skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> did Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, etc all make a terrible engineering mistake?

Is that so impossible? There are many other considerations that go into technology choices at these companies. There are trade-offs involved, and for companies with huge teams of developers the considerations need to be very different than for small–medium sized groups of developers.

I would argue that a smaller group of developers can focus much more on user experience and engineering efficiency, whereas a large company has a organisational scaling issues and a significant bureaucracy to support. At a large company, engineering considerations come second to very many things. It would actually be surprising if the trade-offs and choices those companies made were correct for other very different companies.
We've proven that the big tech companies can go fully remote and not completely crash and burn, that's about it.

Looking at record high stock prices, I think we've proved that offices are completely unnecessary. What you're describing sounds like a low performance interrupt driven nightmare.
Psychonetics discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28838445
Meditation is a tool. I don't understand how anyone can claim that a tool is powerful enough to alter your mind or body can only have positive effects. Of course, any such tool can also alter your mind or body in a negative way, if used incorrectly or if it is not the right tool for you. Same with Yoga, Ayurveda, weed etc. If you think it has the power to change you, you have to accept that it can also change you in a way you did not anticipate or want. I think we should explore all of these, but also be careful in recommending them as "side-effect-free".
We’re all just names on an internet forum. Everything here is baseless. I’m not even saying I doubt you are/were involved in PsyOps. I’m saying I’m not so sure I believe the “ex” part.

Anyhow…here’s a question for you. Leading up to Jan 6, it was quite clear to me that someone with PsyOp knowledge was involved with Donald Trump’s Twitter account. Any thoughts or comments on that?
That would be me. I'm the tech site lead for Atlanta.
The first part was certainly true many years ago (Bruce left). However, that was actually a driver for change way back in 2010 because nobody thought that was a good result
I freakin' love Japanese web design. I think the Japanese just favor the old "info dump" style of web page, as opposed to here where web pages are supposed to function as either advertisements or substrates for advertisements.

For an example of what this looks like in English, check out Hitoshi Doi's web pages, which are still up in more or less their original form from the mid-late 90s. I learned basically everything I know about Sailor Moon from him back in the day: http://www.usagi.org/doi/
> all victims are on the Ukrainian side.

So, a Russian conscript, beaten into submission and then sent off to fight a war against people who might as well be his cousins. If this conscript is killed in action, is he not a victim?
"or other 2nd-factor" includes another WebAuthn factor. This is one of the things that bothered people about login.gov before, they're like "But I already have a Security Key, what other factor can I use?". Another security key is fine, they're each independent factors, it just wants to make you won't lose your only route in to the site.

My login.gov has my two Security Keys plus my phone (a Pixel 2, via WebAuthn) as possible second factors. You can indeed choose TOTP, or use a Government ID (a few million people have Federal jobs with IDs) and if you must yes you can use SMS

So if you need better security, just don't choose the weaker options.

Suddenly that goes from "automated attack launched by a school kid on the far side of an ocean" to "Government black bag job", and it's enough that most people should sleep soundly.

Also, the other benefit of Security Keys as an option is that we can teach users that their Security Key is safe, because it can't be phished. That exercise where you try to train users to check they're on the right domain and realistically you know adversaries will confuse or terrify them into skipping that step? No need with Security Keys, that's the Web Browser's job and the browser isn't confused or terrified, it's just calling memcmp() as it does many times every page load.
I wouldn't accuse Google of having an effective management culture.

They tend to promote from within and along the engineering track, which results in engineers reasoning from "What would I (a high-performing engineer) do?" and not necessarily what's best for the team.
Well said. Dynamically linked packages managed by a package manager and created and distributed by maintainers is the Linux Way of doing things for multiple very good reasons.

In fact, the article brilliant describes one of them:

> Modern software distribution: AKA "actually free with no-ads apps store" of the Linux and BSD worlds.

That's it. That's the advantage summed up in a single description that wasn't even intended as a description of the advantages of the current way of doing things!

The article has a list of "cons", but it utterly fails to consider the possibility that this overwhelming advantage of what it calls "modern software distribution" is simply and inescapably tied to the maintainer-oriented approach that currently underlies it!

Attempts to create modes of distribution that are even slightly different from maintainer-distribution (think Google Play) suck ass. For all its faults, F-droid is a vastly better platform because it insists that the software must be built and distributed by an F-droid maintainer. Stepping even further away into the realm of developer built opaque binaries is begging for chaos and misery.

As you say, it's ultimately a security concern [1]. The article claims that a change is necessary because of "increased usage of languages and run-times that don't fit the current build model", "some of these new projects have large numbers ... of dependencies", but these are themselves problems with modern software development. Even putting aside distribution, bloated nodejs dependency trees create security vulnerabilities. The inability to develop software without pinning exact versions of your dependencies (which then need to be manually upgraded by the developer) creates security vulnerabilities and fragility. These are problems, not good reasons for changing our current way of distributing software!

I'm convinced that there are some (like me) willing to die on this particular hill. Come what may, even if half of the developers out there switch to Go and only ship static binaries, we're going to continue working on and using traditional Linux distributions with maintainer controlled software. (To be clear: Go and static builds are warranted in many cases. For example, closed-source rarely updated software like games, and software that is "deployed" rather than installed. But these are not the base case for Linux distributions.)

Further reading: http://kmkeen.com/maintainers-matter/

[1] https://blogs.gentoo.org/mgorny/2021/02/19/the-modern-packag...
That's a very dishonest distortion of statistics.
> Wouldn't that mean, though, that the Kytch device could be working around the issue in detriment of the patron's, or "end user", safety?

From what I understand the issue the Kytch device solves is the cryptic error code displayed by the machines. It tells the user what is wrong and how to fix it, which may just be restarting the machines heating cycle with the correct amount of liquid.

> a PR nightmare and endless lawsuits.

Not that McDonalds would have any issues managing actual health problems, just set the same people on it like they did in the McCoffee case and they can spin the families of a few dozen deadly ill children trying to pay hospital bills into a group of hypochondriacs trying to make billions.
Well, you can have a 'power of attorney' without being a lawyer. I think there's some of the difference there.
I like onelook.com -- it's a dictionary gateway site. It searches both general English and specialist dictionaries.
Well, you can probably start with the fact that the person you're replying to never said 20% of engineers.
I got a job that was onsite. On the first day I learned no one in my team worked in the same office.
Yes but we're talking specifically of Software targeted at consumers or niche professionals, what "Independent Software Vendors" sell, it's good that some infrastructure projects get corporate sponsorship and that RedHat funnels some money from its server software business to the Linux desktop, but this is, rather noticeably, not spurring development of Linux desktop applications now, or last year, or in the ten years prior.
> It does make a lot of things less efficient

Do you believe remote work is less efficient because your organization hasn’t adapted to remote work, or do you believe something about remote work somehow makes it inherently less efficient?
https://bandcamp.com/jerhewet
>> Looking at record high stock prices, I think we've proved that offices are completely unnecessary.

There's probably more than one variable that went into that phenomenon...
You remember complaints about the busses in San Francisco?

There are lots of areas that are having difficulty with gentrification and the associated difficulty of actually being able to hire people to work the service jobs in those areas.

A company that is paying significantly more than exacerbates the inequities in those areas. A big tech company having remote workers living like royalty in places as the cost of housing there goes beyond what the regular person who lives there makes can become a PR nightmare.
> but the amount of needless bashing it gets here is astonishing

I don't think it's needless. I'll bash Java as long as it's the language for AP computer science. Imagine a budding young programmer, bright eyed and bushy tailed, eager to get into computer science. They get to class and greet the teacher "Welcome class, let's learn about Java. There's a wide world of computers out there, but your perception of computing will be that Computing <-> Java until maybe the sophomore year of college. Have fun!"

Students come to me their sophomore year of college completely awestruck. "I had not idea! I thought programming was all Java!" they tell me. Imagine that. Close your eyes and picture a world where all of programming is Java programming. How quick did you open them and splash water on your face to wake rid yourself from that nightmare?

Java is singlehandedly responsible for snuffing the dream of so many young programmers. I've seen it in my own research, where kids in elemntary and middle school describe programming as fun, interesting, and challenging. That's because at this age they're using fun languages like Blockly, and they spend their time programming making and playing games.

Then they get to AP computer science and they are introduced to Java. Perceptions of programming fall through the floor, with more students calling it difficult, frustrating, and scary. It's tragic what Java is doing to young people.

Like, I understand we want students to have skills they will use in business, but we can't present programming to them as if all of programming is OOP enterprise development in Java. It's a crying shame.
And yet no sane parent would want their children to grow up in a single parent household. Studies don't show everything. Anyone with two eyes and ears can see that single parent households are not good for children. Most children that have grown up in a single-parent household can speak to this. If a culture has a high proportion of single-parent households, this needs to be addressed.
A modern MS Word document is pretty much zipped XML and mostly ISO standard-compliant.
I've had good results over the years with Juno Download, although I generally shop there for electronic music.
Everyone, it was a solid ride but we knew this day was coming. Upper management cannot sleep knowing employees have good work life balance. You need to be on the GRIND or these shares wont go up and you wont get your good equity.
Nope, you get it. Both you and GP are saying the same thing, I think.
> ASCII? Sure. EBCDIC? Ughh. UTF... 8? 16? 32?

8.

> Date: 2022.02.03

> Is this March 3rd or February 3rd?

February 3rd, obviously.

But the periods are weird; the standard is hyphens.

> Sure, but what about dates and encoding?

ISO and UTF-8.
This offers a modern approximation to both targets and fallout maps, but not sure I would say it's "better" as in my area (Seattle) the targets east of Tacoma seem suspiciously placed.

https://www.nuclearwarmap.com/
It really depends how you measure productivity. Does it make the team close their JIRA tickets faster and pump out more lines of code? Probably. But I wouldn't be surprised if it also resulted in more defects, worse designs, more tech debt, and more failed projects.

Sometimes the best thing you can do is stop someone from writing code.
If you're the type of person to smoke weed all day, I'm not sure that being at work would stop it. It's simple enough to sneak an edible or hit a vape somewhere outdoors and private. Who is to say it's not an ecig, especially if you're not doing it in anyone's face?

I think peer pressure, visibility, and lack of non-work distractions are probably the bigger thing, though. Not just in terms of playing video games instead of working but you don't have the option to get up and do the dishes, or take breaks as frequently to read, or any number of other things that are less "slacker" and more "ADD brain".
In general they don't add free stuff to your library, they just let you download it. I can't recall any free album that could be added to my library (I don't personally mind, I just download stuff anyway). There used to be a $.50 minimum to add something to your library but I think they might have dropped or reduced that at some point (you do need to pay something, though).
Minecraft on modern JVMs still requires setting memory usage based on how much free RAM you have (though not GC tuning
to the same extent as before).
2010.
Google was very different then, and was honestly somewhat immature about location strategy. It is no longer like that, in large part as a response to Atlanta back then.

We are opening a new larger space (in the next few months), and have over a thousand people here now.
One of them would be where NATO and Russia end up in a conflict which causes China to decide Siberia needs to be "protected". There are some 35 million Russians living in a region covering 140% of that of China which houses 1.4 billion people. Rich in minerals, forests, water and many other resources it is only a matter of time before a conflict around this region arises.
> having to deal with juniors or large teams with varying competence isn't unique to Google.

It's good for "juniors" but not yourself? Lmao.

No one can praise Go without speaking in the third person.
I would be surprised if managing disk cache by hand is going to beat the Linux cache allocator. RAM is never wasted, every byte not being used by an application is used by the kernel for disk cache.

If you dedicate 2 gigabytes of it to the .cache folder than either it's going to be mostly empty and you're be causing more thrashing as the kernel unloads stuff it didn't need to, or it fills up and your system falls over when something tries to put a big temporary file in that folder.
You think if folks did that on a regular basis, there would have been a noticeable contribution reduction. At that point, it becomes a person management issue and either the situation should be corrected or the person be let go.
Go read the source code was the message, given the gains on "hacked" drivers I think the answer is there, but frankly I would be dumping crypto right now...
I don't have non-standard browser settings. I watched the form submit in the debugger. It responds with a 302 to the GET request.
The comment you’re replying to has nothing to do with response time. They’re specifying their preference for in-person communication even though it may affect individual productivity.

I 100% agree with them.

I’m more productive as a remote employee, my coworkers seem to greatly prefer remote work, and there is a 0% chance the next job I pursue will be at a remote company.

It’s just not my preference.
Capitalism is ok with diversity in working methods as long as the pay is diverse too.
"US Army Psyop" is a subset of a subset of US government agencies.

https://www.federalregister.gov/agencies

https://www.dni.gov/index.php/what-we-do/members-of-the-ic
I think using thermobarics on a city is potentially a serious escalation from hitting airports and other infrastructure, as they are designed to kill people, especially people in shelters.
Because of the ability to rip air out of them, and from the surrounding to sustain longer explosions that penetrate deeper in openings and tunnels. My understanding is that they have an extremely wide blast radius that will kill people taking cover compared to the structural damage they dish out.
I wonder if prolonged experience with a written language that can condense quite well (and go in other directions that just left to right) is a factor.

I prefer old “data dump” websites even in English - much better than whatever the current “hero image” design we have now where we do about five words per ten inches it seems.
This is probably true if you're writing an SPA from scratch, but in reality much of that complexity is handled by libraries like Next.js. I also think it's much easier to learn a React-like library than to learn various server-side template frameworks..
I don't even understand what this criticism means. Does joking about his job title somehow mean he's full of himself? Would it be better if he said "Individual Contributor, Content & Communications at Stripe"? Some people think its arrogant to state your full job title too, like "what gives them the right to presume I care about their job so much?" or something?

IDK, i genuinely don't understand but would like to..

EDIT: or just downvote and move on that's cool too i guess. i have learned my lesson. he is disliked based on instinct and the reasoning is just post-hoc rationalization i guess. maybe asking for a justification in this regime is considered an attack.
What other runtime needs more updates than an OS? Python never asks for updates and breaks my workflow.
I just don't know how it could be made any easier to not mess up. You really truly do need to go out of your way to mess it up, or be entirely unfamiliar with the JavaScript routing framework or library you're using.
Almost 11,000 words later and his assessment is:

"The core result was correct."

"This prediction was correct."

"I doubt every claim is exactly correct."

He refused to even acknowledge how wrong he was, much less grapple with how his methods of research and reasoning got it so wrong.
hahah this happened with a new hire this week. We usually bring them in office the first week. This week, that meant they worked alone :)
There are other people who prefer to be an office that the juniors and poor performers can learn from...
As others have mentioned, it is probably a high pitched noise. You may not be able to hear it, or maybe it is just on the edge and so very hard to judge volume. But if you can find a child they will likely be able to tell you if it is switched on or off just by listening. Or one of the many of us who can still hear poor quality LED lightbulbs and TV sets despite the years of hearing abuse. Google coil whine. Be careful with soundproofing, so you don't cause overheat and fire; better to get a replacement charger. Often another unit of the same brand won't have the problem, and you just have a substandard component. Other cases, such as some LED bulbs, you have entire product lines that whine.
Other big techs to follow. I am irritated.
Was Yahoo! incredibly more productive and efficient after Marissa fired all these slackers ? That doesn't seem to be the story we've seen unfolding from there.
Ok, to recap: this whole article that we are discussing here is about the forward "gradient" method. Which, despite the name, only calculates a single directional derivative. If this were all, that would be a bit interesting, but not much else.

The article goes on to show how to make use of this in optimization. I called their descent algorithm the "random direction descent", because that's what it is. You chose a random direction, from a multivariate normal distribution with zero mean and identity covariance matrix (section 3.4). You chose a "step size" eta. Then you go along the chosen direction by eta times the directional derivative (times -1, so you go "downhill"). That is all explained at the top of page 4, Algorithm 1.

Why does this work, if, as you correctly noticed, the chosen direction is almost perpendicular to the gradient (one of the "features" of high dimensional spaces -> most of the volume of a unit sphere is close to the equator).

The answer is this: if you split the chosen random direction into the component along the gradient and the orthogonal component, then the first one has variance 1, and the second variance (N-1), since the overall variance is N, where N is the number of dimensions. The orthogonal component makes you move downhill, while the orthogonal component makes you move level-wise. The orthogonal component doesn't make things any better or worse.

Another commenter in this thread claims that this method adds noise, and the noise is sometimes so high that the method is useless. Well, that's not what I observed.

Why did I observe that the random direction descent outperforms the gradient descent. With the argument so far, you'd expect to do no worse, but why does it do better? This I don't have an explanation for, but maybe it's the fact that you don't have a constant step-size, but rather a stepsize that has variance 1. With the classical gradient descent, as you approach the minimum, the step becomes smaller and smaller. With this one, it still becomes smaller and smaller, but sometimes it's bigger, and sometimes even smaller. It appears there's some gain from the extra-stochasticity, so you end up getting faster at the minimum. I'm not sure why, but that's what I observed.
No, you just hold it a little differently. Twist it sideways, like.
It's not about how you wrote it, it's that the "single executable" concept needs both directions of compatibility if you dynamically link libc on any old distro.

E.g., you might use a relatively recent distro in your GitHub action (or whatever) to build this binary, but then anyone running CentOS or whatever can't run it because they ship an older libc version and required symbols aren't available.
It's now your fault they don't know about it
Second biggest nightmare.
Heh, that will sound familiar to many.

Funny how westerners are surprised by this. Not telling the grunts what they are going into has been Russian modus operandi since forever... Just like throwing bodies at the problem, sending conscripts from Central Asia first (throwing actual Russians into the meat grinder might prove unpopular), rampant looting (including of the most absurd stuff like toilets in Georgia 2008), etc, etc.

Somehow most of the pundits and analysts have been blindsided by this stuff, even though it's common knowledge in Eastern Europe.
>I think anyone who's claiming that remote work has been "proven" to be better or worse is wrong.

It's "proven" better for me and I'm, never going back and that's all that matters to me. I feel like this is a trend.
> But the bigger question, is why in 2022 is anyone still buying toxic crap from fast food restaurants?

because i’m sad and it’s easy, tastes good, and is fast

> live a couple years longer

not appealing
Yeah I really like it. It’s like Amazon but faster and without all the counterfeit junk.