skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A while ago at my company we switched from GCC to Clang, and noticed a couple of massive regressions (on the order of 50%?) in performance having to do with floating point.

After profiling for a bit, I discovered that suddenly a lot of time was spent in isinf on Clang and no time in GCC… Clang was emitting a function call where GCC wasn’t. I happened to randomly change isinf to std::isinf (it’s a random habit of mine to put std:: in front of these C functions). Suddenly the regression disappeared! I guess on Clang only std::isinf was a compiler intrinsic while GCC recognized both? Anyway, that’s my small-change optimization story.
But it also occurs on Atlassian suite, Gitlab, Github and probably more tools…
Flooded at the entry level by Coursera certs and MS in Data Science from University You Have Never Heard Of. Used to work for an ML company that hires the entry level cert people for $19 an hour as consultants. They have an endless pool of cheap hires.
I personally have an enormous debt from my perception of the world to Cosmos by Carl Sagan.

It's not simply a world view absent of supernatural forces. Yes, it is that, but at the same time it is much more.

It's a world of discovery. It's a world of curiosity. It's a world of wonder and imagination. It's a world of exploration.

And the way to properly search for questions is first to stop pretending we already have all the answers, like religion does. I find almost every religious comment and answer so... reductionistic, so simplistic, so pompous, so pretentious, it kind of kills the mood of discovery and curiosity.
Clearly these engineers have never done customer feedback for developing nations, twitter interactions clearly provide evidence for what musk said, but some engineers seem to be in denial, imho the firing is cause worthy.
I use Dropbox and Dropsync on Android, keeps my music synced across all devices and I just use a regular music player with it.
Mastering Regular Expressions by Jeffrey Friedl! I was fresh out of college where I literally memorized certain regular expression patterns for a Unix class exam just to pass. It was only when I started an actual job in development did I realize what a powerful tool regexes are and was recommended this book. It explained everything so clearly and easily that to this day I love regular expressions.
I mean the fact that Drax is not solvent without UK government funds and the fact they have to import wood pellets from Canada/US should give you a pretty good idea that none of this is sustainable or carbon neutral.

I would much rather see those funds allocated to actual renewable sources instead of wasting time/money with wood furnaces and arguing if they are sustainable/renewable.
decentralized systems are always less efficient than a comparable centralized system (any insight that can make a decentralized system more efficient will do the same in a centralized system).

considering how hard it is to scale centralized such systems, it makes simple sense that it be much harder to scale a decentralized system.
I think you might be misunderstanding how liabilities and assets work. If your business is valued at 1 million already, it means your assets and liabilities net out to $1M. Taking out an additional loan for $1M just gives you $1M in assets AND $1M in liabilities (assuming this is before interest kicks in)... so your business valuation is actually neutral.

Now, if you squander the $1M and don't generate more than $1M+interest, your business will lose value... but you would have to lose $2M to then increase your liabilities to wipe out your original valuation
That doesn't contradict the point above
> They've added more MSG over the last couple decades

You say this as if it's an inherently bad thing. There's nothing wrong with some MSG as a flavor enhancer.
Java has been tunable for a long time. Periodically, the recommended tuning changes, or new GC algorithms become available, etc. But it has long been possible to get short pause times with various combinations of choosing the right algorithm and writing your program the right way.

I think what really throws people off here is that getting good performance out of a Java application involves some skills which are alien to C++ programmers, and vice versa. You take an experienced C++ programmer and drop them into a Java codebase, they may have a very poor sense of what is expensive and what is cheap. Vice versa… experienced Java programmers don’t do well in C++ either.

The result is that you have precious few people with any significant, real-world experience fixing performance issues in both languages.
You rejoice because of schadenfreude. It's painful to watch a bunch of lemmings make 200x their original investment while you are lucky to squeeze out 8% per year.
The problem is that they were dealing with it successfully before, by either treating the umlaut as a "u" or a "ue". It's not like umlauts are this new technology that English speakers have never been faced with in their business ledgers. But what you see in older business ledgers, is a variety of different spellings, and a human brain that can map them to each other, with a little bit of training. And when software came along, most systems just used the "u" approach, and that kinda worked as software systems grew to massive scale.

Now the hard part is changing how to deal with it, because now you need to patch all these huge production systems that were working before, and it's a breaking change.

So if you have a big stack: UI --> business layer --> DB

You can't just change the UI, as that will cause breakage in the pieces below. You start with the DB change, then the business layer, and you do the UI last.

Moreover this is not a simple change. Getting a DB to handle unicode is a known thing, but how do you train your customer support personnel to do data entry with unicode characters? Do you expect the customer to remember the code point? There are many characters that look the same which have different code points. So what you need to do is come up with a list of officially supported extended character code points and do entry with those, but still you will have others -- users of Asian scripts, for example, whose characters will be missing.

And you will get customers still doing the old "u" approach together with the official umlaut code point, sometimes for the same name and the same package. People will call up, trying to find their package, and randomly used one convention, since even though you can train your staff (which isn't cheap) you can't train your customers. So you need some system of identifying different orthography for the same underlying name, some with "u" and some with "ü" and some with "ue". And then that's going to require changes in a lot of other systems, for example reporting systems, etc. We see this problem today, taken to the extreme, in the various different spellings of "Gadafi".

But really it's worse, as a distributed system has

UI <--> business layer <--> regional DB <--> business layer <--> regional UI

And now it's much harder to make these changes without taking systems off line, for a distributed global network.

What they probably did, as most companies do, is look at all these problems and costs, compare them to relatively small benefits, and kick the can down the road, waiting for the next major system upgrade, and sometimes these next major upgrades can take 20 years to happen. Or even longer.

In other words, the hart part is the incremental breaking change to the system, not the dealing with the umlaut. If this was a brand new code base that was just being written, they could make it handle umlaut with much less cost.
Those people received generous severance packages, on top of government unemployment benefits.
Patients seldom have a choice in any aspect of their care. We could flood the market with dirt cheap insulin using an older formulation but surprise you can’t actually do that without one of the oligarchs buying your company just to stop you.
People were critiquing microsoft for the ads in the start menu or wtv menu. How long till we see ads in iphones?
Is the fake accounts thing overblown?

Like, if I create a fake verified Eli Lilly account on Twitter with no followers, how would anyone even see it? It seems like it would only get picked up and shared by people in on the joke.
@d0@mastodon.social
It’s different. Rivian will have serious issues without all the gov loans and money Tesla got. I expect Tesla to struggle a lot in the future as the more established brands get their EV stories solidified. There is a lot more to a car or truck than a drivetrain. In some ways that’s the easiest part.
Type checking absolutely should not run during runtime. When I’m refactoring I need to be able to test that things are partly working as I go.

If I have to get an entire application’s types perfect before even running the code that’s a huge DX slowdown.

Types should pass, strictly, before merging.
Don’t Wait for Motivation, Act for Momentum
Yes he's got quite the nose for these things.
Honestly, this doesn't sound much different than a year ago, five years ago, or ten years ago. Companies never seem to be serious about hiring: they go fishing but never reel anyone in, they ghost you after a few communications, they reject your application with automation, and even if you have an internal referral, the referrer is usually only able to do "Go apply through the normal funnel and if you get through the automation, I'll vouch for ya!"

I've got ~20 years in the industry, including startup-sized companies, medium sized companies and FAANGs. Every job hunt for me is still around 100 applications : 10 interviews : 1 offer. These ratios have remained pretty reliable through bull and bear hiring markets.

I suspect people for whom "jobs are falling off trees" are rarer than HN commenters might have you believe.
Yes, they are real jobs. But you have to make sure that it is from primary vendors. Often times, many secondary vendors source for the same job listed by primary vendor. One way to cut down secondary vendors, ask for decent rates. If someone asks you to work for $60 per hr, just say NO.

Even primary vendors have outsourced their recruiting to India.
> Many people don't care about web culture; they only care about consuming.

> Most people have non-computery interests, and that's fine.

But personal sites don't need to be about web culture per se. The best ones were often about some other interest or perspective that happened to be combined in a person who was also tech-capable enough to share it online. And 15 years ago, if you had some passion, whether that was french cooking or birding or carpentry or something else, a personal website or blog was a pretty good way to share it. But now, you'd get a better audience through sharing that same perspective on social media.

I think the thing that's hard to get on a personal site is the immediate feedback that social media provides. The issue as I see it isn't so much that people only want to consume (that was always the case) but that people creating content are in a numbers-driven competition for eyeballs. Creating and publishing stuff online has been mashed together with status/follower-seeking behaviors, and your own personal site likely doesn't provide the same dopamine hit. Even if you're posting about your latest sewing project, putting it on social media can get you some likes and comments, but putting it on your personal site can feel like talking to an empty room.

And aside from the minor technical challenges of creating your own site, I think people rarely talk about the legal or administrative burdens of creating your own whitelabel place to host your content. Do you want to track how people use your site with some analytics tool? What TOS and cookie opt-outs do you need to provide in that case? Oh, you'd like to have a comments section under your posts? What are the GDPR implications of that? You're publishing online so it's not for "purely personal or household purposes" after-all. What if after your personal project gains an audience, you decide to sell some merch -- then because you're 'a business', what has to change for you to meet CCPA obligations? Whereas if you have just a bunch of social media profiles, you don't control and are not responsible for handling that user data.
One imagines that the endgame for him is probably some sort of charity to hand off to anyway.
“Implicit reference semantics” means that variables ordinarily refer to objects rather than containing them. “Value semantics” means that variables contain values rather than references, though there are pointer types that let you explicitly store references when you want them. (Often this is discussed in terms of parameter passing, for historical reasons, but the same ideas apply to variables more generally.)

If your language has implicit reference semantics, “x = y” will cause x and y to refer to the same object. If it has value semantics, x will be a copy of y.
How is this different from what google and facebook does?
All but the last of those examples only paid out to the living survivors of the atrocity, and the last only earmarked 5% for descendants.

So it does seem that inter-generational reparations are indeed very rare.
Movie Maker mode in Godot 4.0
>It might be time to lose that space, similar to how we don't double space after period.

Well, that's is a bit like saying "it might be time to write your whenever you mean you're" just because Google Docs' autocorrect feature kept messing up the two when you wrote English.

How would it look like in an email to a client?
Which tech skills? Full stack? Backend? any speciality skills?
Its not practical as a global currency with regards to BTC. It never really has been. It is too slow and too expensive compared to centralized options. The idea of a neutral all digital currency sounds fantastic but it glosses over a key advantage of the US dollar. The dollar is backed by the US Gov't and the US military. It didn't just randomly become the defacto monetary standard in the world by accident.

Price fluctuations would diminish with more adoption as well. We also interact with things that vary wildly in price year over year too, like the price of gas (oil). We have just become used to it. The dollar itself fluctuates a fair bit, the DXY index is at 106, and it will probably get much higher next year indicating a strong dollar if there is a global recession. Actual price adjustments are just slow to trickle down to consumers because of a lack of practicality of changing on the shelf prices each day. Also, inflation will drive prices higher, but even after the economy is back under control, prices rarely will go back down.
No it doesn’t. Better repro steps needed.

Edit: best guess so far: something regional or language dependent? Looks like US-specific search suggestions?

My non-crashing circumstances:

(iPhone11, iOS 15.6.1, Swedish language, in Sweden)
We're a web development shop. We're not flashy but we do work with a lot of large companies. We're having trouble getting applicants with a solid 1. Skill level 2. Grasp of English.
I think this is a large part of why he is getting a pass.
Which one of these will be the biggest “unicorn” failure ever?
This is hilarious. Buying “down” coins on binance. Seems like all real coins will drop in value, and “down” will go up. Splashed 100£. Guess i’m buying twitter soon.
It's been a while since that was his primary storyline w/r/t Tesla.
If they were desperate to hire somebody, they'd lower the bar on the tech screens.
Kitchen use cases for voice for me:

Setting multiple named alarms while cooking and often my hands are not clean to handle a phone or they're holding something going in an oven or they're stirring something.

Adding things to Todo lists or shopping lists as I notice them.

Setting alarms when I set a cup of tea to brew so I don't forget about it. I have to walk back to the room to stop it ringing, which means I can add milk and pick up my tea.

Changing what I'm listening to while washing dishes.

I'm already distractible enough, not having to pick up my phone to do them also means I'm less likely to get distracted.
I'm sure it takes a little time to solve this issue to the degree any customer should expect from them... Researching non-extradition countries with decent quality of life and decent buying power for your... their money.
I like applying the Circuit Breaker approach to caching. Rather than applying a cache everywhere, setup a cache wrapper that only triggers if the accessed resource is slower than a certain threshold.

The goal is for the cache to go unused most of the time, but during times of unexpected system stress the caches will kick in, provide relief to the system and reduce impact to users.
Contracting is not really an option that way in the U.S. market that I've seen, though I'd be interested if you've had a different experience. Either you're contracting through an agency in which case you're applying just like for any FTE job, or you're operating at the high end with an established network. Random gigs at places like Upwork don't pay enough for a major U.S. metro area unless you're willing to hustle full-time to live a student.
I've been contracting for the past five years.

Still luckily have work when I want it.

However, my general feeling is the market is cooler here in the UK. I used to get annoyed on a regular basis by the number of recruiters who contacted me .. it's happening a lot less often now.
Apparently this face is real: <https://www.whichfaceisreal.com/realimages/59264.jpeg>.

If you say so, I guess.
I'm happy that these sort of posts are actually getting some traction on Hacker News these days. Up until 3-4 months ago, I was still getting pummeled with downvotes and flags if I even suggested Apple are hypocrites building an ad empire.
More examples on Insta, we'll add more to the website tomorrow too: https://www.instagram.com/petpic.ai/ Published asap, lots of catching up to do on showing more examples - you're completely right!

We hope to bring the costs down in the future, but for now this is the price...
His new partner seems to be an influence.
Hourly employees are easier to replace because the training path is much shorter.
What a wild thing to post
And it doesn't even pay as badly as I think people expect, necessarily. It's not SV money but it's reasonable.
I think this is a good call to deprecate as they don't have much of a business and should play to their strengths
Why wouldn't you get out of any/all crypto you can right now?

If you're bullish on crypto's long-term prospects you can always buy back in after the crash. There will be a new "ground floor". (I would suggest no one do that... just saying, even if you believe whole-hog in the future of crypto, now's the time to sell any way you can.)
Early in Bitcoin we came across the 1923 "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator", https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/60979 -- which described some of the scams we were seeing cropping up.

Much of the altcoin industry seems to have picked it up as an instruction manual.

(Not that there aren't scams in Bitcoin land-- but they've mostly been concentrated into the altcoin ecosystems, which tend to be overweight in the exuberant and gullible even compared to Bitcoin. It's completely unsurprising to see the FTX implosion happening at a scamcoin casino who's CEO had been publicly attacking Bitcoin -- it would have been much more surprising to see it at a Bitcoin only or mostly organization)
I use US_Intl keyboard for Swedish and Portuguese and can type all of this without the need of special char keys: ä ö å - á à â ã. Just a mix of Opt+(u/a/e/i/n/`) and the next character I want with the diacritic.

Edit: and ß is just a Opt+s. It becomes quite logical after you get the hang of it.
Also, the problem I think we all have with Slack is picking the important messages out of the deluge. I've been mulling a sort of SLA/prioritization tool for Slack messages. Something where you could set SLAs like "If my skip level manager DMs me I want to respond in 5 minutes" and do the Pagertree sort of escalation until I respond.

You can apply this to channels and do more intelligent notifications than Slack does. Like if a Director or higher posts in your team's public channel then kick off the Pagertree notification. Or if a post has gotten 10+ replies in 5 minutes.

Can't tell you how many times I've been late on important messages because Slack's notifications are coarse and terrible.
They already had some. Now there's a ton. And it's not to make it better, but to cover for the fact that all the other components have gotten a lot worse.
Yes, a regulated centralized exchange is valuable for on and off ramp. All they would need to do is process user transactions, take a small fee, and not gamble with user funds. Regulators could do audits and keep consumers protected.

But regulators have failed to provide clear framework for exchanges in the US[1], so most CEXes are running off shore.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/11/op-ed-crypto-markets-need-re...
Crypto for retail consumers is dead. The end.

I just don't see how consumer confidence can come back after losing thousands.
It is popular in newgen tooling but I feel its more a function of the slowness of `tsc` than anything else. I get why `tsc` is slow, and have a lot of respect for the team and the constraints they work under but I can't help but feeling if we were to get a faster type checker (potentially `stc` from the creator of `swc` which also does this? https://github.com/dudykr/stc), this choice would be less popular. However if I'm honest I don't know if TypeScript's type system means that there are some natural constraints on how fast it can be validated.
The beginning of professionalism in software?
Rivian needs something like Tesla's profitable 2H2018 where they showed that they could be profitable just selling S's and X's just before they endured massive losses while ramping up the 3 and Y.
> all the internet did was email and ftp

In retrospect, that would have been a nice stopping point...
I had a coworker that had one of those, while I had only an IPaq PDA. They were roughly the same size, with the phone being slightly thicker and also an antenna nub on the top.

I found my IPaq while moving a month ago. The footprint is significantly smaller than my Google Pixel 6. Though the Pixel is significantly thinner, I find that also makes it more uncomfortable to hold. Like, imagine taking it to an extreme and the phone becomes as thin as a piece of glass. Even without sharp edges, it'd still be very uncomfortable to wrap your hand around such a thing.

I don't understand the obsession with thinner and thinner phones. Thickness is not universally bad. It would at least give us more room for battery.

There aren't any other, similarly-sized objects that I wrap my hand around completely. Small books, digital cameras, handheld game consoles, I hold gripping the edge of the device. But you can't do that with a smartphone because one of the two largest faces of the rectangular solid is reactive to any part of your skin.

My laptop touchpad can tell when I wrest my wrist on it while typing on the keyboard versus just touching it with my fingertips. Why can't smartphones reject grabbing the side of the screen and only react to fingertip touches?