skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I love this idea, but I didn't choose it when I kicked off because of my experiences of feature backlogs.

Too often seeing something along the lines of "we'd love to use your site, if only it worked in IE|Firefox|insert here" and the ticket forever being thrown further back... but it would sometimes work.

My initial complaint went down the road of, if you want to get something fixed in engineering real quick: then you get it into the incident board - so GDPR complaint to the DPO, cc the ICO, get your MP involved and make it clear they should respond within 72 hours, etc and that largely worked for their breaches of GDPR in the ad tracking they had on their site, but that aggressive approach makes it harder to try the other route, as the tone is already set.
It is necessary.

If you can fire low performers, average performance will be higher, which means average pay will be higher. The risk is that you personally get mistaken for (...or correctly assessed as...) a low performer. Hence, tradeoffs.
Which specific act are you referring to?
Insightful...

Figuring out the right amount of automation in business is hard. Too much automation makes the company too rigid to the point of breaking but too little reduces productivity. This is a dilemma that factories/companies have to constantly re-learn. We see it regularly. A new manager comes in and decides that a company can save a truck load of money by completely automating production. But soon finds out that there are too many variables in life and that total automation can't work. The goal should be to find the sweet spot that produces the maximum while being flexible to change. But I don't think this is why productivity is dropping.

I suspect it's related to the reduction of reliance on foreign factories. The US wants to reduce the reliance on foreign manufacturing and bring all of that production back to the US. That will take time, capital and ability to learn how to do the work here. That will hit productivity hard. All than change won't happen cost free in terms of productivity and assets. The change started a few years ago. We are beginning to see the result.
Perhaps I was a bit non standard. But worked at NASA and programmed networked Unix workstations in C. You had to worry a lot about memory management. The only source of information was other people’s code, man pages, and trips to the nerd bookstore.

Work wise it is still the same deal.
My experience is that most companies are pretty averse to firing people in general, even in the US with at-will employment, and even when there are many people who are moderately incompetent (so long as they are not posing obvious risks to the company, e.g. sexual harassment, etc.).
Well not buying it in the first place was an option
qmail was the first codebase I read that blew a lot of assumptions I had about "good code" and "clean design" out of the water.

It went its own way on a lot of things compared to GNU projects and achieved an enormous level of success for 10-15 years despite some really weird decisions. And even the "wrong" decisions, with hindsight, stemmed from a clear desire to keep creative control and a small codebase. I'd rather read well-documented "bad" code any day of the week.

Since then I've felt a bit of rebellion against standard practice is often a valuable if it's 100% aligned with the goal of your project - reinventing a wheel, ignoring portability, picking a weird language, a new storage format, that kind of thing.

For an engineer it's so easy to get sucked into assuming you should make standard, well-supported, well-understood choices that you suppress your more creative & judgmental instincts.
Quine Relay, "a Ruby program that generates Rust program that generates Scala program that generates ...(through 128 languages in total)... REXX program that generates the original Ruby code again."

https://github.com/mame/quine-relay

(HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6048761)
Yes, all the href's are missing leading `/`
The Unreal Engine 4 code, when it first went open-ish source. I was blown away by how huge it was, but yet, how clean and modular everything was.
Owning a major communications service allows them to spread misinformation that's not popular enough to go viral normally, as well as suppressing true information that they find inconvenient.
The underlying reality doesn't depend on the society you're in, just the categories and definitions of words that we create to make sense of reality and chunk that reality into digestible abstractions. So it's weak social constructionism, yeah.
And also the fact that C sometimes cares way less than you might think about what goes where. :)
A Wasm implementation of JPEG XL is 174 kB, and a minimal implementation (reflecting the libjxl-tiny encoder) can be done in somewhere around 25-50 kB. Wasm is rather performant and can render both normal and HDR JPEG XL's in browsers.
Ember.js, Angular and Vue are frameworks. React is a render library.
>For example, there’s “Félix Erausquín”, who invented a javelin throwing technique you probably never heard of.

But who's infinitely more known than his contemporaries who didn't do some interesting footnote-worthy thing like that and therefore get mentioned far less.
You can't log in before you sign up. I think bringing up complexity of the sign-up is fair, but I don't understand how you can be "turned off" by the second step before you looked into the first step.
I'm not convinced.

What you're talking about sounds an awful lot like MS Word. It has a document model. It has a renderer for said document model. The document model even has first-class abstractions (Word templates). You can directly edit the rendered representation. And it has a mode to show (at least certain kinds of) markup directly in the rendered document.

But the thing that all binary formats share is a lack of transparency. When I have a text file with, say, Markdown formatting, I know I'm seeing 100% of the formatting. Because the irony of not having a "code view" / "presentation view" split is that I'm never 100% sure what I'm actually looking at. Even in "regular" documents, I find that this can matter (especially when you're using Word templates and you want to do some sort of a global format change—it really matters what formatting you've applied to the document and not just what the current rendered output looks like). In documents like HTML that need to be processed in one of a variety of ways, this matters even more. I frankly cannot imagine a solution in which you do the sorts of sophisticated transformations people routinely do with HTML without caring very deeply about what "code" gets generated.

If I'm not mistaken, predecessors to MS Word actually had a code mode, with a corresponding input language to control it. All of those solutions died off, at least in terms of being popular in the long term.
I had the exact same experience too. Really blew my mind.
Also Bezos would like to normalize the intense surveillance, speed focus, and corner-cutting that leads his warehouses to have injury rates 80% higher than the rest of the industry.

https://thesoc.org/amazon-primed-for-pain/
> To be concerned about the current level of productivity requires either the attention span or the intelligence of a goldfish.

It seems like the median journalistic piece assumes this of the reader anyways?
I don’t personally like it. It measures input factors rather than outcomes. I think surveyed happiness multiplied by life expectancy is a better measure.
liquidity matters to commodity markets that transact often. the flipside of liquidity is instability.

treating real estate as a commodity, not as an intimate necessity of everyday life, helps no one except speculators and rent seekers, at the expense of everyone else doing productive work.
Why do you feel awful for the workers, particularly? I assume they are hired to do exactly that? As jobs go it doesn't sound too terrible.
> "In the first half of 2022, productivity — the measure of how much output in goods and services an employee can produce in an hour — plunged by the sharpest rate on record going back to 1947, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics."

It annoys me that an article about a big drop in workplace productivity doesn't actually say how big the drop is. If it's only 3.6%, then that explains why they glossed over that part, as it would have undermined their narrative.
Yale’s new employee tour was like that, too. They walked us around campus and one of the things they highlighted was how much nicer the Depression-era stuff was than the decades before or after because the amount planned suddenly bought a lot more and they apparently had a windfall in the form of top-notch Italian stone workers who’d immigrated because the job market was even worse back home.
Something I've started doing along with the functional is fallback assignments and relying on Set operations to be idempotent. This can tidy up by removing a lot of excess conditionals at the cost of some extra operations that are actually VERY fast so in a most cases prob won't be a problem.
Password1234

Please use it, only if I don't post in a year.
I, for one, am glad it's not optimized for everyone. It's tough to find places with new exciting content that's adjacent to what I like, which HackerNews does exceedingly well.

I also enjoy the moderation style, which weeds out low-effort posts that plague other communities, so thanks a lot for all the hard work, Dang and team. Keep it up!

Edit: grammar
There's a lack of evidence either way, which really should tell you all you need to know. I don't think they're delusional, but they are constrained by their context.

Yes, with ML models, you often can be better off trimming down your sensor data. Usually though, you don't remove entire categories of sensor data. Even when you do, to be confident in such a move, you need to first achieve a working model with whatever data you have, and then through refinement you can prove that whole categories of data are more hinderance than help. They haven't done that.

It seems quite clear that the reality is a full sensor array is just economically non-viable with their business model, and that's framing their whole thought process.

Because they promised FSD back in 2017, they can't acknowledge that going without those sensors means it's going to take them much longer to achieve FSD. Because of safety/regulatory oversight, they also can't acknowledge that going without those sensors means there will be additional safety risk.

So they're stuck making these rationalizations that everyone in the industry knows are at best half-truths. No doubt, at some point we'll figure out how to do self driving with a much more limited sensor package, and when we do, we'll achieve a significant improvement in the cost effectiveness of self-driving.

In the meantime, there's a lot of "rationalization" going on.
Most of us older CP/M users understand this instinctively.
I went back to KDE after a lifetime using Gnome (and then Cinnamon when Gnome3 ruined things).

KDE has been a joy and is now my DE of choice.
I can't comment on how that 4B/quarter is being spent. However the Quest 2 has been the biggest success in VR to date. Why couldn't some of those billions have been spent on getting a Quest 3 ready for sale for Fall/Xmas 2022? It would be like Apple not releasing new iPhones level of missed opportunity.

Or perhaps it's a huge selfish gamble thinking, let's get our product perfected before everyone realizes how big this is. This sounds like a small startup more worried about having their unknown product's secrets stolen rather than how to market it so enough know it exists.

The business angle also doesn't make sense to me. Maybe during severe lockdowns it might have had a chance, but now we should be betting on the tech and performance/price improving in service of games first and foremost.

I hope SteamVR wins, otherwise I don't care whether Apple or Meta's device wins. And where is MS in this, too late as usual?
If you like the lambda cons, I recommend checking out Church numerals, representing numbers as functions in lambda calculus. I don't remember all the operations off the top of my head, but iirc calling one number with another is equivalent to multiplication, which I always found beautiful.

Then if you really want to go down the rabbit hole, there's SKI, which is lambda calculus without a lambda operator, just 3 named, curried functions(S, K and I, but I is techically definable in terms of S and K). Any function that can be expressed in lambda calculus can be expressed in terms of calling these various functions with eachother as arguments.

Assuming LAMBDA is automatically curried, to save myself some typing:

(define (k x y)
x)
(define (s x y z)
((x z) (y z)))
(define (i x)
x)

Alternatively, I can be defined as follows:

(define i (s k k))

SKI is implemented in the Unlambda esolang, with some additional functions defined for IO and convenience
Yes. We are working on it right now. If you are comfortable in Remix, that’s a great place to start. Everything from Hydrogen will be additive from there.
C# as of 7.0 makes this possible:

(a, b) = (b, a);
Preparing the ground for a complete collapse in your standard of living...

"Don't worry your happiness was only an idea and didn't really exist anyway"
Hyperbole, but ... a quick look at the Wikipedia article on Wisconsin's 2011 law [1] looks like the next best thing (e.g., yearly votes to retain union).

> Collective Bargaining: The law limits collective bargaining for most public employees to wages. Total wage increases cannot exceed a cap based on the consumer price index (CPI) unless approved by referendum. Increases from the bargaining process for teachers are applied only to the base wages, and do not include the additional salary of teachers. Contracts are limited to one year and wages frozen until the new contract is settled. Collective bargaining units must take annual votes to maintain certification as a union. Employers cannot collect union dues, and members of collective bargaining units are not required to pay them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Wisconsin_Act_10
> What's people-friendly may not be machine-friendly, and vice versa.

I think we’ve established that to be an axiom, otherwise we wouldn’t have 5 popular configuration formats and 10 popular markup languages.
> If any, Copilot and similar tools take away all the joy of actually writing code

I like to challenge my own beliefs, and I reluctantly tried it out. At least I would have a basis for my criticism, so I thought. I'm about 10 hours into using it, maybe.

If anything it has increased the joy of writing code for me. It eliminates the mundane busy work and lets me focus on solving problems. For me, the "real" coding happens in my head, putting it into an editor is just process. I still also have to check it's work whenever I use it, so I'm still deeply embedded in the coding process.

I believe it's akin to an easel vs Krita/Photoshop. Some people enjoy interacting with the physical medium, others enjoy the creative process.

I would strongly recommend trying it out in anger (i.e. a reasonably real codebase), at least for 30 minutes. Form a better opinion after that (which may well be the same as yours right now).

For reference: I've been coding since I was 8 (almost 30 years).
It is not entirely correct. There is a C (j40.c) and two C++ implementations (libjxl and libjxl-tiny). Kornel would love to see a Rust implementation I believe.
> And when you come into a position that requires recruiting, likely you'll speak to your recruiter and say "what do you think we'll need to pay for someone like this?".

And when I do this, I expect the recruiter to have an idea of the salary range for that position and be able to put it in the job posting. Otherwise we'll be looking for another recruiter.

It's that easy.
I remember similarly reading the jQuery codebase in awe, back before the MVC rush and the thousands of posh libraries. It intimidated me that someone could write code so polished, and was a big driver for me years later when I published my first popular open source library.
I wonder how much of this is due to getting old vs actual complexity.

When I started I was literally memorising the language of the day and I definitely mastered it. Code was flowing on the screen without interruption.

Nowadays I just get stuff done; I know the concepts are similar, I just need to find the specifics and I'm off to implement. It's more akin to a broken faucet and it definitely affects my perception of modern development.
And some of the scooter companies have developed technology to detect when people ride them on sidewalks. Mandating its use or fining the rental companies for rider behavior would help with this problem.

https://electrek.co/2020/01/30/limes-electric-scooters-can-n...
I cannot stress how github code search is helping me! Gotta be the best productivity tool recently
Big fan of both Casey's and Jon's streams.
I think this is a pretty interesting idea. I think it’s less about business strategy/acquisitions and more about increasing buyback power. Meta took a $10 billion loan this year in order to increase buybacks, my understanding is that that’s the first long term loan they’ve ever taken. They bought back 2% of their stock last year and I suspect the buybacks will only increase now that the stock is sub $100.
The GNU make manual is well written and worth a read:
> https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/make.html

My last workplace was very Makefile heavy and I used that as an excuse to read it. 10/10, would recommend/do it again.
On the order of ten times the people who apply and are capable of being successful at Elite University X are given a spot at Elite University X.

Yes, of course it makes sense to accept people who most likely to be successful. But what then, after that?

Everyone’s got an opinion, but what’s the use of that if no one understands the problem? Oh well.
American Express Joins Firms Posting Salary Ranges for All US Job Listings
Maybe they really liked inlining?
A lot of code from The Art of Prolog that used some form of accumulator data structure as a third argument to predicates.
Civil society cannot tolerate threats of violence or acts of violence. This applies to all aspects of civil society. There is a limit to freedom of speech.

There is nothing exceptional about social media except that it has taken so long to apply the sane principles of civil society. People who threatened the founding fathers with physical violence probably earned themselves a horsewhipping or a duel.

People who resent society must find a way to express their resentment by democratic action, not through threats and violence.

The founding fathers were not senseless followers of written words. They did not relinquish critical thinking by signing a constitution. The constitution was not a declaration of the end of critical thinking, education, and progress.

Violence is a destructive cultural anti-pattern.
What went wrong with Snap, Netflix and Uber?
That's a very long winded way to say you have no evidence of it ever happening
I also have a phone number solely for MFAs, and phone is in drawer at home. Battery is good for weeks, so not plugged in. Every incoming SMS, an app forwards it to a Google Apps Script, and GAS pings my telegram bot, which sends it my all devices with telegram installed.
This resonates strongly and I'm surprised more people aren't talking about it.

I recognized this problem in the 90's because I worked at a manufacturing plant where the software, even then, was getting in the way of workers needing to do something a bit non-standard (they developed workarounds over time).

It's also why I'm a big fan of the 80% solution, I think there's a level of hubris involved in going for the 100% solution for everything.

To your point about trust, it's something I've been thinking about recently. Not trust, but the authoritarian nature of software, which expresses itself and is purchased for the ability to distrust. You'll see this in things like debates about whether or not developers should be allowed to affect the deployment via yaml files or not. What makes it difficult is there is often a legitimate need for these sorts of systems, especially for regulatory compliance, but more often than not they just get in the way of actual work.
Nope, I'll be dead so I'm not interested in creating an ongoing security hole for myself to worry about while I'm still alive.

Important things like banks already have next-of-kin covered, insurance is sorted out etc.
The O(1) sleep sort algorithm: https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall13/cos226/l...
Unless some of your colleagues don't go along with it and are willing to train recruits enough to keep the ship afloat. Unions: the anti-anti-trust weapon in the war to win the balance of power.
> add the CA to your in-house browser/list of trusted CAs.

This is the hard part. Unless it's company hardware there is absolutely no way I am installing a new root cert on my machine.
I dunno if they are saying that, but I wholeheartedly endorse this idea. Add the "client side junk" (fancy Javascript stuff, etc.) as enhancement on top for those who want it after the required functionality is being properly and reliably served by the "core technologies". Serve the need properly first, then make it "nice".
Very interesting article, thanks for writing it.
Of course. that's the meaning of politics. GDP is not a natural law. Economics it
s not a hard science it is full with ideology.
The configuration space allowing a functioning society, while constrained, is still very large. we make choices to navigate that space. These choices are based on preferences.

It's been a while since a very specific ideology gained a hegemony in economic thinking. As hegemony often does, it pretends to be a natural law, inevitable and unchangeable.

It's not.
I’m pretty sure that the average wastewater treatment plat in the US was built in the 50-60s.
I am still seeing it too, looked at Musk’s feed while being logged out. I am in Europe.
That's easy, just use your bare hands to throttle that thing. Whether you succeed or not, depends on your strength.
I think the price of food and gas compared to take-home pay has a lot more weight than any stat-pushing.
The codebase that has most blown my mind is the one I currently work on. It is the biggest steaming pile of garbage I've ever seen. It's a Rails app developed by two guys who had never worked as developers before. They built an MVP that found immediate traction in their market and so they hired some slightly more experienced contractors to add features. It is shockingly poorly designed. We've hired an army of talented people to try to fix things so we can actually get to the point where we can add new features but I'm not sure we'll ever get there.

Until this job I hadn't realized how blessed I had been in my career to work at companies that took software development seriously. I can safely say that every instance of "bad code" I had run into previous to this one was really nothing.

I'm not sure how much longer I'll stay here tbh. The place is toxic for a variety of reasons not just the software.
It also has the nice property that it's tail-recursive.
You say hand written but actually, it wasn’t exactly. The original version was apparently in LISP and then translated to C++ [0].

[0] - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/patrick_duss...
But I’m saying that’s not true. My thesis is that meta’s share price has next to 0 effect on how much mark chooses to shove into reality labs.
That assumes the water going into the water heater changes temperatures which as I just said isn’t always the case. Some people take “cold” showers year round and the tap is very consistent.

Trivially people in the tropics don’t have a winter, but well water can similarly have very consistent temperatures independent of seasons.