skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hate autoformatters/linters that frob with line length with a passion. I'm an 80-column kind of guy, but 81 columns can be just fine, and in some cases 90 or even 100 can be more readable than obsessively wrapping at 80 (or some other arbitrary value).

There are a few (rare) cases where gofmt will wrap lines, but it mostly leaves it alone which is one of the better "features" IMHO. Many *fmt tools really got this wrong.

Automated formatters are nice, but in the end there is no substitute for human eyes and common sense.
Yup, at PayPal, as CEO, it was "it's cool and all you have this working prototype of PayPal, but really, I think it should be Windows and ASP, so let's start fresh."

Board of Directors: "We're not going to do that".

I don't think it was backstabbing on Thiel's part (though I despise the man, personally) - there was very little in the way of cogent argument beyond Musk not really knowing Linux at the time. And to be clear, he wasn't CEO because he was a founder/PayPal was his idea/his technical vision and direction - he was only CEO because he was the largest shareholder of the two companies when they merged.
Let me ask you a question: why does it matter if a new successful product comes from an acquisition or is homegrown? Everything on your list other than Gmail and Chrome (which relied on Webkit FWIW) were acquisitions.

Some acquisitions just mean billion of dollars spent for nothing and these get a lot of attention. Remember when AOL bought BeBo for $850m? But every acquisition is a gamble. Most won't pay off but some will, spectacularly.

Like in 2022 can you really believe that Google paid less than $2 billion for Youtube? Is that not the biggest bargain of the century? Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion. Were it a separate company, at least until the last couple of years, it probably would be worth 100x that.

Most ideas don't turn into billion (or trillion) dollar companies. Expecting a company to do that multiple times is like expecting to win the lottery twice. Taking a $1 billion company and turning it into a $100+ billion business is itself a massive success. I'm not sure why the homegrown product is assumed to be somehow more virtuous.
In my experience people most often convey sarcasm on social media with emoji and the emoji is typically the most informative feature.

I hate my job :) -> probably loves their job.

I love my job :( -> probably hates their job.

Without emoji sarcasm is often hard to detect even for a human.
Faceless clock makes you think twice about how it works
> It's hardly losing the plot to ask someone "What have you achieved and what do you think your best work is?

that's not what's being asked, they're asking for screenshots of code. Which is not the same.
It's interesting how legacy companies are not making exciting consumer/commercial products anymore, but infrastructure and technical projects are booming.

Google TensorFlow and DeepMind, Microsoft WSL2, Meta AI, etc. Also worth mentioning the many quiet efforts to get quantum computing off the ground.
A Tesla has to work for the driver, passengers, the others on the road, pedestrians, the road itself - these are new problems never encountered before that Elon is tackling head-on. If you consider every person on the world to be connected (if they are physically touching the ground), a Tesla has to literally work for those billions of people.
Yeah, but having that is clearly not aligned with making money. They could make it more difficult or impossible to use headscale at any moment.
As a counter point, the US actively tries to hack UK security networks.

Source: My job was to prevent that.

I’ve no doubt we do the same to the US.
Compare a hand-made loaf of bread to one from the grocery store. Count the number of ingredients. The hand-made loaf is usually made from flour, with water, oil, and leavening. If you buy unprocessed flour that makes 4 or 5 ingredients as a base. A store bought, whole wheat loaf of bread contains roughly 16 ingredients. The home-made loaf doesn't contain preservatives because it won't need to sit on a shelf for a prolonged period. The home-made loaf can use higher quality/purity ingredients than you will find in the grocery store in the USA. White bread is worse.

Not all bread is made the same. Not all bread ingredients are the same. Those individual ingredients can be processed as well. The more processing on the ingredients and end product, the more "processed" a food is. I'm not even touching "highly processed" or "ultra-processed" foods in this short post.
Why did I have to scroll so much down to read a reasonable comment?
Past performance does not make every action an individual does correct.
We already have eBPF.
Yes, we all know that the bigger the software creature's title is, the more lines of code the creature must leave behind. Jeff Dean is well known for changing hundreds of thousands of lines a day! he has a whole team of reviewers just following him around and LGTMing his mighty trail.
Reminds me of the story of the computer engineer at Data General in Traccy Kidder's nonficion book, "The Soul of a New Machine" [0], who quit after spending weeks toiling away on sub-second timing concerns:

> He went away from the basement and left this note on his terminal: "I'm going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season."

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine
I'll agree with the thought of "The folks who say they do not care about animals join the company of everyone who has historically opposed the widening of that circle", I do benefit from the status quo.

That being said, it is a huge proposition to proclaim you're on the right side of history, and that others who aren't should either reconsider or live to regret it. Especially when the change you champion will only happen when those that make money from meat no longer do. I'll sooner bet on the grass turning purple.
Having Elon in sole control of what is or isn’t acceptable speech is a feature, not a bug.
I suppose you aren't working on teams of enterprise shops scale, with the various skill sets of contractor that it entails.
It is a uniquely crummy feeling to have your work go unused like that, but you shouldn’t let it discourage you. You reached a level of mastery on this particular thing that few people have, which is evidenced by the fact that no one else in the trading community was able to reach your company’s level of confidence and they decided to wait out the leap second instead.
This is a perfect example of how an algorithm will fail. I suppose someone could argue that your comment isn't negative (or negative enough to warrant de-boosting).
The problem is not that Elon is getting rid of the dead weight, but in the fact that he seems to be alienating the good talent in the process.
> the idea is to find folks who have nothing whatsoever to show, and yet have titles like "staff software engineer".

Shouldn't that have been the idea *before* they laid off half the employees?

How fucking idiotic of a leader do you have to be to lay off half the company and *then* try and figure out who is producing literally nothing of value?
He's not doing anything unusual - he's just doing ti very aggressively and quickly. He dropped the bottom 50% as reported on by managers and now he has identified the best of that 50% and asked everyone else to either commit or get out. This is standard operating procedure but it is usually done over the course of many months to over a year instead of like 1 month in this case.

If it works then I think senior managers will be more willing to reorg quickly and build from the solid core.

However, I'm not sure it will change most things at most places. Managers love headcount more than anything. Each person under them makes them more important. Managers love this. I've had roles where I don't need anymore headcount but I was forced to add it because my managers wanted more headcount.

Worst case, we'll have profitable tech companies far earlier in the lifecycle.
Art in the bark: Indigenous carved boab trees in north-west Australia
Now he's saying that he wants people to fly in to present their code to him by midnight.

On the Friday before Thanksgiving.

Into one of United's big hubs.

With 14 hours notice.

And a lot of cold fronts over the eastern seaboard.

Likely more like 10 hours with travel times and the line of potential people that are presenting.

I'm honestly gobsmacked.

Look, if you're on of those engineers and are unfortunate enough to have to go through this insane reapplication for your job on ~1/2 day's notice, then I think you owe it to the poor people that are trying to fly in to drag this thing out as long as possible and stall, Stall, STALL.
Hiding errors like that is going to make it hard to figure out what is going on as more and more wrappers like this pile up.

If time.Parse is failing, you either have bad input or a bug, right? If you are ok with this failing without even logging the error, something might be wrong with the design.
Agreed. To me, the genius is just his courage to actually do it while probably feeling like the entire world is against him. A lot of leaders might come up with similar plans, but execution in the face of so much opposition is what separates Elon from the rest.
“Sir, are you suggesting that we blow up the moon?”
I feel like Google Photos is a pretty incredible product.
It's (less than) a minute a century -- why would we not simply say "no corrections except at the century mark, in the middle of the weekend closest to January 31st"? That way:

There's an exact time everyone knows the correction will happen, it's just a question of how big the correction will be.

The correction is always in the same direction -- no "one second forward, then later one second back" shenanigans.

It always happens over a weekend, so no one has to deal with real-time work-time issues.

While maybe some have to work a weekend, at least it's not near the year-end holidays.

It only happens once every 100 years.
> A few little prison-term sized problems

No one will ever see the inside of a prison off of this matter. FTX was deeply involved with powerful political contributors and those people can't be allowed to be subjected to depositions or other legal discovery. Key figures are on the lam and no one with the power to capture them will be tasked with doing so.

While the amounts involved are eye watering they are not large enough to destabilize to the US financial system, so the people involved need only resolve their various financial entanglements and wait for the story to expire out of the news cycle.
Does someone know why the Webb telescope give this strange "sharp glare" on many of the shiny star-shaped objects ?
Is it some sort of AI upscaling or is it raw data coming from the sensors ?
If the goal was actually to see what employees think is their most important work, that (and criteria) would be specified, instead of playing "what is he looking for" mind games.
Presumably he’s going to realize this in a couple days and start trying to hire back the folks who were in charge of moderation, etc, on the platform.

The possibility that Twitter was configured the way it was when he bought it for a reason apparently didn’t occur to him.
Your code must be very "salient" then.
Maybe if you aren't contributing or are abusing your position.
Some customers prefer asking in a community because that can lead to responses from other customers (at times it can even be faster response than a company rep getting to respond). A good example is dev infra related companies, where a customer can get a lot of value by hearing from how other customers think about a specific problem. You don't get that through a typical customer support software which is one to one.

It comes down to preference. The trend is that companies have to meet where customers are already hanging. Some customers will prefer only email (and for them you still need a ticketing software), some will prefer social (depending on industry), and some will prefer chat/forum communities. If you want to stand out as a company (esp when you are starting out), you have to serve them where ever they prefer. Sure, if you have an amazing product with a strong moat, you have more leverage on how you want customers to interact with you. But that comes much later in a company lifecycle.
I think the more pertinent question is will Google ever launch a new product that actually makes money. If that firehose of ad money ever slows down, look out.
Screenshots of code, what a technical genius this man is!
The engineers make a fuss when you ask them to clean and appraise cars and make the website at the same time
I think the salary hasn’t been cut, but the value of the stock (options) are probably very different now
I think the point is more that most of the hard work behind Twitter isn't in writing the "fancy" code at all - it's in developing the infrastructure that allows that code to safely propagate across Twitter's massive network of servers, and abstracting that complexity away so that the developers who make the "fancy" user-visible changes don't have to worry about it.
Here's a rather more likely reality:

The workers have noticed Elon likes to see everyone acting busy and has a propensity for causing a lot of trouble when he doesn't see what he likes.

Therefore, they act busy when he's around, and go back to normal, productive work when he's not.
Sure, Twitter can probably find new engineers to hire.

But replacing all of the random but critical bits of knowledge in the heads of the people walking out the door is much harder.
> That's dumb. I'd like a function to be GetJobName to indicate that it doesn't mutate anything. Maybe CreateJobName to indicate mutation. Just JobName is useless.

It can't mutate anything with a non-pointer receiver. Mostly.

> how do you reliably "test" its emptiness

See time.IsZero() for an example.
Declining birth rates are happening everywhere in the world, not just in the christian liberal west for the reasons you gave. The primary causes seem to be urbanization and women's access to education and birth control. It makes sense to have more kids living on a farm, not so much in a city.

This will drive lots of changes, both cultural and economic. Is it a good thing or a bad thing? Probably depends on who you ask. Are lot of people scared of these changes? Definitely.
Automated API Generation
Hey all, started working on Flaming API for fun and thought I'd post it here. APIs are a fundamental piece of any app and it's always a tedious process to set up. Also after setup, your api-needs evolve, like needing custom business logic and handling load issues.

With Flaming API, I'm tackling the setup issue first, where you can set up api endpoints for any app in 1-click. As things evolve, I think I'll have to add ability for api customization, but that's me getting ahead of myself.

Sign up to the waitlist if you'd like to follow the journey... and stop manually setting up your api :)
Ask HN: What was your take-away from job loss?
For those who have been fired, laid off, let go, edged out, or otherwise, what did you take away from your experience?
Dave Gordon – Electrical Engineering – Open Neutral
If I'm basically expected to prove my value to a loudmouth that walked in a few weeks ago in a place I've worked in for >year because he can't figure out how to evaluate people - I'd rather do that in an interview for another company - sounds healthier.
> those who cannot physically get to Twitter HQ are excused

Probably means that if there are no actual flights from where you're to SF and that you couldn't get there in time no matter how much you wanted. Not exactly the same thing...
Really? Looked into the economics/fundamentals of the hyper loop? Or the crappy excuse for one they built in Vegas? How about that Mars mission?
Sorry to be pedantic (well, not really it's M.O. for a hacker news commentor after all, isn't it?) , but as someone who knows a few languages, slang is not an issue with spoken languages at all. You learn a language by full immersion with other speakers, who impart that knowledge unto you. Unless all you are doing is conversing with grammaticians and newscasters, you will pick up on regional and local differences, euphemisms, and slang.
The problem for him here is that instead of boiling the frog, he's gone straight to chasing the frog around with a blowtorch.
We need to let it completely loose and get everyone exposed to it everywhere so that maybe we can finally get rid of this insane taboo and uptightness about sex and nudity we have in society.
> I just hope whoever processes severance checks is still working.

In the dotcom era, I was in the middle of a mass layoff. At the meeting, "everybody go back to your desk and dial extension 1234, and you will get a message with your employment status, instructions and next steps".

PBX crashed.

PBX took a while being brought back up because, well, the people responsible for supporting it wanted to find out whether _they_ were some of those laid off before deciding whether they wanted to bring it back up.
Yikes there is no empire
Coming from Swift development I first missed having a collection of assertion functions for testing, but I've come around to the go testing patterns. I do think test assertion libraries usually result in less useful messages, and you end up having to implement a new function for every type of comparison under the sun.

(One thing I absolutely abhor is those assertion DSLs similar to rspec)
They still don't have folders and have ignored years of feedback. The only reason I don't use it.
Side story: the haptic feedback for the NanoManipulator was through a hydraulic system (kinda like this? https://www.sarcos.com/wp-content/uploads/history_5-339x280....). There were hydraulic lines that were piped through the building down to the machine room (where the SGI Infinite Reality Engine was!). Someone read through the manual and realized that the force that the arm was capable of could easily break someone's arm, and since it was usually grad students working late at night programming it, they decided it would be safest to just decommission that. I think I got one of the last demos during a UNC grad school recruiting event.
And yet, every single month there are a new couple of exploits, really skillful...
Interesting. I find git blame sufficient to assess engineering talent on a shared code base. Sometimes I read through a file and there's clarity and other times it's spaghetti. The ones who write with clarity are the ones I want my desk next to. Sometimes they are not even the ones that management is promoting.
That sounds like what I've heard about Steve Jobs.
Outside of people who blindly lucked into something, I can’t think of anyone stupid who actually built a long-term, sustainable business where they had to juggle multiple duties.
Counterpoint: yes?
Yeah, I'm amused when people say he's all liberal/libertarian.

The only person allowed to smoke weed at a Musk company is Musk. Everyone else better piss clean.
Tribel is another twitter alternative I've been enjoying: https://www.tribel.com/public/trending
The game industry manages it because a lot of people dream of making games, in the same way as I'm sure Tesla and SpaceX have a lot of extremely dedicated employees because the work they're doing is literally a life long dream.

There's some very interesting things to solve and achieve at a platform like Twitter but I doubt very many people have had them as life long targets for themselves to achieve.
Seems the # of employees left is close to or under 1000. About 230 of those are on H1-Bs, I didn't look up others. There's additional information per table entry or you can download the data.

https://www.uscis.gov/tools/reports-and-studies/h-1b-employe...
It would actually be really interesting if the remaining staff at Twitter tried forming a union at this juncture.

How many more of his employees would Musk be willing to fire or make enemies over this without completely ruining the shell of a company he still owns?
Actually HN has taught me that CEOs generate the value for shareholders.
It has much more to do with people's consumption patterns and ethical norms than it does that people make money from meat.

No matter how much money someone makes from owning a slaughterhouse, they can't make me eat something I don't want to eat.
I have lost count of the number of caveats that have been applied daily to his “free speech absolutism”. Any bets on how soon he will permanently ban folks like AOC and Elizabeth Warren under some new “policy”?
Junior/Mid Perspective: "I was hired to write code, sometimes I solve business problems"

Senior/Staff's Perspective: "I was hired to solve business problems, sometimes I write code"
I think it helps to start with what you think “getting out from under that” means. Why do you think it’s a problem for Japan have this much debt to GDP?
I mean, do you know what I‘m willing to do for a Mountain Dew with real sugar?
Now imagine him dropping the leetcode hazing too. That would seal the deal.
Jeff Bezos Unveils “Vertical Search” (2005)
Running things in kernel space doesn't make them faster.
The FBI closed the book on Z-Library, and readers and authors clashed
A Tesla in Los Angeles does not have to work for a pedestrian in New York.
Quick! Someone write an AI that classifies the likelihood of informal fallacies.
This is Elon Musk MO. He invents nothing, just repackages and markets - the electric car (the very first kind of car invented over a hundred years ago) and going to space in a rocket? These are his big things and people eat it up. Why?
Achieving Crypto Privacy and Regulatory Compliance
I'm sorry but the only thing Musk has shown in the last couple of years is blatant market manipulation, kneejerk reactions and poor choices. It's great that he "supports" enterprises like SpaceX and Tesla, but more and more evidence points to these companies succeeding despite him, not thanks to him.

This is anecdotal of course, but pretty much every single one of my friends - even the staunch Muskovites - are really scratching their heads at his behavior and choices. He may well be the awkward genius that was his prior image, but right now he is being widely perceived as a tantrum throwing privileged man child who had success fired at him from a high speed rotary cannon and he managed to avoid destroying it by the skin of his teeth.

The way he publicly talks about his employees and how his approach seems to be to human beings can only be described as sociopathic. Again, there may well be an army of overpaid engineers at Twitter just twiddling their thumbs, but the expectation that people will somehow fall over themselves and sacrifice their personal life so that Elon Musk can add another couple of dozens of billions to his wealth is preposterous.

He went from being an advocate for humankind to coming across as a robber baron who cares nothing for the wellbeing of those who work for him. As if it was somehow a privilege to work for him.
https://archive.ph/KjPRo
I work at Google, but just want to say that AlloyDB is really cool.