skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
sounds like the manager really needed that estimate (!)

that part of the story was really a microcosm of the gap that exists between individual contributor vs manager; the former 'does the work' whilst the latter needs to report the progress of that work 'upstairs', an archaic yet persistent organisation of labour
> Sorry, but this is your fault.

Lolwut

> As ever, your role as the employee (triply so as a contractor!) is to stay professional and follow directions.

That hasn't been true in many companies for a while now - especially if someone is in as a senior equivalent

> then blasted the company on a custom built blog.

I mean, the company blasted him with no right of reply on an internal system, not sure what the "custom built blog" has to do with anything

This reads like either a: the OPs manager who was in waaayy over his head, and lashed out or b: another manager who is in over their head and just want the smelly developers to do what they are told, and act like mindless cogs for them.
They don't. The majority of managers I've had in my career have been fine to great. I've probably only had one genuinely bad manager. However stories about perfectly competent managers who simply manage their teams to successfully completing projects make very boring blog and forum posts.
It doesn't have everything listed at all.
How is the vector of persistence of any significance here? At some point the attackers got root access on your system, game over.
The same train almost everyday for over a year? I'm sorry but the CFF loves smelling their own farts talking about how great they are but let's be honest here the Romandie part gets treated like a second class citizen. The trains are dirty, I remember seeing the same goop and grime on an inside train wall for over a month (I'm very consistent with my train timing so I ended up mostly taking the same train). The trains are late all the time, even yesterday for a simple trip from Vevey to Lausanne the train was late and I saw a lot of +5 min and more delays for other trains at the stations.

I know things are better in Swiss German parts but my experience has been so I have considered maybe getting a car or anything to avoid the trains.
Making full stack engineers successful necessitates simplifying the "stack" they need to work with IMO. If you have Kubernetes, a complex SPA frameowrk on the front end, and a maze of microservices on the backend, it's unrealistic to expect any one developer to have mastery over all that.

However, if you use a fairly abstracted PaaS, limit use of Javascript and primarily deliver HTML from the server, and keep things in one well-organized backend service, it's perfectly reasonable for a single engineer to contribute at all levels of that stack.

I think one problem with a lot of modern tools is they haven't made programmer effectiveness and ease of use a primary motivation. People look for the best tool for the job (which is often overkill for the scale / complexity that they need to solve for), when often they're better off choosing the simplest tool for the job (which might not work forever, but works well now).
No, that's just how markdown works, and HN uses markdown.
There is indeed the speed of propagation of electric potential taken into account, that is, how long it takes for the input of a logical gate or a logical subsystem to produce the output (that involves the propagation of electric potential through the chip's conductors). If your clock is too fast for the size of your subsystem, the result will not be correct at the output before the next cycle begins, so your system will just be bogus.
It will be as of next year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_British_Railways.
I guess if everybody were pushing the envelope, things would get unstable quickly. Humanity survives on a lot of dumb grunt work.
> and are really just excuses for selectively bullying out companies they don't like

Except that if Tumblr had chosen to take responsibility for the moderation of their platform then it would still be on the store. Twitter, Reddit etc are heavily moderated hence why they are still there.

> Apple has the power to control what software you can download and run on YOUR device

iPhone has been around for 15 years. We know. That's why we bought it in the first place.
Because the App Store review team is capricious and contradictory.

We've also seen third party Reddit app developers not allowed to feature content that the main Reddit app is despite toggles, and Discord not allowed to feature content that Twitter is.

The policy is badly written and not even Apple's own reviewers understand it, and they overreact to complaints from religious groups.
You forgot to use compassion.
Some people much prefer the contract lifestyle it can offer. It's not entirely strange to be honest.
It did. Apple repeatedly said that wasn't sufficient.
Apparently half a million Swiss did the math and decided 4 times that local bus pass price is worth their money. It's not like you have to get a GA. I don't and I'm happy with the half-fare abo, my daughter has a local pass and a half-fare abo (which doesn't help to the local pass reductions), but if you go in the mountains or skiing enough weekends (and many do) you will save lots with the GA - as the mountains are often not in your local bus network.
Science is hard, and you can usually make an exciting announcement about big discoveries. In physics we did not have any major discovery since the early XX century.

By major discoveries, I mean ones I cant talk with my mom (a humanist and a lawyer) and make it exciting. Balls that could go though a wall? that's exciting. You travel fast and you age relatively less than someone who does not? Oh yeah.

Higgs boson? Boring

Something something black hole at 3 MM light years? what's a light year?

OTOH you have areas such as biology where the announcements are revolutionary (about 3 extraordinary findings against cancer avery week) but there is a lot of money behind so the details are sparse.

On my PhD thesis, the introduction was 5 lines long, stating that if you need an introduction you should probably not be reading this thesis but here are a few books you could start with. And of course the thesis was terribly boring for someone who is not in the field (even though it had "particles", "neural network" and other buzz words inside).
Was on a Swiss train that did exactly this yesterday. To be fair, the delay originated in Italy (20 minutes late)and there was a minimal impact for people wanting to get to or leave from that city (Bern) as passenger on the affected train could get off one stop early and then catch another train to finish their leg and passengers trying to board the train in Bern just had to catch another train to the subsequent stop (Olten) to get on the late train there.

Finally, this was the first time in over 20 years of light rail use in Switzerland that I experienced this.
It’s not quite that petty.

It’s not that the background of the message is the wrong color, it’s that having an SMS user added to an iMessage chat degrades the functionality away from what iMessage supports down to what SMS supports.
the article seems to have been written by an immature MBA
Sounds like the manager was in over their head.

Engineering team will always have items that are very hard to estimate without doing background work.

A good manager would have said "what do we need to do to figure out times?" and then "Can we timebox that research to a sprint / two sprints / etc?" are reported the horizon one timescale up.
I don't care because of living literally among forests. Burn more fossil fuels, silly humans, your money won't earns themself!! Make even more fragile things (for burning even more later) and use a car for travelling anywhere longer than 402 meters.
I built a number of them. It was significantly easier.

The Javascript ecosystem today is far more diverse, complex and multi-faceted than in the past. It's hard to put together a simple to develop stack that will be supported and maintainable in the future.
It's the wiki, just add them to the article! Yes, these biases exist, help work against them by editing those pages that can easily be edited.

Edit: I just tried, that article is locked. Could add it to the Talk page.
It's thus probably also worth counting the number of trips - I don't have numbers, but I have a feeling that SBB runs much more passenger trains daily than Polish or other systems do.

The trains run more often and go to more places than any other place I've ever been to.
Another one I’ve seen is interpreting the statement “if you have an imposter syndrome, you can’t be an imposter” as “if you feel like an imposter, you can’t be an imposter”. I’m sure that approach can have the effect of temporarily helping someone’s self-esteem, but it’s based on highly questionable reasoning.
I think you missed the topic of this thread.
The E.U. has prohibited some tattoo pigments
> To say that a physical system is a computer requires an external observer to map the physical states of that system onto the abstract states of a Turing machine.

No it does not. An unobserved computer still computes.
There’s porn on my phone, Mr. Jobs.

Where? Which app?!?

The app I believed is called “the internet.”
Fossil-fuel price spikes are causing pain but little climate payoff
Close but, no cigar. Code sober, debug drunk!

https://sonnet.io/posts/code-sober-debug-drunk/
The last miner reward will be earned in 2140. It's a 110 year timeline. The miners will not transfers the ASICs to the other chains, the ASIC will be obsolete, broken or something.

But in 2139 the reward will be tiny, so it's better to worry sooner. A reduction from 6BTC to 0.06BTC is /100, that is like 8 halvings, that is like 32 year. Anyway, in 32 years the the current ASICs will be obsolete, broken or something.
> and anything relating to that gets flagged as "adult" by automated systems

Maybe Tumblr should have taken a page out of Apple's book and had reviewers.
Remote Development with Rust on Fly.io
You are assuming all SMTPs act in a compliance with the specifications. They don’t.
Agreed. OP didn't like the characterization of being a "bad culture fit", but to me, spending multiple hours to build a site, purchasing a domain name, and promoting it all over the internet is exactly the kind of pettiness and poor judgement which _would_ make a bad culture fit. I would never want to work with someone who would be willing to write up public manifestos about petty coworker drama.

OP was definitely mistreated, but the mature and correct thing to do is to move on and find other work. Use it as a story for the "conflict at work" question in an interview, but otherwise, put it behind you.
as needs must. Going non-nuclear will turn out to be a crippling (yet popularly supported) error by the German government. Nuclear reactors take 5 years min before coming online also, so half a decade / decade of fossil fuelling in the largest economy in Europe, with an economy that requires significant energy input
How do you know? This sounds like your opinion, not anything rooted in fact.
Has anybody told this to Morges? I would routinely get off the train in Bussigny just to watch the bus leave the bus stop as everyone is arriving. We would collectively let out a sigh of disgust. I've seen many people confront the following bus drivers about this problem, I know the drivers are not in control but some people just vent their frustrations on them anyway.

I even saw a mass walk out of an MBC bus because they were so disgusted with the service. At least the TL (Transport Lausanne) isn't garbage like MBC.
> Python classes may be clunky but it is said that Python class system is more flexible than other languages' OOP, even Lisp CLOS.

Nah. Python's metaprotocol is inflexible compared to other similarly-dynamic languages.

Here, let's try to monkeypatch a method onto a hierarchy of existing classes, calling the superclass method from time to time.

First, here's our existing hierarchy:

class Base: pass
class Derived(Base): pass

This is the decorator that will do the monkeypatching. Any other way of doing the monkeypatching will fall foul of the error we're about to see. There's no way around it.

def extend(cls):
def extender(f):
setattr(cls, f.__name__, f)
return f
return extender

OK, let's add `foo` to Base:

@extend(Base)
def foo(self):
print('I am a base!')

and to Derived, calling the superclass:

@extend(Derived)
def foo(self):
print('I am a derived!')
super().foo()
print('I am still a derived!')

Finally, let's try it:

Derived().foo()

Oh! What's this??

~$ python t.py
I am a derived!
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/tonyg/t.py", line 20, in <module>
Derived().foo()
File "/home/tonyg/t.py", line 17, in foo
super().foo()
RuntimeError: super(): __class__ cell not found

Huh!

---

Turns out in situations like this you have to hold the runtime's hand by supplying `super(Derived, self)` instead of `super()` in the `foo` in Derived. It's to do with how the compiler statically (!) assigns information about the superclass hierarchy using magic closure variables at compile-time (!).

There may be some insane magic tricks one could do to make this work, maybe. Things like reaching into a closure, rebuilding it, adding new slots, preserving existing bindings, avoiding accidental capture, making sure everything lines up just right. It... didn't seem like a good idea to put insane magic in production, so I did the traditional Python thing: swallowed my discomfort and pressed on with the stupid workaround for the bad design in order to accomplish something like what I was trying to achieve.
Yeah, technology still isn’t a socially respected job.
Should be able to post.

VS

Should have no consequences for anything you post.

How are so many people getting this wrong?
oh yeah sure, the guy was out of his depth, scrambling for numbers to support the story he was telling upstairs
Every time I watch a dabeaz talk about metaprogramming python I think about CLOS.

Expert may pitch in but it feels like a regression (even though I understand the social dynamics at play)
Full title is "Former AWS engineer convicted over hack that cost Capital One $270m", so yeah, misleading
Here’s an easy heuristic:

The trust you should afford to a dentist is inversely proportional to the amount of time and energy that dentist promotes teeth whitening products and solutions.
Then use a bank that does have a mobile website or non-Samsung specific app.

Companies will not change behaviour unless you vote with your wallet.
plotted as in graph, not as in conspiracy :)
> 5. A semantic line break SHOULD occur after an independent clause as punctuated by a comma (,), semicolon (;), colon (:), or em dash (—).

Uh oh, that’s incompatible with standard em dash usage, which is with no surrounding whitespace.

(I’m designing a lightweight markup language of my own, and it’s tempting to special-case an em dash at the end of a line that is not preceded by a space, to join to the next line without inserting a space, but I’ve been trying to avoid nuance in rules. But I definitely do want to put line breaks after em dashes sometimes.)
> “is AI going to torture us for eternity if we don’t praise it enough?”

Probably not. It is after all not an Abrahamic god…
I think this largely depends on the definition of "know".

E.g., when I used to work as a doctor in hospital, the last thing I would describe my colleagues as would be incompetent or un-knowing. They all "knew" stuff. Heck, they had to pass stringent exams, and were still accountable to several agencies to ensure being up to date.

The thing is, 50% of what they "knew" was wrong. And if you looked a bit under the surface, what one person "knew" was very different, and often contradicting what the other one "knew", even though they both "knew" stuff. And after many years, I've come to the conclusion that the number one cause of modern disease is iatrogenic, but most doctors seem not to want to admit this, and stick to what they "know" from textbooks instead. This is something I now "know".

And that doesn't even take the whole "is 'know' a binary or fuzzy concept, and if it's the latter, how much 'know' counts as actual 'know'" argument into account to begin with.

So, I hear the argument that "maybe OP is just an impostor projecting their views in a world full of experts" (wildly paraphrasing, obviously), but I also think you're perhaps being a bit too rigid here in discounting that expertise is a relatively fuzzy term.
> If this is true then there is no reason that these abstractions couldn’t be learned, in which case you could take away the language, and perhaps the machine would continue to have thoughts; it would just be unable to communicate them. Of course, in this case you would probably conclude that it’s not conscious because it can’t communicate.

If this were true - that it had a general human level abstraction, and not only the ability to mimic human speech - we would be able to attach LaMDA to some other outlet and see it do things we consider conscious. It would be able to navigate environments pretty accurately, for example, since that's something even animals that we consider much less conscious are able to do.

If it's only optimized in one specific domain - human speech mimicry - and isn't able to generalize to do other tasks - even tasks that can be done by much simpler animal minds - then it's a pretty good indication that there isn't conscious abstraction.
That was definitely the implication I took but I don’t think the title is misleading. If the hack cost a company 270m it was a 270m hack imo. Similar to how we measure property damage.
Any specific reason you believe that a soldier was involved?
I cannot agree. The post makes it clear that the author was hired as a senior engineer ("…He expected more from a senior engineer…"). Senior engineers are expected to present the needs of the team beyond immediate work items, and so it was the author's duty to raise these issues.
> If everyone just sucks it up then nothing gets solved.

That's a naïve way to look at it. As a contractor he should have STFU and done his job. His job is to do the work he's told to do. Now, if the manager hadn't been an asshole, none of this would have been an issue. But when you're dealing with an asshole (in a position of power over you), the last thing you want to do is continue to piss him off.

I've been there, done that and when I there was mutual respect and trust between the manager and I, I would push back on things that could be done better. When the manager was an asshole, I just stayed in my lane. My job wasn't to fix the org's problems, my job was to build software and (from my perspective) my primary concern was staying employed.

If he wanted to stay at Spotify he just should have kept quiet and switched teams.
Culture Docs: Facebook, Netflix and Valve
Ask HN: I've built a supposedly useful site. Now how do I make it known?
So for the past few months, I started building a web site that's targeted to a niche group of people. It's partially a social network.

My assumption is that it will be useful and attractive to a lot of people out there. I shared it with friends and they've been using it every day, so I've been getting good feedback.

I myself been using it since the very early prototypes, since it was solving a problem I had.

Now it's reached a point where I think I should stop with adding more functionality, and start somehow advertising it to people that might find it interesting and join.

But I'm a bit stuck as to how to market this and make it known. Do you have any advice on one generally goes about making their project known to the world (not anybody, just the people that might care about it)?

To clarify: I don't have any plans or even thought about monetization. I'm doing this for fun and I there are no subscriptions charged etc.

Thanks

------

EDIT: I guess what I want to say is that... OK I've spent effort building this, and it looks good and useful to me. How do I validate my assumption that it will be good and useful to others?

Seeing people joining and using it would be a huge motivation to make me continue working on this. (Not that it's the only motivation.)

EDIT 2: Since this is for a pretty specific group of people and it aims to be free, I don't want to put paid ads anywhere.
> likely more financially risky but with longer-term industrial potential (electric semis in particular) because the shareholders would balk

Electric Semis are not that risky. Tesla has been very very clear about their strategy. As long as they can turn all the batteries and chips they can get into car they will not actually make any more profit by adding more model diversity.

Unlike every other car company that is promising 50 models in 2025, Tesla basically will only do so if they can.

The Semi will be a big seller when it comes out. Simply put, nobody else has the batteries either to dominate the market.
My view is that if this story is 100% true, the author is in the wrong, and the manager is in the wrong, and Spotify as an employer is in the wrong.

Write a formal letter and pass it up the chain appropriately (without this petty retaliation baked in), transfer teams, find a new job, etc... Fighting the manager directly and consistently does not provide any business value, social value or goodwill. It's simply the wrong play.

In an ideal world, pushing for what you think is correct is noble and moral, however it is not an ideal world. Rallying against (minor) wrongs is not always valuable or appropriate. Business magnifies that, and pushing back against (minor) wrongs becomes ever more subtly complex.

Business environments require tact and that is absent here.

Now we can take it a step further and assume that the author is making themselves appear less complicit than they are (we all do this to some level when writing about ourselves). The chance of that pushes this story from "innocent but socially immature dev against big bad manager" to a whole variety of stories where it's a troublesome developer and a manager trying their best (even if moderately poorly) to manage it.
Start a VM at any provider (IP reputation doesn't matter for receiving), install an SMTP server on it configured to accept everything (but not relay) and add an MX record for it.

This will at least allow you to receive mail until your primary comes back up.
I am sorry that you have this kind of experience. Vevey - Morges is really a weak point of the network, and I do agree that the Romandie gets treated like a second class citizen.

I also use the train daily to get to Romandie (to Lausanne), and I almost never have problems: maybe the train is late every two weeks by 5 minutes.
> I don’t consider £25 each way Manchester-London to be brutally expensive to be honest

I think you're citing pretty much a best case there. I just put in the same journey on a morning next week and got £150 each way, which I suspect is still not the worst case.

Before the pandemic, my wife used to pay about £5K/year for a London - Brighton season ticket (a distance of about 50 miles).

Possibly the most infuriating thing is that it's highly unpredictable what's cheap and what's expensive, and long journeys can often be several times the cost of flying. From a social-welfare/cost-of-carbon and oil-crisis perspective, this is nuts, especially when you compare what Germany is doing[1].

[1] https://e360.yale.edu/digest/germany-slashes-summer-train-fa...
Check the appendix of the book. The authors have made a comparison.
> The solution is to stay away from it and send a clear signal that Facebook is not the proper channel.

Collective action through the legal system is another legitimate approach. If enough people are unhappy, legislation can force a change.