skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thinking as a user of various software, this is all I want

1. As close to zero bugs as possible, aka, it should be dependable

2. Work as fast as possible. How much time humanity is collectively losing, because JIRA takes its own sweet time to load? :(

3. Clearly communicate what it is trying to do, and just do it

We don't think about stuff that work well, all the time. It just becomes a part of our routine and we forget them. Would be nice to have software that get out of the way instead of taxing our brain to think about yet another menu item, yet another feature....
Better.com CEO blasts laid-off employees, accusing them of ‘stealing’
Last time I got laid off the CEO said that he knew it was hard for me, but also wasn't easy for him.

Which is true: firing people is one of the hardest managerial tasks, but it's tone deaf and disrespectful to make it about the manager's feelings. Shows a lack of maturity.
>The fact that they hired 900 people they now no longer need is a failing of the CEO by itself

How so? Business circumstances are constantly changing
If you’re letting go of 900 people, for the average person their manager is also being let go. In a good amount of cases, probably their manager’s manager.

I think it was a good call for the CEO to do it instead of outsourcing to HR or a COO. He didn’t try to hide behind another exec. Anyone being let go - especially at the holidays - is going to be pretty pissed about it, and it was the right thing for the CEO to take the slings and arrows for it instead of an underling.
So relatable, I myself slacked off at least a few weeks total since the pandemic started. And some of the people I work with have very ... odd response times, even when I ask about things they're very engaged in.
I'd argue truth is a big enough point, don't you think so?
Probably a condition of the deal
I've gone further in some of these, but sometimes it gets to "there's not enough time or people to do X".

There's been some cases where "I missed X - there's not enough time to check everything and I missed X". "Well, you should have told us X wasn't checked" or "you should have raised the alarm before". I've been raising it for ... 5-6 months. And the whole point of "I missed something" was... it's a mistake/oversight, not "I intentionally didn't check X".

There are rumors of other developers being interviewed, but no one has come on board. Assuming someone does, I suspect the thinking will be "let's double the previous workload - we have 2 people now".

I'm understanding of the situation, to some degree. Pretty much everyone on the project is 'overworked' in some sense, but they've been hiring and doubling up other positions, just not this one. I've been keeping this pace for 18 months. I scheduled one day off - 2 weeks in advance - because I had to drive someplace. That morning, someone noticed a financial bug that was preventing everything from working. 2 hrs later, from my hotel, I had to connect in and review and fix stuff. It was totally my fault - I missed stuff - but there's just... no getting away from it.

Adding in '5 whys' and other formal review processes on top of this situation borders on insulting.
Tens of billions of installs of the database _engine_, trillions of databases (ie SQLite files).

The webpage is a bit unclear about the difference, I'll agree
How many Engineers are already present in the company
What range of tasks would this particular engineer perform ? BE REALISTIC !!!
If half of my time is automating current manual processes ; then maybe I am not interested
This. It's really not a 35h/week job. 35h in class doesn't equate to 35h of work.
I think it is just that the upper management doesn't value the time or feelings of their employees. They could have done the meetings virtually on an individual basis or in smaller groups. They just didn't want to spend the time to do it
Getting fired is bad enough, but if it's being done by someone bad at firing people it's the worst. Moneyball had some solid advice:

"Be straight with them, no fluff, just facts. 'Pete I gotta let you go. Jack's office will handle the details.'" That's it.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTjhHrcyiQI
Archive: https://archive.md/pCi8K
That is very surreal to read, for some reason.
To me this story is more about the CEO's poor leadership and lack of empathy. Laying people off is something companies will have to do, and in this time of WFH companies will fumble around trying to consolidate on the best way to do it. But the CEO consoling himself in front of everyone whose lives he's upending is completely tone deaf.

It's rumored that he followed up this call with an all-hands to instill fear in the remaining employees. And he also admitted to going on a Blind tirade to shift blame for the outrage onto all of the individuals who were let go.

I would never want to work for this dude.
I was a little taken aback when they just, kept digging. It was clearly a significant find. To continue disturbing it without taking proper records was a little careless? Maybe when she becomes an archaeologist she will learn a better way.
MySQL a 'pretty poor database' says departing Oracle engineer
This is what seems right to me. It's not the virtual nature, it's the lazy mass group layoff that's objectionable and disrespectful.

If you're being laid off, you probably have a lot of questions. A 1:1 meeting would allow for that.
Incompetence? Slacking off? Lazy?
It's in the posted article.
I once bought an air filter that had the pm 2.5 rating surrounded by a blue/yellow/red halo. The only things it was missing were logging, and the ability to run the sensor without the fan. It could change fan speeds based on PM 2.5, but it was calibrated for a small room, and always ran way too slow.

I wish there were standards around thermostats these days. If there were, then people could sell gizmos that measure PM 2.5, then (if the windows are closed), use it to set the speed of the variable speed blower in central air furnaces accordingly. This would cut our electricity usage by at least 20-30% during fire season.

(I’d love to see a legal mandate for interoperability in this space.)
where is the current list?
Nolan Bushnell – co-founder of Atari – Interview [video]
> in the days of covid and working from home

I don't see how covid plays into this, unless this is suggesting that, pre-pandemic, it was common practice for CEOs to call 900 people into a single auditorium just to tell them that they're all fired. That sounds like a great way to end up hanged from the rafters on your own necktie.
I’ve been in mass layoffs. Having bosses arbitrarily come up to desks and then having that person return fifteen minutes later and repeating that for the entire morning is much worse. It’s anxiety inducing, even if you didn’t get the ax. I’d rather have an all-hands and get it over with quickly.
I almost deleted my comment after I wrote it, because, like, I get that he's probably also nervous and it's not an easy thing to do. You're probably right that some kind of "pay attention!" intro is necessary, but, yes, I'd definitely advise skipping over all the stuff about how hard this is for him.
or maybe Amazon now
That would probably be the case. Its not unknown for companies to get funding on those sorts of conditions.
How to add custom types to a JavaScript library
Thanks for calling this out, moreover that’s not what wage theft means:

> Wage theft is the denial of wages or employee benefits rightfully owed to an employee.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_theft
The default innodb_file_per_table changed to ON in 5.6, released nearly 9 years ago.

It's not really that hard to change if you started with OFF, it just requires a logical dump and reload (typically on a replica, followed by some re-cloning and promotion). Companies with sizable data tend to have database engineers who can handle this fairly easily.

In any case, it's not an urgent maintenance operation like a VACUUM problem...
Right, sounds like an attempt to do a PR stunt.
I use something similar but without the downside of the "+[...]@domain.tld. Some website don't allow email addresses with the "+" and, as mentionned in this thread, the "+..." can be stripped easily.

I use one of my domain name with a catchall address at my email provider. Everytime I have to signup on a website or IRL with an email address, I just use "website-url@mydomain.com" or "company@mydomain.com". I maintain a simple blacklist of all the throw away emails that have been abused over the past 25 years. I have set up a rule on the email server to delete all messages addressed to any of these blacklisted addresses. This is very effective at cutting down spam.

Downside : when you get a real human from a real company on the phone or IRL. Usually, they don't understand why you have "their-company@a-domain-they-dont-know.com". But it was never a major issue for me.
What was the purpose in making the customers give up the opportunity to make spirits, if the charcoal wasn't any more special? Was demand high and the blacksmiths wanted to reduce the volume of low-priority requests?
Maybe they're anticipating "Streisand Effect".
Many ISPs acquired IP addresses in the past for free. While they could sell them now on open market for $50/IP, it makes sense to hold them (as their price is expected to rise) and just use them for their customers (for fixed or monthly fee).

While technically they could rent them outside, such approach is not recommended as they would lose any control about how they are used, they can be used for spamming or hacking and can get on blacklists, which could damage their future selling price.
I love PostgreSQL, and would recommend it anytime. Even though jsonb is very powerful, in general if you store JSON in a SQL database you're very likely doing something wrong. (You're breaking first normal form)

But if you really wanted to use SQLite to store JSON à la jsonb in PostgreSQL you can use generated fields[1]

sqlite> create table t(id integer primary key autoincrement, data text);
sqlite> insert into t(data) values ('{"foo": "value", "bar": "other value"}'), ('{"foo": "baz", "bar": "qux"}');'
[…]
sqlite> alter table t add column foo text generated always as (json_extract(data, '$.foo')) virtual;
sqlite> select * from t;
id data foo
-- -------------------------------------- -----
1 {"foo": "value", "bar": "other value"} value
2 {"foo": "baz", "bar": "qux"} baz

You can even use a "stored" (instead of 'virtual') generated field, and create an index on it for fast lookups.

It's not as powerful as Postgres, but it does a pretty good job.

[1] https://www.sqlite.org/gencol.html
related fun fact: wage theft by employers is the largest category of theft in the US by a large measure [1].

[1] https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-fo...
How is waiting days for a potential meeting to be scheduled in better?
What course work did you perform already, and was the course work interesting ??
What are you hoping to learn from this intern work ? Why do you want to learn that ?
You’re not alone and your not too old. I’m 31 and I’m getting pretty tired of things changing all of the time.

So the other day I set up an instance of phpBB for my own private use. A forum for just one person? Yes! I’m experimenting with using a completely vanilla install of phpBB without plugins or anything (did change the theme to one that I liked better than the default theme though), to organize my own notes because:

1. The bulletin board model of different forum categories for different topics make things organizable while not going overboard with the organizing.

2. The bump mechanism makes keeping track of current concerns easy by posting in the respective threads. Old stuff on little interes naturally fade into the background without any kind of manual effort.

3. It is searchable.

4. It’s open source and self-hosted, and it’s been battle tested for years. It’s far from perfect but it’s stable and I could probably run it for ever.

5. I’m making it available over my VPN only. I can use it in the browser of any of my own devices as these are all part of my personal WireGuard VPN. Meanwhile, because it’s not reachable from the wider net my install of phpBB is not gonna get trivially pwned.
Ideally yes, but 900 people? Before you’ve reached the end of that list you’ll have created a lot of fear among the remaining people.

I worked for a company that did individual firing with a manager and HR, it was no where near 900 people, and it still took the better part of a day. It was absolutely terrible for everyone, not just those who where to be fired.
Catapult, the RISC-V CPU
I'm undecided on whether that's a bad thing or not - but the pace of the change(s) is what I'm finding more Annoy than Shock.

The most dangerous aspect of this phenomenon is that the platforms our applications run on are now highly unstable. We live in an era when software like operating systems and browsers will happily update itself whether we want it to or not. You can't build a castle on sand and expect it to stand when the tide comes in.

At least if the platforms provided stable, standardised foundations, those application developers who wanted to provide software with longevity and compatibility could do so. But the likes of Microsoft, Apple and Google seemingly have no interest at all in providing those stable foundations any more. If everything is throwaway junk then everyone needs to buy the new throwaway junk next week too.
Also if you apply hydraulic equations to the lave through such a small diameter borehole, you quickly find that you would NOT be in control of anything and you'd probably do more to trigger a large eruption - the velocity of lava out of such a borehole would be hypersonic at least and quickly open the borehole to form a new vent equal to an actual eruption.
That's one I hadn't seen before, and would assuredly cause fun.

The common one I've seen surprisingly often is the autorun script doing "cd" and causing for /f loops to break in some way.
Feels like there is a culture issue here isnt it? If so many employees are not performing or missing duties, something is wrong.
to be fair, ahaucnx didn't use the word 'accessible', he just said 'easy to build' -- and this is hacker news, not consumer reports.

but if you do want 'accessible' in your sense of the word (pay some money, get a working assembled unit), AirGradient does sell assembled units. And can provide a back-end system for remote monitoring if you would like.
I don't think people who write this sort of thing actually have any real concept of operating systems or software development.

They probably do have a very refined concept of clickbait though.
Milkmen, elevator operator, and switchboard operator were extremely common occupations in their heydays, all of which overlapped with my childhood.

I only stopped milkman service here in Palo Alto a couple of years ago (though the dairy downtown shut down maybe 30 years ago). It turned out to be a direct milkman->teenager pipeline which was better than walking to the grocery store twice a day.
I do not agree. It is very few words (maybe one page's worth?) with high information density. There is no rumination or explication whatsoever. It would be very difficult to make this article any shorter without removing information.
Yeah, I did scouts for a couple of years. I'd like to do some dev coaching at some point, maybe. COVID put a brake to some of my plans, but I'm having a lot of fun teaching my 4yo son in the meantime haha.
You cant tell it's a fear scam at this point? You don't understand how propaganda works? Lots of countries have no pandemic because they arent playing along. All dissent is called disinfo.
The default is to allow it to be deleted so you’ll forget you sent it so when it’s included in UserName342 dataset, you won’t even remember.
As someone who used 5-whys when I worked at Amazon, I love it and the criticisms here don't resonate. It's not about finding one path of causation, or finding everything you can point a finger out. It's about being willing to admit the actual causes and then do something about them.

"Why did our code break?" "Because we habitually ship things without thoroughly testing them."

"Why?" "Because our culture has product managers demanding things with short deadlines and no concern about the code quality."

... which, and this is key, has to be followed by managers at all relevant levels changing their processes to fix this. If it's not fixed -- at an organizational level -- as a result of the analysis, fuck off with the 5 whys process, it's just a joke.

I tried to run an Amazon-style 5-whys at my new job and my boss said, oh that was very good, good analysis. Then we did none of the things suggested. Well, there's no point. Just quit. You're going to be mediocre forever until the management chain buys in.

The reason Amazon scales well and can do so many things is that that their management is incentivized to care about things other than shipping/deliverables/this quarter's returns. It's still about the business overall, but Bezos' long-term-thinking has infected the entire company with long-termism and it's very effective.

I am quite sure that Google/Microsoft/etc do not have this quality in the same degree (or they would not have made many of their obvious mistakes). Not that Amazon doesn't make mistakes; they just make different kinds than a lot of other companies. And of course plenty of departments at Amazon don't do this well either; it's too big a company to be culturally uniform. But at least the norm is to do it well instead of badly, which is more than you can say about most larger-than-startup-sized companies.
> You assume anyone except the hacker knew anything about AWS.

There were a lot of smart and experienced people at Ubiquiti when I worked there.

Nick Sharp manipulated his way into total control over everything and wouldn't let anyone outside of his isolated team touch it. Nick was hired out of his job at Amazon because he was supposed to be the AWS expert. He used that to lock out anyone but himself and a trusted team.

It didn't matter that others knew better. Nick controlled it.
>It's pretty straightforward.

Really?

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html

>It's an actual contract between the source provider and anyone who uses it.

I don't want a contract, especially NOT with the FSF and their shady GPLv3 introduction...not thanks. If i want a contract i go to Oracle.
Religious (source header comments) and warships (General Dynamics) sure, but an extremist?
> isn’t for cloud-based software (i.e. software that changes without asking first)

Is it inconceivable that cloud-based software wouldn't change without asking first? My employer uses the wonderful Redmine for issue tracking and we haven't been surprised by changes because we control when to move to new versions.
What an absolute load of bollocks from a company that just raised $750M.
From the article:

>>Garg told Fortune that a month earlier, the company began to review employee productivity data, including missed telephone call rates, number of inbound and outbound calls, employees showing up late to meetings with a customer, and other metrics.

>>“You guys know that at least 250 of the people terminated were working an average of 2 hours a day while clocking 8 hours+ a day in the payroll system? They were stealing from you and stealing from our customers who pay the bills that pay our bills. Get educated,” Garg told Fortune.

>> “As we started to slow down our pace of hiring, we saw some alarming statistics and a number of our customers were not getting the service that they deserved from our teammates,” he said.

So the people at better.com said they looked at the data they had on employee performance.
emotion or desire, especially as influencing behavior or action.

I had to look it up, I wasn't even aware affect had a noun definition - I had believed it was only a verb. TIL
Brilliant, hilarious talk, thanks for linking.
Agile tries to create dynamic output with a typically static input (developer salaries), so there will always be drift towards a natural state.
https://twitter.com/bagder/status/1467895841541210118?t=pPU8... and https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2021/10/21/the-most-used-softwar... might be relevant here. TLDR; cURL is likely installed in even more devices (but not listed on SQLite's page).
I was thinking same but apparently the CEO is a complete arse [0] - perhaps the reaction is because of the messenger not the act itself.

[0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidjeans/2020/11/20/mortgages...
Could you expand on what Postgres offers that SQLite doesn't in this regard? I'm curious to know what I'm missing out on.
SQLlite has also got probably the most well-tested code of conduct of any open source project in the world (aside from the other open source projects which use this CoC)

https://sqlite.org/codeofethics.html
Founding DocSend, Creating a Winning PLG Motion, Data from 1000’s of Pitch Decks
> I think it was a good call for the CEO to do it instead of outsourcing to HR or a COO.

There was actually a movie about these outsourced "downziser" organizations/consultants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_in_the_Air_(2009_film)
>‘You are TOO DAMN SLOW. You are a bunch of DUMB DOLPHINS and…DUMB DOLPHINS get caught in nets and eaten by sharks. SO STOP IT. STOP IT. STOP IT RIGHT NOW. YOU ARE EMBARRASSING ME.”

Sounds like there's a problem at the top too.
TIL the original book was published in '64—kinda surprised to learn that, because by that time experiments with mediums were already quite widespread, particularly in literature (afaik): e.g. Principia Discordia, ‘published’ in '63. Pretty sure that suprematism and constructivism from the '15s and '20's were steps in this direction, and by the time of brutalism and general mid-century modernism, things were in full swing. Take Swiss modernism in print design: it's hard to not get the message.

By now, of course, the sentiment has permeated the culture—so in the recent discussion on Codex Seraphinianus, the comments immediately derail it to works that are ‘weird’ but play with the form at least as much as the content: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29413428
Taking the slings and arrows for it by entirely protecting himself with a one way call?

Nice meme
> what is the consumer harm

Fires from bootleg phone chargers and the like. (Google for "phone charger fire" to see how often this happens.)

Explosions from bootleg batteries.

Sickness from bootleg water filters and food.

What if you bought CO/ALR receptacles to bring a home with Aluminum wiring up to code, but the terminals weren't made from Indium?

What if you bought a marine battery for your sump pump backup, but it failed to perform and/or failed to notify you of its impending death?

I can continue from here, but I think you get the point.
I can see why you would say that, but remember ads are ultimately paid for by the person watching the ad. If the company didn’t have to pay marketing expenses, it would be able to sell the product cheaper.
Was continuing to use the older version of Excel not an option?
I think they ended up raising $16MM rather than the $250MM they had planned on.
>>Detonating nukes and releasing several gigatons of CO2 is more dangerous than supervulcano.

Eh? You are aware that if Yellowstone were to erupt it would literally mean the destruction of the United States. How is "defusing" the vulcano by detonating nukes "more dangerous" exactly?

>>Naturally released CO2 is harmless.

Again, atmosphere doesn't care - CO2 is CO2. Yes it doesn't count towards calculations that we currently do to model climate predictions, but it's not harmless, and a supervulcano event will fuck everything up, it doesn't magically stop having an effect just because it's natural.