skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I recently left an 8,000 person company that's been on a 2 decade loop of private money to publicly traded and back a couple times now. It occurred to me that in 25ish years (about 10 of which I worked there) that it might never have made any money

That is crazy if true. My fear is that there are a ton of tech companies like that, just chasing future profits or an acquisition, but not actually creating anything of value (at least in terms of profit).

I don't know. It just doesn't sit well with me knowing that a lot of products we build don't actually make any money. We're all just part of some weird system of money re-allocation and the software is just there as a signal that money should change hands.
Is your first sentence missing a negation, or can you elaborate?
We should require every fusion breakthrough article to state Q in the title
Maybe; it's different than saying it's a "human right" though.
I worked at Klarna between 2011-2013 as a software engineer and later as a team manager. I was laid off in a very similar fashion at the same time a bunch of others also got the same surprising news.

When it happened to us there was no announcement from the CEO. Sebastian had actually just gone on parental leave and one of the co-founders, Niklas Adalberth had taken the reigns.

At the time, my suspicion was that it was because Niklas Adalberth was getting rid of people he didn’t like and that the main reason my firing in the way it was done.

I was invited to an external meeting room at 17:00 in the Stockholm office with my boss and my boss’s boss, where they proceeded to tell me “we think we need someone else in your position”.

My boss looked helpless and sat quietly the whole time. My boss’s boss did all the talking and seemed just like someone following orders.

Reading this now it’s sad to see how nothing has changed at Klarna and makes me think that even if Niklas did had something to do with my firing that it couldn’t have happened without Sebastian’s knowledge and approval.

My experience of Sebastian was that he was a talented product guy, but unfortunately seems to leave a lot to be desired as CEO.
Not that amazing… wind flows up the wall of the dam and blows the water with it… you can see the unsteady wind flow by the variability in how the water is “flowing” up.
I don't do mass-scraping with some automated tool. TikTok allows you to save videos, so people do that and re-post on other channels. There is enough of that happening that scraping is redundant. Just the way Vine[0] lives on forever on YouTube.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vine_(service)
I've actually spent the last few days looking for a good free/affordable cpanel alternative. I've tried four different options, none of which were very good. I think there's definitely a place for what you're describing, though I'd start your process by doing a lot of research into what users are specifically looking for.
There's a business case for periodically killing people who miss loan payments, to keep the other debtors on their toes. The idea that the concept of theft has to be eliminated in order not to justify these business practices is an infinite license for them to continue.
Fusion reactor can, in theory, go out of control, but it won't "fuse any atom it comes in contact with". Somewhat simplified:

The failure mode for a regular (fission) reactor can be twofold. The better scenario is that by some kind of mechanical failure the radioactive materials escape the confinement, and instead of putting their energy into the electricity generation mechanisms, just start shooting it around, irradiating things, thus breaking them (including living organism's cells and DNA) and causing them to become secondary sources of radiation. The worse scenario is that that before that, radioactive materials become too close together, starting self-sustaining chain reaction, which outputs immense amounts of energy (essentially, like a nuclear bomb), inevitably leading to destruction of whatever container it is in (no container can survive it for long, too much energy) and spreading around, by which time we're back to the scenario above (since once the materials have spread around, the chain reaction would stop) only with much more material which is much more energetic and thus will spread around wider and do more mess.

The failure mode of fusion reactor, if it happens, would be different, since it does not contain fissile material. Instead, it contains some light elements (usually the mix of deuterium and tritium, both of which are just hydrogen with some extra neutrons) which are heated and compressed a lot to start forming helium. If something breaks, the elements would not have anything to contain them (since, unlike what happens in the Sun, they don't have nearly enough gravity in themselves to be able to counter the thermal forces taking them apart) so what you'd get is a lot of very hot gases (mostly hydrogen) flying around. It's no fun, especially given hydrogen likes to explosively combine with oxygen in the air under the right conditions, but there would be no radiation involved, and it won't be able to "fuse" with anything else because it won't have enough energy to initiate the fusion process (that why we needed to compress and heat it up in the first place). So if everything goes very wrong - which is not very likely, but we're assuming the absolutely worst case scenario - we will have an explosion but noting like fission reactor. The containment is absolutely necessary - at least in current fission reactors - to achieve more energy out than in - and if it fails, the energy output will stop. This is one of the reasons fusion reactors are supposed to be safer.

There still could be some radioactive contamination involved due to fusion causing neutrons to fly around, hit the surrounding materials and turn them radioactive, and these could be spread around by the explosion, but less than in the fission case.

Now you may ask how hydrogen bombs are so destructive then? The big difference they use a regular nuke to ignite the reaction. Unless somebody builds a fusion reactor inside an exploding nuke, that's not the scenario we'll be dealing with in the fusion reactor case.
To see the flaw in that idea, take it a step further. Some people can't read at all, so why not force everything to be described in pictures or videos instead?
P.S. this part about needing irrigation is not unique to the Central Valley.

Irrigation agriculture, rather than depending on natural water for growing, was an innovation humanity developed 6000+ years ago.
I like Rust because it feels like it "spans" well between high-level and low-level use. The highest-level Rust I've written looks kinda like C#, since it has async, mutexes, etc.

C is very limited in how high-level it can go.
I would recommend blacklisting a few words while generating the URL. This is what was generated for me https://0x.co/done.html?code=632CUM
Google started testing similar functionality on Google Docs recently: https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/google-docs-writing-...
I agree; The credit score system is full of abuse. But, and I ask this genuinely, what’re the other options?

If I’m a bank that’s has never heard of Joe Schmo (who’s asking for a credit card), how do I know how much credit to give and at what interest rate? Sure, I could give them a very low limit and high interest rate, and both would improve over time, but if my competitor next door can extend $5k at 15% by looking at Joe’s credit score, why would Joe come to me?

The reason credit scores exist is because there’s a market for that information, and the three companies took advantage of that. But because of that market, abuse had to be controlled, and Congress produced the FCRA. But even with that, there’s still the mess we have today.
that's less useful if you're trying to do it over multiple rpc calls, which is how this is used
> If you aren't succeeding, you are failing - and I was expected and taught to succeed by default.

Nitpicking, but you were expected to succeed by default, and also taught to strive for success by default (and presumably also taught the tools and approach to maximize likelihood of success). People cannot be taught to "succeed by default", anymore than someone could be taught to "win the world series by default".

And then that unpacks the challenge of this particular world view (and points at why the 'self-esteem thing' is a thing), is that learning to strive for success, and learning the tools and methods to achieve success does not mean you will actually reach success (this would just be a variant of the just-world fallacy). The challenge is how do you create the motivating factors and structure for as many people as possible (hopefully everyone) in your society/culture to earnestly strive for success, but not crack apart when they encounter continued failures.
No. And also the web is not really international. It is filled with little pockets.
People just want shit to complain about, if they can't discuss technical issues and provide explanations/solutions it'll be social ones instead.

I wasn't kidding about selling a case or making the case out of plastic or coating the outside with a rubberized material. Apple chose to be the odd manufacturer going all metal and that leads to unmasking issues like this. I would wonder whether it's cheaper to ship a 3-prong or a silicone sleeve for the laptop.

Telling India to fix its electrical standards to avoid this annoyance is just as futile as telling Americans to bury their electricity transmission lines. Even if it was codified it'd take years for components to get replaced.
> Best layoff I ever went through was when my boss came to our team and said, "look, don't tell anyone, but we have a layoff coming in a few days. I have to let one of the three of you go. Do you want me to decide or do you want to decide amongst yourselves?"

Judging from your reaction, it sounds like yall had a great work environment, and that this was a good way to handle the layoff for your team. It sounds like it went smoothly, which is 100%, A+, great.

But HOOO BOY, that was a HIGH RISK move by your boss. I sincerely can't imagine the clusterf** that would've resulted from that at some of the places I've worked. Good GOD. This is an invitation for a lawsuit on a silver platter, holy guacamole.
I joined Proxify (on the list) recently and was pleasantly surprised to find a quite vibrant tech scene. As someone who followed the more traditional startup hubs like Amsterdam, Berlin or Dublin, I've found that there are many gems in the Nordics.
There is an incredible dichotomy that I learned about from David Deustch, which is that things are either:

a) ruled out by the laws of physics, or

b) possible.

Commercial ICF is in the latter category as far as I can tell.

In other words, maybe?
Not for cross-country journeys yet (at least not alone), but battery powered locomotives are picking up steam...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2022/03/01/the-new-...

Apparently they largely have regenerative breaking already but nowhere to store the energy so dump it through resistors to vent it as heat, if they had big battery arrays the savings could be significant.
I’m sure AI in charge of organizing a process can build forms and reach BAAS naturally.

What I wonder is, to output a mess process, would it be faster than actual government services, or do govt services effectively act as brownian agents?
q is more of the fan way to look at it than the engineer way to look at it

people throw it around like "you need q=1.35 to be economical" but that's kind of nonsense
In a lot of ways internet businesses are like buying bonds. You pay some cost to acquire a customer and will get revenue from them over time. You can calculate a present value for that customer based on that future revenue. As long as that value is more than what you paid to acquire the customer you're making money.

And if your numbers are right then you, more or less, want to spend as much money as you can buying customers. So that's how companies with numbers like this continue to operate.

To put it simply, Klarna is spending a billion dollars to buy customers that will generate more than a billion dollars in revenue. The catch is that you have to pay now for later revenue. So your numbers look like crap until your existing customers far outnumber your new ones.
That is awesome for a cohesive, high functioning team. I worked at a company with some obvious (to everyone else) under performers, and as much as I wish they had not been a layoff, I would have been pissed if some of the nicer members of the team had volunteered to take the bullet.

That said, the standard layoff protocol only got rid of one of them, and the other only left after reacting badly to the slight uptick in performance feedback (suggesting his lack of self awareness)
Mattermost? And all your chats are in Postgres so you can build all kinds of fun magic on top.
Capitalism is why it was done in the first place, instead of people waiting in lines outside stores.
Athens Charter
I predict it will be a feature in the next release.
Not to mention a tritium shortage [1?] -- assuming this is D-T fusion -- which it seems is going to be hard to get in the first place let alone throw it into a generator.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31451902
I take it you are a reformed Lisp programmer?
I'm German. I'm still filing it under marketing BS. Sue me.
It's not.

Plastics do decompose slowly, but they certainly do decompose -- especially under sunlight. If they didn't decompose we would have a lot more plastic in the environment than we do now.

Here's a recent study on the rate of decomposition in the ocean: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030438941...
Aside from an expression of self, your appearance is a signal to others. How you present above the neck is part of that signal. We're always sending signals. And obviously always receiving them. Signaling is what humans do.

Haircuts are gender neutral. How and when people use that signal is left to the individual. Or maybe we should all shave our heads in order to avoid offending others with our choices?

I hope not.
I have a friend who looks exactly like that. Tiny head, huge body.
The Dark Knight has Bane trucking around an explosive fusion reactor.

In Spiderman 2 Doc Oct is blowing stuff up with fusion.

Those are the two that pop into my head.
I find this viewpoint astonishing.

That we would use technology to intentionally dumb writing down.

Instead of using that same technology to provide definitions for less common words to people who might need them.
Yes there was no such thing as hard work before America. All of civilization sprung up from nowhere in a life of leisure where everyone relaxed, then America came around and made everyone work hard.
Fun idea. Needs a sort by time, and a link to the context.

"I predict this will turn into a debacle for Apple."

What will? I pushed the button about 10 times and only saw one that was even partially understandable without context.
That can be easily faked. Seems susceptible to sybil attacks.
What are the other relevant numbers to summarize the progress? $/kWh?
I've built Formester[1] which aims to be the only backend that you would ever need for any forms on the web. You want to build survyes you can do it. Want to store data from your own embedded form, auto notify users on submission, protect against spam with out fiddling with complex code and much more. I would love to get feedback from users on what could be improved further.

I had initally abandoned it but have picked it up again in 2022 and this time I'm planning to make it big.

[1] formester.com
You are not the only one to have this thought. The problem is - who comes and fixes the mess when the inevitable customizations needed have been done by a contractor who is now long gone? It seems like a great idea at the beginning, but at some point someone ends up responsible for a fleet of AWS accounts that have diverged in different odd ways. Who is that someone? Individual departments? A centralized department?

The latter sounds nice except for the lack of appetite (on both sides of the atlantic) for doing what's necessary to recruit and keep SREs as actual government employees rather than just contracting everything out...
Ask HN: How to diagnose why streaming video to a PC is so choppy?
I've noticed for the past several years that video appears really choppy when streamed to a PC (but not to a TV or Tablet/Phone).

I'm sure it can be a variety of things, but I've noticed it on all major platforms -- Windows, MacOS, several flavors of different Linux distributions, on several programs.

I figure it could be codecs or similar. But that's not yet in my skillset how to determine those (and whether that is a fruitful target for investigation).

It happens on all kinds of internet feeds and connections (wired & wifi).

I'm curious how you as a tinkering hacker would approach this!
The question is, does the problem exist in a normally functioning unit? Am in the majority or the minority here? If I’m in the majority, and most people don’t have this problem, then I think it seems like an unfair generalization to say with certainty that all macs have this problem which is what some commenters seem to imply. I was trying to debunk the idea going around here that all Macbooks do this because they dont.
The Universe of Discourse: Things I wish everyone knew about Git (Part I)
Has the first bullet (“ignition”) been achieved before, or is this the first time?
It needs a very special OS: "git, lua, curl, a sha256 utility, standard compression utilities, and an x86_64-linux-musl cross compiler"
Oof, basically everything I've built, I've been too lazy to market...

- Mental Health tracking app [1] for tracking my daily activities against my anxiety/depression/well-being

- Web3 Contract Explorer [2] for making it easier to inspect and run methods on Ethereum contracts

- GlobalEntry appointment notifications [3] for making it easier to book last-minute interview appointments

[1] https://mental-h.vercel.app/

[2] https://web3-contract-explorer.vercel.app/

[3] https://www.appointmentfinder.xyz/
The "contracted for development" setup is common amongst multi-territory IP-heavy businesses. You choose a country to hold all the IP and have other locations sell development services to that country's legal entity.

You can do it to fiddle around with tax, but it's separately quite sensible to hold all your IP in a single region & entity to minimise the complexity - otherwise you'd have every territory licensing IP to every other territory, a.k.a an absolute mess.
Welcome! Yeah, I think titles may be edit’able for a short while only, and even then I’m not sure.

Glad that your post picked up some comments nevertheless!
We're good at logging text, but how do you handle logging assets (images, audio - anything non-textual but generated) and associating them with your logs?

For example an image processing pipeline. You don't always want to log (it'd never scale) but as part of a trace you might want to keep the intermediate files so you can track down where the problem is. You've already got text logging for each step, recording metrics like duration and which filters were involved. I have saved files and referenced them in the logfile, but no log viewers I've seen understand anything beyond text. So I then have to build my own UI or open the images in turn.

Is there a pattern to handle this?
Looks like other commenters identified it as Blood Music, but this sounded a bit like “Steve Fever” by Greg Egan [0] to me. Similar themes! Great gateway drug to other Egan stories.

[0] https://www.technologyreview.com/2007/10/15/223446/steve-fev...
Hi OP! It would be nice to have some examples to go with the article. Some set of minimum data and sample "lineage" etc.

This has broadened my perception of data though, I never linked this with the good old thermodynamic principles.
[Silly aside] So, the highest level of abstraction is that used by management, since it obviously causes the hiring and firing of programmers, regardless of the languages they use. We've adopted things like Dilbert to point out how silly they are, perhaps it's just because we can't do the 4d chess they do. Or, maybe late stage capitalism is an irrational environment with bad incentives.

Backing out a level, it's not possible to look up a level of abstraction, because that view is basically every possible option, and an infinite space. You'd have to violate Gödel's incompleteness theorem to do so.
Web browsers are for serving website content, their job isn't to moderate content especially at the level you're describing. If you want to write your own filter/extension to preserve your eyes from being exposed to unfamiliar words, you're free to do so.

Wikipedia has Simple English - https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_English_Wikipedia - maybe you're looking for something like that.

But the idea that we should be discouraging difficult words, or that this should be done at a browser level is terrible in many ways.
The "Optimized B-Trees" section I _think_ is suggesting to get rid of datoms, which I 100% agree with. I do not think they add anything at all; IME you can have a collection of all attributes indexed by entity ID and then have additional indexes on top of that collection.

My stupid question is: why even bother with B-Trees? I believe asami[0] stores everything in memory using Clojure maps & sets.

[0] https://github.com/quoll/asami
That would be very easily solved by adding a Node.js version or range in your package.json that specifies where the program is supposed to run, and treat major versions as breaking. There's a balance to be had here, and avoiding breaking anything at all costs is surely not really balanced and it's starting to add a lot of cruft that will be needed to be maintained long-term.

The solution is not to "warn loudly" here; specify a Node.js version in your package.json, and your code will continue working on that version. Upgrade the Node.js engine version, and then it's on the person upgrading making sure that nothing breaks. That's how virtually all platforms work (except the web itself, but that's not "versioned" so it's fair).

It's a bit more troublesome when changing core packages and considering dependencies, but the same could apply there.
If you google "vfx workflow" or "vfx pipeline" you'll find lots of stuff.

As I understand it the reason things get out of control on big movies is that there's no incentive to plan shots properly or be decisive, because VFX houses are expected to sign stupid contracts. There are smaller movies where people are more disciplined, eg. Monsters, where I believe director Gareth Edwards did all the VFX himself.
One time I had an amplifier fail. I took it to a local repair shop that I found that had good reviews who charged me $150 to "look" at it. A month later, I called them to ask what the status was (because I hadn't heard anything from them) and they told me it couldn't be repaired. No other answer than that.

That was a great $150 lesson...
I really dislike this graphical style. It’s been a couple years now so I hope something else will replace it soon.
Pulling on this thread leads directly to quantum computation.
you didn’t provide a reason. what would the reason be for doing that?
Thank you for this. I did not know that part of Minnesota and Wisconsin have no evidence of glaciation from the last ice age. I imagine then that all the landforms are related to outflow of melt-water from the glaciers as they receded.

I appreciate that information and for anyone else interested in glacial landforms I found a great Story Map to shows in DEM models and in photos what you would expect to see post-glaciation. [1]

[1]https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/8d42e860ad0147bfac7a4f9...

Enjoy, and learn something like I did.
One person's "dumb writing down" is another person's "communicating effectively."

Is your goal to (try to) teach people new words, or to communicate your points?
If it works for Google, shall work also for them.