skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I don’t wanna comment about my job, I think that this question ignores the fact that an individual having a job as opposed to having to depend on other or on welfare is IMHO a net positive to the world. And that a company can provide that for an individual is thus also a positive.

I do believe that are quite a few companies in tech that are cancer and a net negative to society… but it seems to me that the answer is a lot more nuanced than a simple yes or no.

I guess that If I could afford to work for an organization that the main metric for success is not revenue, that’d be a different story… but those are very few and usually accessible to people that are not oppressed by humongous amount of debt acquired while being an immature teen in college…
I guess I should add my own "story" for context:

Three decades into life and I've got no success stories to tell. At least not the kind that the world recognizes as "success".

For almost 20 years I lived a carefree life and thought I lived in a wonderful world with wonderful parents. I was always praised for being a "good kid", especially in comparison to my older brother who seemed so much more rebellious and independent (eg my parents would complain about how he doesn't phone home or whatever).

Then after I left home during college to live with my current partner, I started to figure out myself, started to grow and mature into a more independent person, but to my parents, I "changed".

From this point on, all hell broke loose. Everything from them became negative. They attributed most of it to my partner (who had a very "different" personality from what they were used to), who in their eye turned me into some unrecognizable person.

It's hard enough trying to juggle university and then grad school and a new relationship and living by myself and trying to be an adult in general, let alone having my parents basically turn on me and blame me and my partner for everything. Tension, conflict, revisited traumas, all came on in those few years.

Fast forward, things aren't as bad now. Not because we made up in any real way, but because, as they always do, they just let problems sit long enough and hope it goes away. We barely talk, as to avoid stepping on any landmines. I step on some occasionally, and regret it immediately, and retreat back to my own life, try to keep as much distance as I can.

But, neglected problems have their consequences. Now, I'm beginning to see some of them, and it's not looking good at all. And I have no idea how to deal with any of it, because the problems have grown too large, too scary. Could I have done something earlier to prevent this? Unlikely, because it all started on day 1. Can I do something now to make it a little better? Perhaps...
I somewhat agree, because as an end user all I had to do is disable the bundled apps (teams, etc) and switch the default browser to firefox. I agree with the criticism though, it really leaves a bad taste in my mouth to see all the extra prompts encouraging me to keep Edge, and the social media links (instagram, tiktok) in my start menu. But for someone who experienced bloatware, this stuff was pretty easy to remove / change. The main difference is that this "bloatware" came directly from Microsoft and not third parties.
This is a scary read for any citizen in a country neighboring russia. This type of propaganda is usually used to prepare the ground for mass murder, like preparing the own population for atrocities to come.
When I was in Amsterdam a couple years back, walking up a hilly street, I saw a lady with a stroller hanging out with her friends and chatting away while the stroller with baby inside started to roll down the hill towards me. I grabbed the stroller and rolled it back up to her about six feet or so. She looked at me, looked at the stroller, then laughed briefly and went back to talking to her friends. I just kept walking and thought, “that was one of the strangest short interactions I’ve ever had with somebody.” I put it down to something culturally Dutch that I didn’t understand.
You're right that HR is never your friend and today's world is so small, but my take: Be cautious with your words while offering genuine, constructive, and non-personal feedback.

It's possible that HR will never do anything--covering for a toxic middle manager--yet expecting to see action from a single exit interview is unrealistic.

SO! While you're not obligated to give any honest feedback, but if you like your coworkers then it's worth a shot.
Do you think Elon Musk does all that he does for the money?
I have a USB-C hub for my Macbook which isn't any of these (it's a "VMade") but looks exactly the same.

It's a heap of crap. (Or, at least, the conjunction of it and Monterey is a heap of crap.) If I leave it plugged in when the Mac goes to sleep, eventually the Mac will kernel panic and force a restart. The ethernet just randomly dies, such that I now run the Mac permanently off wifi even though I have a superb fibre connection. The USB connections do at least work, but that's about all I can say of it.
Yeah that's my point, being the babysitter of your platform is sometimes cost-effective, and sometimes not.
I’ve gotten burned out and taken 3+ months off between jobs for my entire career. Every future job has respected the fact that I could afford to take that time off.

If you’re asking this question it means you live in the US. As Nike says, just do it.
I don’t think of him as shining. I like that he’s a real person, flaws and all. Not someone to idolize. Many great hackers that I know and in general are total jerks (I suspect the trait helps wrangling a machine somehow but idk). I wouldn’t find it accurate to my experiences if we had some polished perfect optics guy as representative (not that that’s what he is)
Re Grothendieck, I'd recommend the book When We Cease to Understand the World, which somewhat romantically tells his story alongside Schwarzschild, Schrodinger, and Heisenberg. It's put me in quite the spirit!
I live in Toronto and can confirm. People will say Torontonians are mean and aren't as friendly as the rest of Ontario/Canada, but when it snows you'll be hard pressed to find any able-bodied person not helping out random stuck cars they pass while walking. Much like the article says, you'll basically just get a wave or a shake of the head after the deed is done.

Plus I can't count the times I've seen folks looking confused at a transit stop and someone asks them if they need help before I get to them. Of course, the local will act annoyed the entire time while helping.
See this comparison: https://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/22713

It really depends on what version (or configuration?) of the device you get. Both have the same USB-IDs.
Sorry, “recently ago or never”. Or else “whenever”, we can always redefine the goalposts. 20 years from now the goalies will be have moved them anyway to stay dry.
You mean the state with one of the lowest effective property tax rates in the country? Your property tax is pegged to 1% of the purchase price, and essentially never goes up ever again.

One of the only (if not the only) state where that happens.

The main reason not to own in CA is the insane purchase price, not the taxes.
It wouldn't surprise me. M1 Ultra has 114 billion transistors and a total area of ~860 square mm. For comparison, an RTX 3090 has 28 billion transistors and a total area of 628 square mm.
> The point of a graph is to illustrate a number that fluctuate and changes over time. Nuclear waste production does not.

I would expect that more nuclear waste is produced when more nuclear energy is produced and less waste when less energy is produced. Isn't that a fluctuation?
> tinygrad will always be below 1000 lines. If it isn't, we will revert commits until tinygrad becomes smaller.

I applaud this. Committing to keeping a project small and simple.

So many projects start small and simple, and before long they've been extended in many different directions and now have thousands of options and things to understand before you can get started.
I stopped watching her channel after her video on the simulation theory. It was very poor. https://lech.substack.com/p/sabine-hossenfelders-video-the-s...
I like his honest streams. Also this geohot can code for 12 hours straight. That's just amazing. If you take in to account his speed of thought, its more like 36 hours.
Didn't know they existed. Just called them. They said "no, it cannot be removed".

They suggested signing in with a different account, but when I do that, I get the error message "This account is not allowed to sign in within this network."
> Then Ukraine happened and basically none of the predicted capacities and skills 'actively maintained' of russian military were displayed when facing actual equipped and trained army.

For instance, the thing with the tires: https://twitter.com/trenttelenko/status/1499164245250002944.
Wouldn't they only get, at most, one low-end M1 Max if there is a defect?
String theory is crackpot AF. It's not based on Occam's razor or empirical observation, just on the fact that if you accept a few really giant unfounded assumptions, then you end up with some neat math.

We'd be better off with a theory of everything designed by a neural network, at least people wouldn't belabor under the mistaken assumption that "theory of everything" actually corresponds to anything real.
This is, in fact, precisely backward.

DC is great for transmitting power. You crank the voltage, use all of the copper wire (no pesky skin effect), and sync to the grid at the DC-AC conversion point.

The limiting factor to DC was conversion losses. The Pacific DC Intertie needed to use gigantic, toxic mercury vapor tube diodes for the conversion for a very long time.

Now that we use high voltage semiconductors, that's no longer a problem. We easily convert between DC voltages as well as AC with quite remarkable efficiency.
Hosting from your owning servers on home, localized data centers to global cloud companies.
You might read the Vector type constructor 'Vector N T' as "this is a Vector of T's of length N'.
> It seems to me bascially certain that no compressed representation of text can be an understanding of langugae, so necessarily, any statistical algorithm here is always using coincidental tricks. That it takes 500bn parameters to do it, i think, is a clue that we dont even really need.

I think your premise contains your conclusion, which while common, is something you should strive to avoid.

I do think your opinion is a good example of the prevailing sentiment on Hacker News. To me, it seems to come from a discomfort with the fact that even "we" emerge out of the basic interactions of basic building blocks. Our brain has been able to build world knowledge "merely by" analysis of electrical impulses being transmitted to it on wires.
According to the long-dead Learned Hand. The objective of a business can be many things. If we can tolerate the societal change wrought by technology such as mobile phones and contraceptives, we can redefine the objectives of business.
I really hate this kind of argument because it's an argument that springs from privilege and entitlement.

We can sit around and say that education should be free and accessible and that would be nice but it's not the world we live in. The fact of the matter is that life isn't fair and some people get substantially better or worse starting hands.

Yet you would seemingly rather remove opportunities from those with the fewest options because of how the government chooses to use the military.

It's pretty easy to say that others with fewer options than you should make sacrifices that that are at best symbolic when it requires no such sacrifice from you.

What are you doing to effect change? I guarantee you that influencing the government that sets policy is going to be a whole lot more effective than a few disadvantaged people sitting out a Reserve program where they might otherwise just be doing admin work.
I didn't say they wars didn't do anything. I said they probably do <<less>> than the equivalent peacetime.

99% of the examples you and other commenters use are in the military field.

And frankly, I know all of them, I'm a history buff.

Let's compare the washing machines of 1990 with those of 1995, instead. Let's compare Intel CPUs of 1980 with those of 1990. Let's compare desktop publishing in 1995 with that in 2000.

Heck, the more answers I get the more I'm convinced people are also partly influenced (I don't want to say brainwashed), by military R&D propaganda that needs to justify its budgets.

For every radar and jet engine there's a F22 jet fighter.
Sad to see Anker on the list. I used to think of them as a pretty reliable electronics manufacturer in a sea of low quality chargers and hubs.
I haven’t yet met a user who’s upset about having to use Apple Pay to check out on their apps or the App Store.
I have no idea why there is so much derision for CoMI on various forums, it was a good game, and the objections to it are never spelled out. Keeping my expectations in check for this new one, too-- why are we assuming it will necessarily be great, again?
FWIW, the hypothetical the author poses of the retaliatory company (because it's a hypothetical) isn't mediated by whether or not you do the exit interview.

Your previous company can decide to hand out false bad referral signal because they didn't like your face, regardless of whether you agree to do the exit interview. Hell, if it's the kind of folks who might give out false bad referrals, they could do it because you refused the exit interview (in their minds, you snubbed them).

Without knowing more about an employer, I don't think you can apply this "Exit interviews are a trap" concept universally.
And the military is far more likely to be enlisted, so the effect is going to be minor.

Also that report seems to only consider ROTC and West Point Cadets, and I’d bet both are wealthier on average than the officer corps as a whole.
I'd argue that anyone who's trying to dictate what you are and aren't allowed to install on a device you bought with your own money is the scammer in that situation. If Apple thinks those aforementioned parties are running predatory pricing schemes, then they're welcome to take any number of actions to discourage people from using those apps; the App Store could show a big orange "lootbox" banner at the top of each offending app, show a modal when you subscribe to an app that warns you about recurring payments, or create an individual review section for the value-add of any IAPs.

But that's not why they removed any of those apps. They kicked them to the curb because their developers thought paying a 30% tax for a payment processor they didn't need was silly, and Apple refused to serve their content unless they kowtowed to their rent collection. You're either misremembering things or creating justifications that don't align with the reality of the situation. Apple is trying to play the side of the public distributor of software and the private denier of apps at the same time. These attempts to keep the Cathedral and the Bazaar under one roof rarely work out though, and I don't really know what they're expecting if they think that our government is just going to turn a blind eye to a distribution monopoly like that, especially if Apple continues to charge developers for it.
I had this issue too. I switched to a dell monitor that used USB-C for video and then plugged my other useful devices into the monitor. I have two other monitors that use USB-C too, but I opted for a DVI to USB-C for the two monitors. I still have two available USB-C ports and if I'm in a bind I use one of these crap adapters via USB-C but that hasn't happened in quite some time.
'Green steel' heating up in Sweden's frozen north
This is an oversimplification. Even if the other big corps are also driving this that doesn't mean they're entirely wrong.
If you use a laptop with an external monitor, a better idea is to get a premium monitor which handles charging, video, and data transfer of USB devices connected to the monitor for you. This allowed me to get rid off the wonky USBC hubs, but before my employer got me a Dell monitor I didn't know that a single USBC connection can deliver all three.
One of the biggest reasons that I went through the trouble of switching to a Surface Book 3 + Surface Dock 2 was to make _damn sure_ that my desk docking station setup worked well. (Plus, I'm a sucker for the Surface Magsafe-ripoff connector.)

I'm running a Dell 27" 4K monitor and a ViewSonic 15" portable 1080p monitor along with the internal display full-time, with both external displays plugged in via USB-C on the Surface dock; and it's been reasonably reliable.

I don't have any other USB-C peripherals plugged in to the dock, and I haven't tried a fourth display; but so far, so good, no complaints.
I work on a language, Dart, which also relies heavily on flow typing (which it calls "type promotion" because apparently every language needs their own name for it). We use it both for subtype tests and null checks. It's really nice and a large net win for Dart especially given its history.

However, if I had a time machine and could redesign Dart from scratch, I would be tempted avoid flow typing and instead do something more like Rust and Swift do: Variables keep their static type but have pattern maching and nice syntactic sugar for simple use cases of it to make it easier to bind new variables with the narrowed type.

The main problem is that flow typing is very complex, subtle, and can fail in ways that users find surprising. For example:

foo(Object obj) {
closure() {
obj = "not int any more.";
}

if (obj is int) {
print(obj.abs());
}

closure();
}

This function is technically safe, but it's very hard for static analysis to reliably prove what kinds of flow analysis are valid when closures come into play. If that closure can escape, it can be impossible to prove that it won't be called before the variable is used.

A simpler, more annoying example is:

class C {
Object obj;

foo() {
if (obj is int) {
bar();
print(obj.abs());
}
}

bar() {}
}

This code looks like it should be fine. But if C is an unsealed class and some subclass overrides `bar()` to assign to `obj`, then the promotion could fail. Because of this, Dart can't promote fields and it causes no end of user annoyance. Top-level variables and static fields have similar limitations.

Even when it works, it can be surprising:

foo(Object obj) {
if (obj is int) {
var elements = [obj];
}
}

Should `elements` be inferred as a `List<Object>` or `List<int>`? What about here:

foo(Object obj) {
if (obj is int) {
var elements = [obj];
elements.add("not int");
}
}

Should that `add()` call be OK or an error?

Flow analysis is cool and feels like magic. It does the right thing 90+% of the time, but there's a lot going on under the hood that pops up in weird surprising ways sometimes.

It's probably the right thing to do if your language has already invested in an imperative style. But if you have the luxury of defining a language from scratch, I think you can get something simpler and more predictable if you make it easier to define new variables of the refined type instead of mutating the type of an existing variable.

Dart is heavily imperative, so I think flow analysis makes sense for it. Accommodating an imperative style is one of the main things that makes Dart so easy for new users to pick up, and that's an invaluable property. But I admit I envy Swift and Rust at times.
In a parallel universe where Intel builds and sells this CPU- what's the price? Single chip, die size of 860 square mm, 114 billion transistors, on package memory.

It just got me thinking the other day since all of these benchmarks pit it against $500-$1000 CPUs and it doesn't seem to fall in that price range at all. Look at this thing:

https://cdn.wccftech.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/2022-03-...
Unpopular opinion- I don't want 'the people' to be 'in control of tech', or really anyone else's private property. That's just populism, and populism is usually bad. I would like to see more antitrust enforcement (actually I think some of the examples outside of tech are more egregious), and I would like to see dispassionate, highly educated professional civil servants & judges make calls around excessive market concentration based on objective, transparent criteria. This is kind of the key concept that separates a developing country from a 1st world one- do you have a highly professionalized bureaucracy & judiciary working off of technocratic criteria, or are 'the people' (aka local demagogue) just deciding which companies are in favor this month?

Like, the arrangement we have now with the Federal Reserve & interest rates is good. Highly educated, objective technocrats who are deliberately insulated from voters make good-faith calls. Meanwhile in every developing country, 'the people' (aka the local strongman) decides what he wants the interest rates to be based on whim.

TLDR- antitrust based on objective rule by experts good, antitrust based on populism/demagoguery/'the people' (whatever that means), probably bad. I hate this leftist framing that just adds 'the people' to every decision in society
Will we see an intelligence too cheap to meter?

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/energysource/is-power-...
Accounts were that they were going around Mariupol and asking men if they were going to fight for Russia or Ukraine. It's hard to believe they'd let you go alive if you said Ukraine.
Then you are not a professional.
If you want a decent dock you have to spend a bit of money. I went through this pain before accepting the cost and buying a CalDigit Thunderbolt 4 Element Hub[1]. Run's two 4k displays at 60Hz, any peripheral and charges my laptop.

So good I bought a second.

1. https://www.caldigit.com/thunderbolt-4-element-hub/
Yeah I've been playing this game for the past two years with the MacBook Pro.

Most work fine for a minute and then after a few months seems to get cranky and some input will start failing :/

Currently using that Anker hub mentioned. Probably the best of the bunch but that's not saying much. Lots of little annoyances.

One thing I found was putting the low powered USB A devices on a smaller hub "stick" that's USB-C and daisy chained to the Anker one. This has been the most stable setup.

But usually about twice a month stability will wane I'll have to unplug everything, restart computer and then plug them all back in one by one.
Do you have a picture of the book? Can you post a picture of the passage and cover? That would be fascinating to see! (I believe you fwiw, not doing the whole "pics or it didn't happen" :) )
“ walking up a hilly street” in Amsterdam how funny
"The exception that proves the rule"
Little things like this helped me give up on Google.

Just ... rubbish.

They're basically a showcase of technology.

Impressive if they can keep the flywheel turning without giving a ... for the everyday people they once pretended to serve.
It feels like Apple should have done/should do an official in-house docking system instead of outsourcing such a critical component in the overall system/value proposition.
Absolutely, every time I have had a job that I couldn't answer these two questions with a confident affirmation, I have burned out in under a year. It certainly is a trial of your moral hierarchy when you are forced to pit financial and opportunity against your core values. I understand why people choose otherwise, but for me it's barely a choice.
How about another scenario: you later find yourself working under the same person, who you made like you by giving them useful feedback in your exit interview. Or you later find yourself working with one of your ex-coworkers again, who saw one of their major pain-points at that previous job go away because of your exit interview.

I think the assumption that the only possible result of being honest in your exit interview is that everyone who becomes aware of what you said dislikes you are a result is weird. Is this the same confusion where assholes claim that they're just "brutally honest" making people think that being honest in your exit interview requires you to be a jerk?