete with GarageBand. GarageBand itself is an instrument in a way; it comes with lots of built-in sounds, loops and more. You should rather think of it as a replacement for Voice Memos :-).
A non-permanent settlement conceivably could see continuous (non-permanent) habitation for thousands of years. If, as a semi-nomadic group, you return to the same location year after year, generation after generation, and you do so alongside a large number of nearby settlements, with whom you maintain social relationships... Well, it might not have a post office or gate, but it's a dynamic fulfills many of the requirements of a "city".
I'd be interested to hear the meeting-to-work ratio at big tech and if the meetings are valuable.
It depends on your goals, maybe the goals are political (and very long term economical), not economic (in the short term).

Many wars turned out to not be economic in the short term, but one can argue that the US has benefited from the rubblization of the middle east (like the shenanigans pulled in Iran among others, as described in "confessions of an Economic Hitman.")
Hey bud, you're really writing aggressively. I'm not really here for that. But I do think it's important to debunk misinformation and this:

>>"video chats"

> Not E2EE

...isn't true. Please see https://core.telegram.org/api/end-to-end/video-calls
It's not without drawbacks, but TLS gives almost everyone good security/privacy by default. And for those who really need it, anyone who does even a basic amount of research can gain very good levels of confidence in the privacy of their TLS setup.

Also, there are degrees of federation. It doesn't have to be a wild wild west of the sort we see with projects like Mastodon. A closed federation can have strict rules on who can participate, can enforce constraints on auditing and rapid updates, and so on, and still be a federation. In fact, we see some of this in TLS - not everyone can participate, but there are dozens of independent organizations working within an internal governance models. Another example is EFnet, which is a federated chat network which has regulations on who can participate:

http://www.efnet.org/?module=docs&doc=16

Moxie conveniently ignores all of this because it serves his interests to be ignorant of it. It has been repeatedly brought to his attention. Moreover, he has put out legal threats to any project which tries to fork Signal to research these features.
I definitely agree with you on a user level. But on a practical level, I wouldn't want to be on 24/7 pager duty if I was part of signal, not getting paid much, if anything for it.

I don't think matrix is there yet as a good replacement, at least for my use case. It's just not mature enough.

I know, chicken and egg problem, but I don't want to be debugging my primary form of communication. It's too important.
The way we do things at Gordian is similar in a lot of way to the Big Tech methods but it stands out in a pretty unique way IMO.

The approach is described here https://www.gordiansoftware.com/news/two-weeks-too-slow and in practice it’s even better than anything I was hoping for. I can legitimately say this is the most productive environment I’ve ever seen.
What an interesting article, thanks for sharing. The photo looks like it could have been taken on the set of Star Trek.
>tech companies to compare themselves to a profession that faces literally life and death situations

I think you have a narrowly defined scope of “tech”. What about the software that controls the Da Vinci robot in the operating room? Do you want someone to say “eh, code quality checks aren’t my job?” Or the person writing flight software for aircraft? Or the safety critical software for a power plant?

The point being, yes, perspective is important but it’s a difference of degree not of kind.
The article feels a little to self congratulatory, to the point of a straw man. It’s like they’re saying “look how enlightened I am for understanding that liberals can be bad guys too”. Everybody gets that. The only issue seems to have been the measurement scale, for which I wish they went into more detail.
> Russian hegemony

What does this mean?
It is important to note that construction of wind farms is not down. 2020 had an increase in capacity of 20 GW with $31 billion of investment in offshore wind alone.
The one that is using without contributing any feedback is at the very least not using the competitor.

If someone asks them "what are you using to solve problem X" and the answer involves my product, it's my product that gets exposed to another user, who might be interested in contributing...
Well, hopefully that is not the norm, but it's not like you are limited to a single branch (fork) at a time.
Having and raising children.
The double-entry accounting is what makes GnuCash so wonderful to use.

Everything has to balance.

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. If you take money from your bank account and spend it on electricity then the amount you have spent on electricity goes up by the entered amount and your bank balance goes down by the same amount.

By picking some sensible (broad) categories you can see at a glance how much you are spending in each category.
don't forget threats of suicide.
Being a person who influences others' technology can be a massive social responsibility depending on you locale.
As a Dev, I loved SAFE. It changed everything about how our program operated to the point our delivery became extremely predictable and we still had every 9th and 10th week to tinker on new ideas or do refactoring and cleanup where we wanted. That program purred like nothing else I've ever been a part of. Senior leaders sat with devs, started talking to everyone about their priorities - people we had never seen before we started doing PI events. Antagonism dropped. We went from not being trusted to deploy during an annual heavy use period to being totally trusted to deploy and given additional contracts for maintenance. And this was with the exact same people who had been there. We just weren't working very well before we got into SAFe.

I think one of the keys to this was the buyin everyone had. It wasn't totally consistent at the beginning, but over time everyone got on board, we did trainings, actually incorporated feedback consistently.

I hear SAFe hate all the time, and when I ask how things went, inevitably it turns out they never actually did SAFe. Somebody made them email a 10 week plan and used the acronym and that was it. If you're gonna do SAFe, do SAFe.
Would love something like that for storing large image datasets for computer vision. Storing embeddings, predictions and metadata in a contiguous format with compression support, ANN indexing support and SQL would be amazing.
1. Totally disagree- these slides should be treated like a hostile witness. This is one of the largest companies in the world on the back of advertiser and investment faith. Facebooks public image is paramount to its continued success and data like this should come from a third party. The points that are good for FB should be treated with heavy skepticism, and the points that are bad for FB should be treated as the absolute floor of the negative impact.

2. Facebook themselves are cherry picking:

> WSJ said: “Among teens who reported suicidal thoughts, 13% of British users and 6% of American users traced the desire to kill themselves to Instagram"

> What the data shows: When we take a step back and look at the full data set, about 1% of the entire group of teens who took the survey said they had suicidal thoughts that they felt started on Instagram.

Suicide is the second leading cause of death from 13-19. 6-13% of teens saying instagram made them suicidal is a huge deal. Trying to detract from that delta by showcasing that not that 99% of teens don't want to kill themselves is repulsive and dishonest.
So what? It can start buying American gas within what? Weeks?

All the infrastructure for the ships and further distribution is being built right now.

Anerica is under "others", because it's too expensive.
Best Watches for Doctors
Because it works better that way? or because it's a way to make a visual app more accessible?

My guess is that ground-up software for the blind would work differently at fundamental levels. Really, what an interesting problem.
Well, then change your user agent to 'googlebot' when crawling the web, since it now became the synonym for search crawlers?
> unless they always replace the device whenever the screen is broken, but I doubt that

Why do you doubt that? I'm sure that's exactly what they do.

Edit: Well, by "device" here I read "screen + sensor". If you meant the entire phone then I agree with you heh.
Ask a Ukrainian!
Yes, and this further demonstrates how ridiculous the reporting on this result was. Their sample population was tiny and skewed, and this paragraph is a great example of why you can make your results look better to lay readers by reducing N (which in statistical terms should reduce your level of confidence in the result you got because the likelihood of spurious accuracy from random factors increases) and choosing whatever metric sounds best when you do that (here, they do so by only talking about precision - IE avoiding false positives, with no mention of the false negatives).

But I do have to give you some credit for providing a case study for why scientific literacy is super hard, and doubly so in a context where researchers are strongly incentivized to try to make their results sound as convincingly meaningful as possible
I'm introvert myself (INTP). I share your frustration. Maybe you have some business hints for introverts? AFAIK, the only successful Unicorn created by INTP's is Google, but I cannot have a talk with Google founders, obviously.
Agreed, this is my go-to argument when trying to fix communist.

For the sake of argument, take away human nature. Assume you have an all benevolent polibutro who really is looking to maximize the greater good. Now imagine the data collection and modeling necessary to make central planning work. Everything about communism goes against every macrotrend in modern thought. Distributed systems, the actor model, concensus protocols, microservicers, the freaking blockchain. We are designing all of our systems to be broken into smaller independent parts that can evovle and make decision on their own. Why the hell then are software engineers so obsessed with doing the exact opposite when it comes to run or economic system?!
The employee numbers in that link are "hobby" numbers for companies as big as those cited. For scale, Facebook (252 people working on blockchain in some capacity) hired ~14,000 people in 2020 alone.
This is old school tech.

For example, I was tought how this worked in satillite image analysis optical computers (e.g. Cold War tech) when getting my optics degree.
The traditional data systems that power the global economy are no longer fit for purpose. Moving transactional data to shared sources of truth can bring some much needed clarity to the state of the world.

It's a data migration... it seems the regulators, corporates and the crypto world are all moving in that direction.

(again, for better or for worse as there are many different flavours)
Jeff Atwood wrote about Boyd's Law of Iteration in 2007 [0] "Speed of iteration beats quality of iteration."

[0] https://blog.codinghorror.com/boyds-law-of-iteration/
I wonder if the particular slowness on windows could be related to how closing file handles is slow on windows because of blocking antivirus checks. Alas I can't recall where I read about this, it was some kind of "a few things I learned over many years of programming" blogpost.
I think we can let reality make that choice. The things that actually happened, those are OK, and the ones that are made up bullshit, they can go. How about that?
"Yes!"
People can complain about overbearing EU bureaucracy all they want - I love it. Please give me 500 pages of regulations about indicator lights if the end result is sane indicator lights.
From a management perspective, having everything reduced to a process and method is the ideal world, as no true knowledge about the actual work is needed. The weaker then understanding of the work, the stronger the desire to replace uncertainty with process.

However, no process can remove actual randomness (did anyone get the necessary ideas, for example) or uncertainty (is it even feasible, for instance).

That said, in larger - and I'd say mostly non-software companies - changing processes to things that are more inclusive, i.e. tech and the business talking directly to each other does help. And one way to sell that is under an agile/Scrum kind of construct. To me, seeing Scrum then more in non-tech/consultancy makes total sense.
> instead of trying to "processify"

A cause of this problem is when people are worried about what happens when they say "erm, I don't know how to do this cleanly" and so they want the "how" to be defined far far in advance. Solving this requires a mix of

A. Identifying those activities that will genuinely make people's lives easier if they have a process and designing those processes to be meaningful and low-burden. Those activities will vary based on team members individual peeves and affinities.

B. Creating clear lines of communication for how and whom to ask for help. This often means more clear naming of responsibilities.

C. Ensuring there is enough slack time for people to be able to help each other out.

D. Creating trust in the team that asking for help won't lead people to question if you are fit to do your job.

> quantify everything

Many times, this is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy
> Like asking for a 6months dev work to help them save 1 hour annually on an annoying task they had to do.

I see this as a complaint a lot, but... in a private company, they're the ones writing the checks. So if they want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to save an hour, that's their prerogative. It's certainly our obligation to point out the cost (including ongoing maintenance) but again in a private company you don't really have the option of saying "no" except with your feet.
I do not think it has it built-in. There is a console plugin for running commands but I do not think that is a full blown terminal either.
Have you seen the efforts in chrome around the home page with ‘Discover’?

There is too much value in the curation business for an entity like google to ignore.
“Russian influence” would probably been a clearer choice of words.
It's mind-boggling* that a company can be entirely aware of their negative impact on teenagers and think, "We have to go deeper".
Premarket stocks: How bad are supply chains? Costco is renting ships
The various parts of a person's name should be encapsulated in a specific class, and one of these objects, rather than a loose last name and other concrete fields, should be a mandatory attribute of a user object.

There should be only one place for name-handling logic, and since other people types besides users could appear in the domain model (commercial customer, social network "friend", relative, etc.) the user class isn't that place.
However, there's still a valid chance that the classifier relates more to any attributions provided in profile images than to facial features. (E.g., we're pretty good at inferring social status or role from medieval portraits based on such attributions without knowing any about phrenology or physiognomy.)
I’m not about to give a company in the blockchain sphere my contact information to download the report. Surely it should be easy to provide evidence for the 27 companies you claim are providing production services using blockchain
Ok then (now it's much clearer). Now, - «suppressing» - the article in some parts surely may sound emotionally censorial («should be anathema»), but, - «embracing» - is the real-world context one of getting elements for further study with all caveats and common sense in place, or one of hyped glamorous reliance? Is it for the criminologist or for an agent? If the HR uses an AI sceening to hire you (first example in the article), you will think you dodged a bullet not working there, but if it is the Country to make decisions relying on it (maybe "false positives are expendable when dealing with big numbers" - which also, per se, would be the opposite of justice), well, there's less than 200 around, and many of them will not just let you in just because you want to.

So, new elements to study: all very interesting. But: "Sir, I see you have the traits of those who smear themselves with bananas for pleasure" - there are a number of issues with it. You know, constructs like, e.g. from Armando Iannucci: «...the sort of racist brush that could only be wielded by a Scottish-Italian» (about himself, in Charm Offensive).
I think this is the better question - will teens stop participating in grown-up spaces just because there's a 'safe' version just for them?

However, for younger kids (say, 5-11) I think a separate environment is the best solution. Up to a certain point, parents have more influence on what their child does. For all its problems, most parents I know are comfortable with YouTube Kids because it's the lesser of two evils. I know that my child is going to participate in social media either way, so I want them to do it in a sandbox until the day I don't get a say.
AppMap (https://appland.com/products/appmap) takes the approach of recording code execution flows and presenting them visually. There are also some tools to diff and compare AppMaps. These more advanced tools aren’t on the website because they are in development but I’d be happy to share with you, or do a demo. In this way you can get a clear view of the difference in code paths and dependencies, based on different parameters.

@kegilpin
Or a Georgian, or a Chechen.
So what is exactly wrong with some Russian influence? As a Dutchie I am continously influenced by Americans, Germans, Frenchmen etc.
We have sprint retros and generally find them valuable. I’m curious how one would even go about incorporating music and movies into a sprint retro? That does sound painful.
Incidentally, only the main document with the file suffix ".gnucash" is required. You can e-mail/backup that file and you can also use the Android App that is available to view it on your 'phone if you are an Android user. (Sadly the mobile app isn't available on iOS).
The article talks about big tech but it’s interesting to think of big tech in a couple ways. One is “Big Tech” (capital B and T) the other would be “big tech”. The destination is that the first is mainly the FANGs of the world that easily come to mind.

The second is other large companies that deploy huge amounts of tech but have different business models. Banks are an example. Apparently JP Morgan Chase’s annual tech budget is $12 billion!!! That’s a lot of money.
> Violating their expected privacy

They're trying to be secret, that's true. But expectations of privacy are for personal matters, this is posting hostile things and then hoping nobody finds out it's you. I don't think the author necessarily has a reasonable expectation of privacy.

> creating an environment where they have to fear expressing opinions

The Holocaust was a thing that happened. Pretending it didn't isn't expressing an opinion.
Version control will let you set the work aside and resume it later. You might have to burn a few cycles merging your old code up to date, but it won't be lost.

I haven't really seen a better option. Urgent work is disruptive to schedule by definition.
The best candidate seems to be Dual-N-back style training for pushing your working memory, and even that isn't without controversy.
Race to the bottom: the disastrous blindfolded rush to mine the deep sea