skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've seen "product driven management companies" do R+D the way OP saw things happening.

There's no way to do true R+D with product driven budgeting. Perhaps "big corporate" has their own R+D and forbids divisions from doing R+D. Its really none of OPs business.

The backlog is always two years because budgeting is done for two years and the goal posts will change continuously to keep the backlog long enough to keep the budget afloat.

The goal posts always move continuously because R+D advances. If they close out and release 1.0 then the team and project have to shut down and transfer to the maint group. If you just keep the project eternally open then you don't have to re-create and open for bids and start entirely over to being version 2.0, you can just massage the requirements into 2.0 and keep going.

The individual contributor layer might not be cutting edge R+D, OP probably wasn't using framework-of-the-month or language-of-the-month but at the business level it might have been interesting R+D, far away in logistics-land or something.

A product driven company can bury paying for R+D this way if no one points it out, but if someone makes a formal report calling it out, that's a career limiting move so lets not look too close.

The other thing I've seen blow up is the business changes faster than the coders can keep up. If you have small enough line of business revenues you can over invest into automation; to put it in terms HN can understand if you engineer a hyper-scalable startup and only ten customers show up, that's a lot of money down the drain. Even worse if they're ten HUGE enormous customers you can stay in business a long time even if the automation would never, ever pay off with only ten customers. Or logistics invented a strategy that is obsolete before the coders can code it.

Some companies are really good at processing "build a bridge" Like a physical bridge cars drive over. Their internal systems will melt down conceptually at the idea of having a R+D dept with a permanent budget, even if it works and even if R+D makes a net profit. I had dealings with a place that, at a high level, made cranes, like industrial lifting cranes. They needed a R+D budget for R+D things but they only spoke business like a housing developer, you sign the contract, build the crane, find another contract. Smart companies that need to do R+D will find a way to do R+D even if they use really weird terminology to manage it.

The way companies like this move from one R+D project to another is "whoopsie the eternal product development is over budget scrap and do something else". Now they're probably got an eternal "fake product" around actually doing R+D using AI algos in the cloud or something. Or they're doing bland IT support, just endless Python CRUD for an R+D experiment in doing JIT logistics in a post-covid chip shortage world where the R+D is not in IT but the R+D is outside IT in logistics or accounting or marketing or something.

I can't guarantee this happened to OP but I've worked at places like that.
Who ate the $60m? The author's employer, or the client?

If the client, which isn't it of the ordinary, then it shows exactly why it is career limiting to tell such truths to customers: company got paid regardless of project success.

Actual short term success for a services company is not defined in terms of the achievement of any particular outcome for the customer, but in terms of amounts billed and paid. As a result, it is a career boosting strategy for managers in short-term minded organizations to underestimate work scope so that a bid can be made for less money / less time than competition. Then, once the contract is signed and work has begun, "realize" that it's going to take longer and ask the customer for more time/more money. The customer may not have a great choice at that point, given they're already halfway down some path, and especially if their requirements were vague enough going in that this can all be characterized as new scope.

This dynamic isn't necessarily explicit or malicious. If people get promoted on the basis of contract wins (as opposed to on time, on budget delivery), for example, the incentives naturally reward overoptimistic managers.

I don't have a ton of experience here but whatever experience I do have tells me this is widespread in the computer services industry, as it is notoriously widespread in construction. The parallels with construction indicate this may be a structural feature of markets with information asymmetry...
"Soul", SQLite REST and realtime server is now extendable
Hi Folks,
For those who are not familiar with Soul it's a REST and realtime server as the title says, basically it takes an SQLite database file and gives you a set of CRUD APIs to interact with your db and also a websocket to subscribe to its changes.
All the feature's up to here is automatic and you do nothing. But what if you wanted to create custom APIs to serve custom needs? Now that's available thanks to first member of Soul's Extensions, "API Extensions."
With an syntax similar to Express.js, you can add new custom APIs to own your backend!

Soon we'll be tackling new extensions such as middlewares and callbacks. So make sure to watch Soul's project.
Here's the link to Soul repo:
https://github.com/thevahidal/soul

Let me know what you think about this new feature,
And I'll see you in the next one.
Question in the article is who holds the debt? My bet is that it is FTX.
Contrarian opinion: the real villains in this story are the morons who advised a twenty something college genius to go after patents and pursue a strategy of developing in secret.

#buildInPublic kids
That's like me wearing my SmartWatch and then proclaiming "IT KNOWS MY HEART RATE AND IT'S TRANSMITTING IT"

Like, no shit, that's what I want it to do.
Ultimately, courts follow the laws as written by Congress or the relevant legislative bodies. The recent decades of partisan gridlock are putting judges in uncomfortable positions.
Arguably a lot of discussion is open to anyone (Bitcoin mailing list, Core github repo), where anyone is free to post their opinion on topics themselves.

It is not democratic as in "you have a vote to force others to comply to the majority", but more a democratic in "you can try to convince enough people that the major chain becomes how you like it, while the others run a minority fork".

People think "where the money goes, is where the miners go", but the blocksize wars showed that "where the users go, is where the miners go". Miners themselves don't decide on bitcoin rules, users do.

So I personally think that bitcoin is not necessarily democratic, but still highly people/community vs money driven.
Not specific, but I have some friends who are involved in highly successful private equity firms. I was talking to one of them about the work and he was saying that one of the primary strategies large firms use is buying existing large companies and firing all the middle management, because that’s the fastest way to create value after the acquisition.
> Lars Bak was of course hired by Google to build V8, which was released in 2008. Within a few years, most of the techniques pioneered in Self had made their way into the major JS engines.

Sort of coming full circle: After working on V8 for many years, Lars pitched Google on the idea to build a new language and VM. They felt they'd started to hit the wall with how fast they could make V8 because of JavaScript's fundamentally mutable nature.

That became Dart and one of the reasons they believed the Dart VM would significantly outperform JS VMs was because even though Dart 1.0 was essentially dynamically typed, it was class-based, and the inheritance hierarchy and field set of each class are fixed. Therefore, you don't need all of the clever "hidden class" optimization tricks they invented way back then.
Have you ever had a hair tissue mineral analysis done?
10% of what? Number of employees at the organization's peak? What if it's already shed 70% of its employees over several years, from its peak? Is it still 10% of that? At what minimum number of employees is it no longer 10%? Seems like a pretty arbitrary number to me.
They are not running off a single server, it's a bit more complicated than that, and you need a proper organization to be able to run a service at this scale.

The problem is that the head of that organization is someone who absolutely can't be told anything, especially not things he doesn't want to hear.
I think people wouldn't' be so confused by it if a lot of pages didn't look like facebook's layout... just my opinion!
Or because you want to buy drugs online.
The 'brown note'
Poland has treaties with France and England: both were in process of mobilizing after the fall of Poland. I think it is inevitable that England would have at least made some attempt at war.

Though I wonder if Hitler could have made things worth if he had not started the Eastern front. (I'm not clear on how that started, and Stalin wasn't to be trusted)
This is a bit pedantic. I did qualify the word complaint with the word "idle". A broad enough definition encompasses any desire for change in the world. There must be a distinction between statements which invite meaningful conversation and those which do not[1].

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIJYO4u5iug
> and no paved roads to be seen.

It's like the first thing you see in this video.

Define "paved road", if a road with asphalt pavement (albeit old) is not a "paved road".
Could be noise (it often is with him) but Trump's mentioned—today or yesterday, I think—Nov. 15th as the date for some "big announcement". It's been expected that he'll announce his 2024 candidacy at some point, to try to head off indictments or other legal trouble, or at least make more political hay out of them. Might be that's what he's got planned for that day, if he expects an indictment after the noise from the midterms dies down. Far enough out not to make the midterms a referendum on him (that is, GOTV for the other side by accident) like it might if he announced today or earlier, and early enough to slip in before the DOJ feels comfortable issuing an indictment because there will surely be all kinds of disputes going on. Maybe even timed well to ride that disinfo wave for some free publicity.
A old coworker boasted about abuse of stimulants and actively conversed with folks publicly about strategies to get your doctor to prescribe an increased dosage.

He was also very arrogant, pumped out features like no tomorrow but the code was always just barely functioning. Product loved him because he delivered but he left a wake of destruction for the security team to clean up.

Another person I worked with said he would never hire or work with someone who uses nicotine. It was even suggested that nicotine users "deserve" to be sabotaged and should not be employed.
Inability to process more than 5 tx a second for entire world is a major point-of-failure that L2 chain cures.
The CEO of a band has never say they have everyones money sitting in the safe waiting for them to pick it up whenever they wanted it.

FTX CEO litterally said that in his tweet.
My wife had horrible, hours long life-disrupting nightmares every day. Prazosin, a medicine your doctor can prescribe, solved them within a week, they are much less common and much less intense now. Highly recommend to try.
Why even reference it then? We have understood that sins of the father are not the sins of the child since at least the book of exodus(~500BC).

If that tweeter has done something wrong in his life, then talk about it. But he didn't really have a choice on who birthed him.

From the wiki page:

> Some of his children were resentful that he gave them no special privileges and treated their mothers poorly.
In case anyone comes across this in the future, I finished the blog about the process here: https://blog.mused.org/building-a-guided-tour-of-the-great-p...

Thanks to the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, especially Doctor Wael Fathy and Inspector Ezzat Salama at the Giza Plateau who worked on site with me this summer.

And thanks again to everyone here for visiting and the feedback!
Vaccines kill a few dozen people and harm a few hundred a year while saving literally millions of people from death and severe harm. They are one of the greatest advances in medicine.
Every company wants to cut spending on people, services, and facilities, because revenues are slowing down, costs are rising, and there's more uncertainty about the near term future.

The people who lose their jobs, in turn, are forced to cut their spending, contributing even more to the ongoing revenue slowdown at companies that sell to consumers.

The service providers who see their billing examined with a microscope and who are told that new projects are now on hold, in turn, find themselves forced to cut their own spending on people, services, and facilities, contributing even more to the ongoing revenue slowdown at other companies.

The office buildings who are given notice of lease terminations, in turn, find themselves forced to cut their own spending, contributing as well to the ongoing revenue slowdown at other companies.

The more every company and consumer cuts spending, the less money all companies and consumers earn. This unpleasant state of affairs is called a "recession." When it's really bad, it's called a "depression." It's no fun. Many unprofitable companies and many consumers without savings are at risk of financial ruin.
> This blog post is trying to establish that its use definitely means something bad and condescending, but I don't agree with it:

You don't need to. Just don't use it, and you'll be fine.

(^This is an attempt to provide an illustrative example.)
Largest might be a stretch. I suggest spending some time reading about John Law, the South Sea Bubble, and the Mississippi Company. When you realize that all of these ponzi schemes ultimately resulted in modern central banking, you might reasonably contend that the largest ponzi scheme is still sitting right here in plain sight -- with crypto illuminating (mocking?) the essence of fiat-denominated "wealth" and "money".
> The size of the asset balance is probably used to obtain loans and liquidity.

1) Lenders don’t care about the liability side?

2) How does “liquidity” differ from “loans” here? That is, when would they do this to achieve one but not the other?
But I can still find a phone with headphone jack. Can't do that with Apple.
Sure they do. What if they switch accounts, usernames, phones, etc. More data is better.
There is hacking the functionality together in an hour or two and then there is polishing it to the point where it doesn't have rough edges and can easily be used by anyone with terminal experience.

Personally, the chosen feature set resonates a lot with me. I like services that don't need accounts f.e. because they are so easy to use.
Leaderless teams always start to build a hierarchy on its own and the longer they exist the harder it gets to get new people into the group. It's really hard to manage.
Kermit could be pretty good. Used it for VMS stuff for quite a bit. Really lost track of it when I moved to mainly Unix setups.
You lost us at lambda
I've dreamed of something like this for a long time.

However, the actual tool is only a tiny part of the problem. The bigger part is moderation and spam.

While this is niche that's not a big deal, but it's also nothing like reddit in that case.

What if it does take of? How will you handle spam/astroturfing/hate/illegal comments?
Well, he still owns >10% of the company. Accountability when you're a significant owner, not to mention a founder, doesn't just mean that you get fired and sent away from the table.
It absolutely does not do that by itself. As proven by other secure implementations with more user friendly approaches to entering encyption keys.

It's also funny how demanding on use of phone numbers, shoving in crypto currency and demanding everyone to use out-of-date Electron app is somehow fine, but making backups user friendly is suddenly a massive "security" issue.

This is the BS security theater I despise at Signal. It's the software equivalent of having every single airplane passenger take off shoes.
Iran Votes to Execute 14k Protesters, Says Rebels Need 'Hard Lesson
Jerry Weinberg used to say that when you hear "just" you should substitute "have trouble", and when you hear "should" you should substitute "isn't". So, "just cache the keys" -> "we'll have trouble caching the keys"; "should be easy" -> "isn't easy".

Maybe we could call that Weinberg Substitution or something. Sort of like Russell Conjugation.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Every anarchist experiment failed?

The Internet's still around, buddy.
Probably thought it was the run over and blow up kind not the kind with a magnet.
This isn't really how big dollar consulting works. Everyone under estimates in order to be the lowest bid and win the deal. Once won then you slowly and gracefully tweak scope/budget to get something done without pissing off the customer too much. That's how the game is played.

Pointing out that you've underestimated by X is pointing out something everyone already knows. And advocating to blow up the estimate by X so early in the project is arguing to piss the customer off and possibly walk away from $60 million. That's why everyone patted them on the head and blew them off. Everyone else understood the game but it's a bit gauche for them to explicitly explain what's going on.
Posted at the same time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33519824
tongue-in-cheek.
Mastodon on your own domain without hosting a server
I've dreamed of something like this for a long time.

However, the actual tool is only a tiny part of the problem. The bigger part is moderation and spam.

While this is niche with a tiny user base that's not a big deal.

But, what if it does take of? How will you handle spam/astroturfing/hate/illegal comments?
Good article. Self was a research language; its output was papers and talks. Nobody ever tried to make it a "real" language in any sense. It's like Carl Hewett's development of Actors -- nobody tried to use his codebase other than him AFAIK, but the work was very influential.

Honestly these experimental languages are crucial for science and better off being left alone. C++ has suffered in being both a research language and a production* language, and the people in the latter camp are frustrated by the people in the former camp.

* I mean "production" in the sense of shipping code, not in the computer science sense.
At a startup once I had a boss who smoked marijuana in the office bathroom when the company president was out of town. He never mentioned it but you could definitely smell it.

Not sure why he didn't just take it outside. Or just do it before or after work. He never smelled like it outside of those days, he just really seemed to want to take advantage of the president being out specifically for some reason.

That's about all I've noticed, outside of drinking at company parties or a drink during lunch or something. I drink a lot of coffee and take several vitamins and a Zyrtec every day, that's about the extent of my substance abuse on the job.
> risk management wise

Short dated government bonds would be the safest. But tweet 0 he litterally says they dont do that, they keep the cash under the mattress and you can have it if you stop by. People stopped by and there was no cash under the mattress...
I don't know what's more disturbing. The request, Legal's response, or the people responding to the thread and finding none of this is unethical.

Seems like we have lost something along the way.
Thankfully not _quite_ as broken as the days of Flash
Where in the docs does it mention the topic name validation? Is there a character limit? Restricted characters? This looks pretty neat.
I'm curious, if these waves aren't heard, is there much need to dampen them?
Are we talking about to reduce the physical effects on those around, or is there a mechanism that makes these audible at some point?
How many people do you think harsher sentences would make a deterrent difference for?

The number of tech CEOs is small. Of those, what percent do you think would be ok With fraud if it were only 18 months years in prison? What is the change if it were >18 months?

Are any choices being changed at all?

I think it is basic misunderstanding of the human mind.
I was referring to insiders selling at ICO to retails. I’m sure insiders were savvy and made plenty of money.
I did not comment but I have some insight on regular finance and took a Udemy course on building your own crypto...

And I came to the conclusion that SBF is a crook and the whole crypto space is build on thin air.
let's leave it up to the word definitions instead :

mainstream : the ideas, attitudes, or activities that are regarded as normal or conventional; the dominant trend in opinion, fashion, or the arts.

So, no, 6% is not mainstream. Moon landing conspiracies are by no means a dominant trend anywhere aside from joke books and parody.
Ok. But I didn't mean that as a discussion on what is a click or a mousedown, or what is fun. That's your decision, of course.

What I meant is that most people will just click and not see the action triggered as expected. Some may then try long pressing, but many won't. The result being that a large number of people won't get the expected impression from the demo and may even think that it's not working correctly.
Unfortunately in some industries continuous delivery is literally illegal. Anyway there's a real issue with their current schedules. Let's say you're developing software some time in the middle of next year. There's effectively no LTS release available at all.
Lol wouldn't be surprised if dcolkitt is SBF or someone near him
Prazosin is the one drug on the market approved for PTSD-related nightmares, I've heard that it works well, but it's a blood pressure medication, so it might not be well tolerated based on conditions or other medications taken.
Layoffs are always unfortunate, but didn't his company have the bright idea of making meetings all day into a virtual Second Life world where you can actually _see_ the other person's dog barking on the call? The experimental parts of the company hired a lot of those people and now can't keep them.

If he gives outgoing employees months of health care, all their PTO, etc. then what is the issue?
Yep, leaderless teams are either ad-hoc for a short time, or they develop an unofficial hierarchy (often based on the complaining of certain people, not anything else).
Sounds like a job for something like Python if they are unanchored. Or an AVRE.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_Minefield_Breaching_Sys...
I don't think you need to shoehorn every piece of software you like into one worldview. It's OK to like two different things. Contradiction is a fact of nature when discourse is linear but reality is anything but. Unix philosophy was amazing in the 70s, modern linuxes are great work environments now, EMACS is super cool, vim is a great little piece of text editing beauty. One thing is clear tho, Windows users have a severe case of Stockholm syndrome.
Can't have a run if you can't withdrawl!
I agree, but IIRC Warcraft 2 hadn't sole-purpose obstacles which can be freely constructed by the player, only Warcraft 1 had those ones. Though in Warcraft 2 sole-purpose obstacles were available as a preexisting objects on the map.
It’s not a contradiction. It’s easy to have illiquid funds. For example cold storage or locked funds.
Nothing less expected.