skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ok, multiply instagrams employees at time of acquisition by 50x and you still get an order of magnitude smaller employee base than Twitter.

And obviously employee count shouldn’t scale linearly with user count. No idea where you get that idea?

To argue that a 1B+ user app of moderate complexity can’t be run by a few hundred employees is simply wrong.

The end game for all web software is going to be managed services with automation built in such that it requires almost no manual intervention (absent logic bugs). This gets easier and easier to accomplish as cloud capabilities grow. And cheaper.

The long term trend for tech is obviously towards fewer employees and bigger impact per employee through leveraging higher level abstractions. Look at what you can build as an individual today vs 20 years ago and it’s quite obvious. Unless you think technological progress will suddenly halt
Creating a 2D physics engine from scratch in JavaScript
Could link to a lot of american perversions if you wanted to but that's a very narrow "we."
"In a game in which dishonesty is commonplace, it is notable that we were able to achieve human-level performance by controlling the agent's dialogue through the strategic reasoning module to be largely honest and helpful to its speaking partners."
typing on my phone.... perhaps if I had an Apple ][+
The title of this article should really be "Don’t promote your programmers into managers", which is the first sentence of a paragraph halfway through.

The article doesn't say to stop promoting programmers among programming roles, which would have been quite the controversial take. It's been standard practice throughout the industry for a long time to have deep IC ladders so that you don't have to promote your best ICs to management.
It is great that Raspberry Pi Foundation releases articles like this, but I still can't buy a Raspberry Pi. And I use rpilocator.com
I could certainly build a version of twitter that didn't require so many people.
this is coming soon to D2: https://github.com/terrastruct/d2/pull/91
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the blog post is concerning a stability improvement on Windows specifically?
Until your internet connection drops out on movie night. Or the streaming service shuts down. Or their license expires and they are too cheap to renew so silently remove your movie. And you won't get the full resolution on your favorite OS. And you can't use your own player so have to put up with whatever options the official one has or doesn't have. And when you move somewhere else half the catalogue is not available.

Yes, "owning" shit is more expensive. But plenty of us would rather pay that cost than give up control.
isn't it wild that you can run what amounts to nearly a hundred VMs at once and your computer still functions fairly reasonably?
> This is also a good example of the benefit of telemetry:

The benefit can be claimed only if the user consented into their private information being shared with the browser vendor in the first place. With most browser telemetry that is not the case and browser is simply not respecting users' privacy. The right to privacy, as a human right, trumps the 'right' to have the product 'improved'.

Otherwise we can find "benefit" in everything. One of the benefits of hell, for example, is that it is never cold.
> I don't think Windows is too bloated or memory-inefficient.

You know I used to be on that boat up until very very recently. I have a 2019 HP Stream 10" with 32GB eMMC and soldered 4GB DDR4. Windows got it bricked on a botched update, so I installed Linux Mint to get it back up quickly.

Not only is Linux using a lot less storage (which was always and issue with Windows Update), but the RAM usage is about 700MB without any applications running, and well under 4GB for most common uses. Sure, Chrome(ium) will eat a hefty chunk of it when you run it, between zram-config and some extra swap space, it handles things a lot better than Windows ever did.

Antoher point of anecdata: shared libraries are actually shared a lot more between processes on Linux than on Windows. That tends to mean a lot less RAM usage on certain process. I know it's down to how they handle sharing things and that Windows takes the "safe" approach (pretty much what the article talks about!) but it ends up hitting memory a lot more than Linux and macOS.
I don't think the reasonable solution is to, by default, lie to programs that care about memory allocation failure for the sake of those that don't.
Dijkstra is a smooth talker and sometimes he's able to convince people that an argument is settled even when it is not... Here, he conveniently ignores examples that are better for [closed,closed], such as iterating backwards over the range. That is more annoying for [closed,open) because it turns into the abhorent (open,closed].

An argument I prefer is this: [closed,closed] is better for representing an index into the range while 0-based with [closed,open) is better for offsets. They are not the same, as C would have you believe, and there are situations where behaves nicer than the other.
Best exploit write up I’ve read. All the details, interspersed with nonchalant humor.

“None of these words are in the Bible.

This is certainly true of the King James Version, but many of these words can be found in what might as well be the Old Testament of Same-Origin Policy: the WhatWG Fetch Standard, which defines the CORS rules we are being accused of violating.”
Of course its all bloat. Software runs on computers, not engineers. The default assumption for software is that it will go on working. The state might devolve, but the software is exactly as reliable right now as it was before. I'm no friend of Elon, and I think its hilarious to think that he can be king of twitter, but all these people talking about "code entropy" are certifiably insane.

Big tech maintains talent so that they won't use their knowledge of the system to produce an identical competitor without the technical debt or investor liability of the original.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33706852
Wei Ho Is Drawn to Algebra, Geometry and TheHuman Side of Math
Hopefully Facebook will self-implode with Zuck's Metaverse taking the whole org with it. Call your Congress person and ask them if they're being sponsored by the likes of FB or these tax webpages. Then ask them to stand up for your consumer rights.
Floating point clocks do lose precision after long enough time though; see https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2012/02/13/dont-store-that...

Storing floating point coordinates for example is what causes the "farlands" world generation behavior in Minecraft, for example.
Why tech's giants aren't rushing to clone Twitter
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050107-00/?p=36...
Thank you for a moment of unintended candor at least.

To this I say: Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.

Call it "toxic" if you wish, I find this whole thing hilarious. Especially this reply.
Big general purpose languages don’t have the capability for certain kinds of performance improvements or static analysis so the market size isn’t a factor.
Again, I doubt it. NASA funding doesn't really work that way. They don't get a big bucket of funds to distribute as they please. SLS was the pet project of a number of powerful Senators, to the point where the joke is it's the "Senate Launch System", and has been specifically appropriated for by Congress.
Nope, I learned [closed, open) in school and .. vs ... in ruby. Python range() is [closed, open) so that's what I use everywhere now.
Agreed. I don’t need a screen or a loud speaker on a voice assistant box. Just make it small and cheap, as promised.
I've heard the Dole pineapple canning plant in Hawaii is pretty great.
Utilizing the PageRank algorithm for source code results
It's true that anti-union ideology is still widespread, but...

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/02/18/majorities-...
Another happy fastmail.com user here. Moved off of GSuite with a custom domain 3 years ago and haven't looked back.
Sorry but that’s a total straw man. Yes, if you redefine the words I used then you can make any argument you want.

In CS, correctness means with “behaves in a consistent manner with respect to a specification”. The smart contract is the specification, so yes the output of the smart contract is guaranteed to be correct with respect to the specification. Of course, there can always be be errors in the specification. If you have another definition of “correct”, let me know.
I haven't done any research on this but I suspect that usage predates "DSL," or at least was popular before the term DSL was widely known and used for it. I mostly see "little language" used in older sources, mid-90s or earlier.

It seems to be making a comeback though! I prefer it too. It's not really more descriptive than DSL but it's not much less, and is less jargony and just cuter.
Eh—the blame comes down to the swap.

If the swap were allocated to the whole HD that wasn't used for actual files, then this hack wouldn't work.

If the swap were leaner that it already is, this hack would be necessary in every program.

If I had to point a finger at who is to blame, it's the Windows swap allocation team. Some combination of predictive analytics or even just a saner ratio of swap to free HD for an incoming file would fix this problem for most users most of the time.

But computers are hard and people want to keep them running for days on end. I get that memory just slowly, slowly gets eaten up by all the zombie procs out there.
"Abu Dhabi investors", ok.

I guess both twitter and bitcoin are now being propped up by Gulf states.
Using algolia search, I found comments using it in HN twelve years ago.
Don't forget Qatar Holding and some oilprince from Saudi Arabia which are now also major shareholders
The barriers to adopting vector-everywhere are social and commercial, not technical.

There are a couple great public raster services like osm.org's default style and http://maps.stamen.com. These are 100% free to use, so they get used everywhere, but incur significant expense to the organizations running (paying) for them.

There aren't equivalent solutions in vector-land yet... I wrote a bit about this previously: https://protomaps.com/blog/free-tier-maps
The Data Advantage in the Foundation Models Era
> What's their core business? Losing money on a platform where people can post racist comments?

they've been running the same exact business for years now, if what you say it's true, maybe the answer is yes?

I never heard of Twitter making profit, so maybe their core business was "Losing money on a platform where people can post racist comments"

There was abundance of both, AFAIK, long before Musk

Remember when Dorsey tweeted nazi propaganda and then said his account was compromised? (which if true it means at Twitter they don't know what they are doing, if false, well...)

Remember when journalists wrote articles titled "Twitter is a Nazi haven for the same reason its CEO claims no bias" because Dorsey never actually distanced himself from the worst of the worst the platform hosted? Fearing he would be labeled as "too liberal"?

Remember when he started spamming crypto-bro propaganda?

Remember when a spy from Suadi crown worked at Twitter helping to uncover activists using the so called "free" platform and after he was discovered and reported to authorities, Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal bought 4.61% of Twitter shares?

Did the situation got better with more and more employees or it just revolved around banning prominent accounts? (not that I necessarily disagree with the reasons behind it, but if that is the best solution they've found, after years of fine tuning, they could have done it before with much less people involved)

> Or do they have to earn money without getting sued for being used to spread CSAM and being a platform for harassment?

it's easily provable that the 7,500 employees did not improve things on that front.

> IT people are really good at ignoring everything but the tech stack

that's a really odd proposition.

Looks to me that Twitter was in bad shape already, despite thousands of non tech employees, Facebook it's in no good shape either, despite tens of thousands of them, basically the only thing still working as intended in those companies is the tech stack.

I guess the real question you're asking is "why non IT people are so bad at doing their job"?

Not my opinion though, I never said IT over other departments, I simply said nobody is able to explain what makes WhatsApp so special that a hundred people can run it while Twitter requires 75 times that and still doesn't work as well.
I don't think the analogy holds in the same way. To me, the bus factor represents how many people you can lose for an extended period of time before there are no subject matter experts left for a particular topic. If you've got 8 people on the team, but only 2 of them know how to do a particular thing, the bus factor is 2.

It's not about having enough people to do the work even if someone quits, it's about having enough people that know how to do something that we aren't losing chunks of knowledge if someone quits (or dies, or gets fired, or gets sick, or etc).

It doesn't make sense to me to treat people as part of a conduit bus that are interchangeable as long as there are enough people.
I think it's pretty clear from the comments that the hackernewses are simply assigning zero value to the fish. Which ironically aligns them with the big wealthy interests of decades long past: the rich farmers who advocated for building these dams.
If anything, I would say that geometric algebra (with its vector division) confuses the group/torsor situation even more since they're both part of the same algebra.
> but what if we could recover from this situation instead? Windows automatically resizes the swap file when it’s almost full, increasing the amount of commit space available. Could we use this to our advantage?

I expect followup by some annoyed blogger that notices swap file ate his system partition and he spent whole day debugging the reason of that...
> It's a hash of everything that goes into a commit, including the commit message

... and, very notably, the hash of the parent commit. That is also part of the commit, which means that changing a parent commit would also imply changing the hashes of all later commits. This is sort of the whole point of git/version control.
Do we need longer-term solutions for mobile phones in secondary schools?
> Or is your workflow a combination of rebases and merges? Continual rebasing of the feature branch onto `main` and then a final merge commit when it's ready to go?

Yes. You don't usually need "continual" rebasing, most commonly just once just before merging.

In fact a good merge tool can do it for you (and refuse to merge if there are conflicts when rebasing).
For those hearing of this game for the first time and think it sounds fun. Be warned, it is considered to be a game that will end friendships that have lasted for years, and monopoly is considered to be a game that causes less bad feelings.

An AI may be able to speak like a person but will never be able to hang onto that long burning simmering hatred from when Brad didn't support my army and instead flipped on me by supporting the f**ing Ottomans instead. I hope you choke on a cheesy pretzel Brad.
Thanks for this. I remember using MVTs on HTML Canvas with Leaflet via plugin way back in 2017.[1] It wasn't perfect, but browser rendering has definitely been the bigger issue than anything with Leaflet.

[1]: https://github.com/SpatialServer/Leaflet.MapboxVectorTile
Anybody got a quick way off this planet?
That's some serious Pikchr-Fu! Nice that you kept the diagrams clickable to see the code.
I'm not saying they're bloat. They're a tradeoff between cost (man hours of work) and lives. They've increased the cost of small planes tenfold but have saved tens of thousands of lives.
Ours is a voice-driven music player for our kids. They love it. We have a YouTube Premium subscription just because of the Nest Minis we have in every room. Sometimes we ask it "What's the animal of the day?" or "Tell a story" or "What year was Abraham Lincoln born?" but mostly the Nest Hub Maxes we have are just photo slideshows, which we love, and sometimes we ask "What's the weather?"

That set of functionality alone makes them well worth the money for us.
If Firefox was selling a physical product in a retail store, they would be able to watch you walk around the store on CCTV, see you avoided an aisle because there is a polar bear lurking, and then remove the polar bear.

But since the product is digital they just have to give it away blind? Never knowing if people even use the features or not?
I generally agree, though it occurred to me that the fact it is now a cultural joke may make you want to know what's behind it, making it a second-order click bait.
I think one of the main reason overcommit is a thing on Linux (certainly one of the things one runs into if one turns it off) is dealing with the weirdness of fork()/exec(). For a moment there in between the two calls you _technically_ have double the RSS allocated - so spawning processes with fork()/exec() from a process with very large RSS is dicey if you don't want to technically overcommit the memory. Since 99.9% of the time very little of that memory is touched/COW'd before the exec() letting it overcommit rather than dying when a 4GB process tries to spawn a new child just because you don't have another spare 4GB of ram sitting around "just in case" is seen as a reasonable tradeoff.

(Modulo vfork() and spawn() of course which are different and arguably better solutions to this issue.)
TIL about the "secrets" module. I have typically used os.urandom() when I needed secure random.
It asks you after every crash if you want to send the report back or not.
French news state 10k+ excess deaths attributed to three separate heatwaves in 2022

https://www.francetvinfo.fr/meteo/canicule/l-ete-2022-a-conn...

Ad that to the 10m individual houses at risk due to soil contraction/expansion of soil rich soil during drought/humid cycles: https://www.ouest-france.fr/meteo/secheresse/secheresse-une-...
> I find that most cloud providers really earn their money from transit/bandwidth costs, whilst oversubscribing their compute resources to then sell them at a discount - does this not make the WireGuard proxying prohibitively expensive?

Oh, my VPSes don't have data transfer costs as a dynamic component (Time4VPS, linked above). I just pay a fixed fee for a given amount of bandwidth and if I exceed it, then the speed is reduced for that VPS until the end of the month.

Here's the relevant bit from their FAQ:

> We reduce your VPS server’s port speed 10 times until the new month starts. No worries, we won’t charge any extra fees or suspend your services.

That said, they're definitely not the only platform that does something similar, many other VPS providers also have certain amount of data transfer included, Hetzner and Contabo included.

I actually have to say that Hetzner is perhaps the best billing wise, because if you just need a VPS for an hour or something, you can also order it for that amount of time, instead of a full month like with many other providers.

Either way, in my case I don't need to worry about the bandwidth too much, because nothing that I want to expose publicly is that popular, at least from my homelab nodes - mostly test environments and such to show to friends/colleagues and so on. Most of the stuff that can generate a bit more traffic (for example, my blog) I host in the data center that gives me all my other VPSes as well, just to not overwhelm my residential connection.
"Tri-state area" is more succinct than "New York City Metropolitan Area" and more people will understand it than the "Mid-Atlantic Region" (which is also physically a slightly different region).
Doom has 2D BSP trees, it's the same technique in any number of dimensions.
yeah i think that's a perfectly reasonable view to have. If the job changes to something other than what you signed up for and you're unhappy then I feel like you have an obligation to yourself to find something else.
> If the swap were allocated to the whole HD that wasn't used for actual files, then this hack wouldn't work.

Then the hack wouldn't be neccesary as they'd have far more committed space to waste
But the thing it does (fill out a fixed sized buffer without caring about NUL-termination) is not at all what you'd want from a safety feature.

If you look at this function assuming it's a safety feature, that's a huge surprise, and indeed if you were skimming you might miss what it does because (in the context of "it's a safety feature") this is an insane choice. "Why would you do that?". Well, because it's not a safety feature.

The perf cost isn't what you'd expect from a safety feature either. Suppose we have a 1MB buffer, and we strncpy "THIS" into it using n = 1024. That's just four bytes right? Nope. strncpy() will write "THIS" and then 1020 zero bytes.
This was covered quite adequately by Fred Brooks in The Mythical Man-Month published 1975
I have several college friends (developers) that ended up at twitter. Some of them loved it, some of them hated it, one universal thing I pretty much heard from all of them is that they typically did actual work 15-20 hours week.

Now overall I wouldn't say this is unusual in tech. I know plenty of people at other major tech companies, including other FAANGs, that say the exact same thing. But just because its appears to be a industry wide issue does not make it okay. It seems to me like that this would signify bloat. You only have enough work for your developers to be working half time.

We aren't even getting into the whole rest and vest. That has been discussed here many times:
https://www.google.com/search?q=rest+and+vesters+paid+for+no...
November 2022 Progress Report
The irony of your horse analogy is that a horse is more general purpose than a car. A horse can travel along train tracks, roads, sidewalks, and hiking trails.
A slight tangent, but there was an interesting experiment by Russia in the 1990s that involved solar reflectors on satellites to shine more light on the Earth. See Znamya (satellite): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Znamya_(satellite)
I only played one game, and this is accurate.
Because they’re detrimental to the biome in this case. Every evaluation will be different, each with nuance.

EDIT: I think, importantly, that these decisions should require the replacement of generation capacity lost with clean generation and storage as part of the cost benefit analysis.
I definitely walk a fine line of wanting people to know how much I value them and how valuable they are to the business as a whole. But, the harsh truth is, every single one of us is replaceable. I've just seen that play out too many times in my career. People with all kinds of domain tribal knowledge walk out the door. Everyone holds their breath as if it'll be the end. And a month or so later, we're still afloat. (I still hate to see good people leave)
> It could almost be useful.

I'm still pondering the “almost” ;-).
Reminds me of Pegged from the Microsoft Entertainment Pack.. https://winworldpc.com/product/microsoft-entertainm/1
I refuse to click the headline because of it.
Post-Olympic Depression Haunts the Games' Winners and Losers
SQL has MERGE