skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> As we said, solid and complete automation is hard to do right. Automating 80% of the steps can be quicker to implement (20% of the effort) and simpler to debug (20% of the time).

Examines some of the costs and fragility of scripting-based automation.

Also gives a nod to do-nothing scripting at the end.
I've worked for (non-tech) companies that didn't let employees know they were safe for months - and they did it almost every.single.year... and always just before Christmas, like they planned to hurt people as much as possible. Utterly despicable.

Thinking about it, I guess they hoped to make people jump ship before they were pushed, but it destroyed any semblance of a good relationship between employees and management/HR.
What would the grounds of the lawsuit be? I can think of reasons to not announce a layoff in advance, but I can't think of why what the boss did was illegal.
Car Talk drove a replica.[1] "You’ve pushed shopping carts with broken casters that handle better. ... No one in his or her right mind would ever venture above 45 miles per hour because of the lousy handling."

[1] https://www.cartalk.com/blogs/jamie-lincoln-kitman/test-driv...
The context is somewhat different on an anonymous online forum such as HN. Giving feedback as a stranger can be fraught with insufficient information. Criticism can easily spiral into negative flamefests full of assumptions of the receiving party. Thus, mods try to dampen it from getting too negative and toxic.

> So why is it any surprise that every startup company has precisely the same back-patting culture?

They are different because presumably coworkers are people you at least personally know in passing, and are not anonymous usernames.

We should be gracious to strangers but more critical to those whom we do know.
„They can’t pay me so little how little I can work“.
Buy now pay later schemes are usually really terrible ideas. Companies like Klarna and Afterpay should be avoided at all costs. Often the loan repayment schedules are intentionally confusing and predatory.

Here’s a relevant You Need A Budget podcast episode for those looking for more on this topic: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0Z9NQoseq5nvutAInURR2r
Ah yeah, you're right that Deno doesn't have a node_modules, but AFAIU it still downloads dependencies to "somewhere on disk" and then, every time your code runs, it re-evals all of them from scratch.

So, admittedly I was using "node_modules" as a shorthand for "the code that makes up my dependencies", and that AFAIU Deno has not implemented this "use a v8 snapshot to cache preloaded/pre-evald dependencies" optimization.

I.e. I want something like:

https://danheidinga.github.io/Everyone_wants_fast_startup/
> unnecessary line noise

It's not noise, though. It protects me from common whitespace issues like careless copying/pasting, style differences between me and other developers, and IDE/OS settings.

It's also just easier to scan. Imagine if we did the same thing with math:

a * b / (c - d)

Look at that noise! We can get rid of some of those symbols, right? Let's replace parentheses with whitespace instead.

a*b/ c - d

So now it's denser and I typed fewer characters, but it's harder to scan because my eyes don't register " " as quickly and easily as they register "{".
Modals don't trap focus, can't be closed by keyboard.
Stealing people’s work to serve as your training set is not human progress.

Sounds like the AI model should be paying royalties to every affected artist for the right to sample their work.
I've worked with several manglers but not many mangers.
San Jose mayor says policy largely failed, as L.A. and San Diego also cease efforts to set zero bail for nonviolent offenses to slow the spread of virus behind bars.(A Democrat that won 79% of the vote)
> probably most people don't use [WSL] for regular development environment

I know quite a few people who do, I actually wouldn't be surprised if their number was higher than pure Windows users for web dev.
There are already trusted sources of software packages that provide security updates: traditional Linux distributions.

Doing automated, local patching and rebuilding is far from enough. You need experts to correctly backport patches and test them thoroughly.
Right and it's specifically for action that we need to know the odds. To pick one set of actions in advance of an uncertain event we need to know three things:

- The cost in case the event turns out bad,

- The upside in case the event turns out good, and

- The probability that the event turns out good.

We can summarise the two first ones as "the payoff function of the event" and simplify the situation into requiring knowledge about the payoff and the probability.

But without the probability we cannot take informed action.

(Unless the payoff is structured such that the probability doesn't matter -- but then it's also not much of a difficult decision.)
Debian is why debian boots slow.
I get where your coming from but do you have an example of this happening for a programming language? I can’t think of any language that a company tried to extend and was successful with it. Its not a SaaS offering so the value add is very low for a company to try and take over development.
And it's a great idea, good thought. I used bicycles in cities where it was possible. But that, and public transportation, only goes so far.

A personal car gives incredible freedom, especially to the poor. Suddenly they can live affordably far from work, choose better work places, do work on the side, transport luggage on the cheap.

Inevitably, the only way to stop people from getting cars is to make the licensing and their cost prohibitively expensive.

So they will take overcrowded trains that may not be on time, and/or live in closets or be lucky not to get into a serious accident on a bike/moped in a city not made for them.

Solving battery energy density and EVs are a good compromise.

But yes, you're right, cities should not be planned around cars. Imo, there should be more of them actually, but alas it seems that's a lost art and everyone's gathering in whatever big cities were made in the past couple of centuries or earlier.

Genocide is a dumb example stemming from my belief that death is better than life in squalor heh. Obviously most people don't think that.
Sometimes people are planning to leave anyways, and wouldn't mind a potentially generous severance package.
"In fact, the project had been undermined by interpersonal conflicts, funding shortfalls, and persistent design issues that he was unwilling to acknowledge."

That's the real true story of most failed startups.
Democracy: The Best of the Worst Essay
> I would have to pay all those when doing the car transfer at DMV.

...why are these are on the car and not on the person?
The private fusion companies still have ambitious (and most likely unrealistic) goals
The "power" of a good programming language is not about whether you can do something, but whether you can do it easily. It's also about abstraction of interfaces, reusability and similar qualities.
So instead of respecting the creators of the content you are linking to an unpaid link, essentially encouraging piracy? And then you want to lecture me on asking something of someone? Please...
No, both docker, static linking and flatpak share the same issue with being unable to provide reliable and tested security updates.

Once you bundle multiple libraries into blobs you always have the same security nightmare:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/315468931_A_Study_o...

(and on top of that docker adds a big attack surface)
The volume pot went in my 1992 Kenwood amp (18th birthday present). It crackled quite horrendously as they tend to do as they age.

I took that amp back and forth to uni each semester carefully boxing it up each time, took it to Germany, back to the UK, and it's still with me in the US, albeit currently in its box.

Huge sentimental value.

A couple of years ago I found the (impressive) service manual for it that had the part number for the potentiometer. Unfortunately the part is no longer available, it has a special loudness tap on it. I replaced it with a pot without the tap, I never used loudness anyway. Works great. It's a brilliant amplifier.

The service manual explains how to re-calibrate the amplifier current biases. So I checked it and it was still in spec.

https://www.audioservicemanuals.com/k/kenwood/kenwood-ka/161...

I also have a same era CD player that still works, I replaced it's laser maybe 10 years ago. Both purchased from Sevenoaks Hifi in Kent, by sending off a check in the mail.
The art that was trained on was all Creative Commons apparently, so perhaps artists should understand licenses first before giving their work a permissive license.
https://xtdb.com maybe?
The fact that people prefer to keep copying Lisp's features than using it must surely say something about its DX.
Still not applicable worldwide. US is nearly always the weird one when it comes to copyright law. It may be legal in the US but not anywhere else.
That’s within bounds for what I was talking about. I don’t see how that can be done with any reliability.

(Only thing there that fits is the recent demonstration of the Russian government acting like half-arsed movie plots are a good idea in real life).
Absolutely, even around JFK and LAX this is very much a thing.

Europe does it differently and keeps traffic on instrument procedures and radar vectors even in good weather. But in the US it's super common in nice weather to have jets into all major airports fly visual approaches, where separation between traffic is very much "look out the window at the plane ahead, don't hit them."
How does something like react native fit in the mobile world? Are there cases where it could be used instead of straight swift or kotlin?
This site suggests a limit of around 100KB per page with standard printer and scanner fidelity: https://www.monperrus.net/martin/store-data-paper
100% false.

As with fission, most of the operating costs would have nothing to do with buying fuel. Solar and wind power suffer none of these costs, so fusion, like fission, would be wholly unable to produce power at a price anyone would pay without being forced to.

The fission plants still operating will find themselves increasingly unable to produce power at a price anyone will pay, so will be mothballed long short of their design life.
Love this. Would be cool to see more examples.

Like Apple Notes/Apple Mail layout done with this library/framework.
> However I don't like that they start with an underscore

Early on _[A-Z] meant reserved variable so that's why it's currently _On. Many keywords are a single word and common enough that it shouldn't bother anyone that it's reserved. However I'm not great coming up with a style guide. On empty is two words, I have no idea how it should be written and everyone seems to have their own style.

Do you have a suggestion for the _On keywords?

> Why not only one? The compiler should know what to do because of the mut, out keywords

You noticed the out keyword? It's not recommended we only use that to interface with C code. Returning multiple variables is much better IMO (I won't speak for everyone). Accumulator and dynamic arrays are common enough that I didn't want to force people to write mut each time. It's simply `:=`
Although I have been a microwave chef for about a year, I am growing more worried about the possibility of leaching chemicals into my food as a result of nonstick coatings, so I am switching to these: https://cookanyday.com/
too bad this site (which encourages it) and most of the comments so far are focused on (poor) singular predictions without taking the next step and wondering whether the mean(s) of these predictions are fairly accurate. i'd suspect that with enough samples, the mean of any given prediction would be fairly accurate[0], but instead, it's lot of shallow criticism.

for instance, i had been saying (since at least 5 years ago) that full self-driving was at least 15 years away. looking at the state of the tech, i was probably too optimistic, but i'd love to know the mean prediction of the population to see how far offbase i was.

[0]: this is the central thesis of the book wisdom of crowds, and of the many prediction markets it spawned.
And I could totally do all those things just need to work a couple hours less a day, have more reliable child care and maybe fix the deranged hobo problem so my grocery and body make it home safely after most trips
Getting the World Record in Hatetris (The Hardest Version of Tetris)
I’ve been saying this for years; PG is just (more) benign version of Thiel.
'screen shots from a Russian telegram account'

Seriously?

'why do you think they'd stop trying to force conscripts'

Because there was a huge scandal and reportedly many officers involved in sending conscripts into the Ukraine were punished.

'there is tonnes of pressure from the conscription officers'

The article doesn't say anything about conscripts being sent to the Ukraine.

"'volunteer'"

Why did you put volunteer into quotes? A lot of people in Russia has been pissed by the Ukrainian 'anti-terrorist operation' in the Donbass.
Thanks. It's dissapointing, there is a ton of things what make sense only in Ent. environment, but having a correct time is not Ent.-only.
You have it backwards, you have to calculate the expected value of the mission and see if it’s less than 1.5M.

For example, if odds of success are one in 10k for a discovery worth $1T then it works out.
I'm currently working as a web dev and slowly gaining interest in Rust as I see it as a contender for C/C++/Java/C# and other established languages. When I started about 10 years ago I was convinced that browser ecosystem will be respectable due to it's cross-platform and flexible nature. At this stage of my career I'm looking for a solid 2nd choice and so far I see Rust as an emerging power. Also I have prejudice about Microsoft, I dislike OOP, I think of C++ as too complicated, C is king of embedded but I'm not looking at that direction, so for me it crosses out some of the more popular options. TypeScript is a good reason to look in the direction of web dev, everything else is up to discussion as it also depends in what field one is interested in.
TLDR: Right to repair is important for more than just for smartphones.

And is important for smartphones too. What good are security updates for old phones if they have busted screen or battery that wont charge anymore.

> And there are a lot more people who own phones than cars or washing machines.

So what, doesn't mean it's still not relevant. Cars being the big issue, where repairs often cost more than most phones.

> How many washing machines does the average family have compared to phones?

Again so what, it's still an issue. And if you count dishwashers, microwaves refrigerators, coffeemakers, toasters, ovens, tv's, radios etc.

Average family has more of them than phones and they combined, often cost more than phones. Remember majority of people don't own flagships but cheap phones.

> What good is the “right to repair” the most ubiquitous device people own if it isn’t getting security updates?

What good are security updates for old phones if they have busted screens or battery that wont charge anymore.

Besides Right to repair would be worth it even if it explicitly left of smartphones. But it doesn't.

> There has never been an issue with refrigerators or washers being relatively easy to repair or even TVs for that matter.

That is changing. Even Mile appliances that cost a lot more than 100 bucks are hard to repair and often have to replace.

> My 65 inch TV costs less than my phone.

Majority of people in my country have phones that cost less than 200 EUR. Most decent TV's cost more than that.

> None of the other devices you mention have parts that always wear out like smartphone batteries.

Pretty much everything except TV's have parts that wears out, even if it's just the hinges and seals. but the thing that most often craps out is electronics. Source my brother works for Mile distributer in our country.

> Phones are essential in even third world countries. None of the other things you are mentioning are.

People in 3rd world countries rely on cooking much more than people in developed countries.

And you can always buy cheap feature phones, that last almost forever and can change batteries and have small attack surface.

> It’s the typical EU

They are at leas doing something. Unlike American lawmakers that just lube their assholes and bend over to the corporations.
I somewhat suspect that most of what is a "failure", to the extent it enters the collective conscious, especially in fields like engineering, is a later triumph.
Or the Prestige oil spill. The cleaning bill to remove the 70.000 tonnes of fuel would fall in he range of 2.5 billion to 10 billion euro. One can really destroy a local economy with that.
The file names yes, modules are catched at development time. "We can't use PackageX because it doesn't exist for Windows and Joe won't be able to run the project anymore." A VM first and WSL2 now solved much of those problems, which leaves us at why bothering with Windows in this kind of business tough.
> As for a system devoid of it, I have grand plans, but for now: people do it with Docker every day! That's what Docker is.

No, Docker really isn't what you think it is.

Docker isolates processes, and provides a convenient platform independent way to deliver stand alone applications, complete with software defined networking and file system abstraction, at the expense of shipping the whole tech stack, including everything plus the kitchen sink like full blown web servers.

Thus a .DEB package which otherwise would be 10MB ends up being a Docker image often weighing over 100MB.

And pray tell what's Docker's solution to software updates? Well, it's periodic builds that force downstream dependencies and users to re-download payloads of well over 100MB a pop.

And you advocate this as an alternative to shared libraries?

Who in their ri
I think a more 1:1 comparison would be self-driving delivery vehicles - which we haven't figured out yet.

and

I imagine a primary motivation for investing in art-generating AI is cost savings.

disclaimer: By default, I tend to be less sympathetic to artists here. It's due to their communities' collective silence about decades of ever-ratcheting (and typically purchased) copyright laws.
Seems to me the solution to that problem is to fix the problems with American schools that produce such illiterate citizens, rather than continue dumbing everything down.
> Docker provides much more isolation

The very opposite. You can do all the sandboxing you want without needing docker and you will avoid docker's big attack surface.
To add more anecdata, I have never been asked to sign such a thing. This may be specific to some subfields or locations?
The “what is bun” section explained almost nothing for me. Is there a better explanation?
Is it a good thing though? init.d was old and it sucked. I'm glad systemd came to replace it, and more
I wouldn't recommend using random public activation servers and hundreds if not thousands of lines of batch scripts. slmgr.vbs and ospp.vbs are your friend.
A company I worked at introduced it and my productivity fell through the floor. I gave it 6 months before concluding that it wasn't an environment that suited me, and moved on.

Some people thrive, some people tolerate it, and some people consider it hell.
> automatic memory management

I wrote some specifics in this thread over a few comments but that and the type system are complex. It can be a talk and writing short post probably will satisfy no one
Why did we (as an industry) go with “eat your dog food” instead of just “eat your own food”? I find the former disgusting each time I hear it.
I mean, AFAIK basically the first thing Sheryl did when she joined Facebook (from Google) in 2008 was break ranks with the wage-fixing cartel and immediately hire like a whole infrastructure organization from Google. Many if not most of the early-ish-days hardass hackers at FB were (figuratively) still wearing Google T-shirts when they built FB's scale infrastructure.

So to anyone paying attention at that time, it was pretty clear that the level of tech cred should be about the same. It was the same people.
I guess you don’t use Linux much, because its codebase has tons of gotos.
The thousands of tons of molten lithium needed for useful operation would, if ever exposed to air, prove extremely difficult to put out.

That would be what they might call an "expensive setback".
Are we sure that that's true? As a private company klarna can choose any metric they so desire as revenue...
For anyone curious, that bro hug is also known as giving dap, or a pound hug. Have lived in several US states and many major cities (NY, Chicago, SF, LA) and dap is universal.
I feel for the people who were layed off, esp. ones who just left their previous jobs and/or relocated. One thing as an employer I would never do (if it were my call) was to lay off somebody who just recently joined/relocated [unless there are already performance problems]. That's just a shitty thing to do, at a human level.

Putting that aside (since all tech companies will lay off new joiners), I don't think this story points to any (cultural) problems at Klarna.

Layoffs are always tough and people will be unhappy. Based on the timelines presented in the article, everybody knew within 1-2 days whether they are affected or not, and affected people got a good severance package. By "good" I mean more than Klarna had to pay based on the law, based on the article.

It's important to remember that 99% of working people in the world would not get this deal in a layoff.

I think we (tech workers) need to stop expecting to always be treated as unicorn snowflakes (esp. in the current market conditions).
Can you offer up a synopsis?
I won't pretend that this isn't a troubling development for digital artists, maybe even existentially so. I hope not.

One thing that makes me a little hopeful is that every image I've generated with DALL-E 2, even the best ones, would require non-trivial work to make them "good".

There's always something wrong, and you can't tell the model "the hat should be tilted about 5 about degrees", or "the hands should not look like ghoulish pretzels, thanks".

There's also this fundamental limitation that the model can give you a thing that fits some criteria, but it has no concept of the relationships between elements in a composition, or why things are the way they are. It's never exactly right.

It's like the model gets you the first 90%, and then you need a trained painter to get the second 90%.

But yeah, it will certainly devalue the craft, don't get me wrong. And anyone who is callously making comparisons to buggy whip manufacturers should consider how it would (excuse me, will) feel when AI code generators pivot to being more than a copilot, and suddenly the development team at your office is a lot smaller than it used to be, and maybe you aren't on it anymore.

If you spend a lifetime mastering some skill, and then it's just not valued anymore, it sucks, and you get pretty mad about it.
I’d say it even goes beyond that to how you treat employees. Poor raises? Long, demanding hours? Unethical practices? Burning people out?

If the business keeps growing and the stock keeps going up, it papers over a lot of those problems.

Of course, when the growth stops suddenly, all the skeletons fall out of the closet.
We pay around 1500 per year for 8 cores (~10 tests on puppeteer). If your service offers not only test parallelization but also isolation of tests then that is powerful.

Charging per test runtime in seconds is also a good idea.

As for pricing, look at Browserstack, browserless, Saucelabs. They are well established players.
False. The main reason was to avoid having to maintain and update multiple copies.