skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>The only reason people work is literally for money…

Well, yes, but also that's super reductive.

The primary reason people work is literally for money. The specific _place_ people work is for things that interest them, engage them, challenge them, provide a path for continued growth in their career, or contribute to a common good they believe in.

And I would argue that it's not necessarily a given that people will be "more engaged and more excited about their work if they were paid more," but instead, may be willing to stick around in an unengaging, unexciting environment _longer_ when they're paid more.
I guess I am just a classic HN reader, so I wonder why Twitter needed so many people.

Also, I find it pretty interesting how this is playing out so far.

I'm starting to think that Mr. Enron Musk is going to pull this off.
Catastrophe tourism. Also, contrary to Elon’s shitty graph with cut off y-axis (can we stop doing that?), that’s like a 1% change around a major American event.
Any voice assistant should be a feature and not an independent product. I've never used Alexa but I use Siri daily for exactly two things - turning on/off my lights when I get home/leave and checking the weather. If Siri at any points tried to sell or advertise me anything I would simply stop using it. The problem with voice assistants is that they are too dependent on other devices for people to pay more money for them. Additionally, if you own a smartphone you already own one therefore you don't need to spend money on it at all.
I'm working but feel the same way. I'm really hoping I can find good in person team to work with but it feels impossible.
Name one app that would be killer.
So, lazy developers using loopback device instead of platform-specific named pipes on windows.
You know, I think Musk is an ass, and would never work for him, but don't you think that someone who has managed to launch and then run many successful and complex technology projects might actually know a thing or two about launching and running simpler technology projects?

And if you're going to claim that his successes have been due to the people surrounding him who actually know what they are doing, then all that tells me is that you are acknowledging that he knows how to surround himself with people who know what they are doing.

We're not fans (I'm certainly not), but it takes a special kind of mind to look at Musk's track record of successes and conclude that his latest project is doomed.
Welp, this ate my time. Fun. Cool.
Any sort of cached object expiring might bring the servers down. Who knows when the Death TTL will come?
Chinese developers are famous for making apps serving 1.4 billion people, with at most 1/3 salary of US, and the willingness to do 996 a whole year around.

I would be surprised that no company in the west take advanced of that.
What if I can't afford 2 new organs or hair plugs tho
Amiga retro computing. Esp those running Unix (NetBSD) on old modified Amiga 1200s.
World's Best Hospitals 2022
So that’s why it happened. I’d heard about the event but not the reason so I always assumed it had been some sort of contamination, or related to wine preservation. But no it was straight up devs bypass?
May I request any and all Qatar world cup -related poster first check out John Oliver's take about that evil spawn of corruption and climate change?
After that, you won't want to post about that QWC!
All recent data center switches I've seen advertise PTP; maybe it doesn't work when you turn it on though. Meta makes their own switches so they can enable and debug the software.
Twitter used to experience significant downtime compared to all other major platforms and one of the reason was its lack of redundancies across everything. Headcount is one such thing and it takes manpower to automate infrastructures as discussed in the post.

Sure, you can run the platform with 1/10 headcount with significantly degraded user experiences (say ~98%). This is not a problem for startups but people usually have higher expectations for established companies. As always, the last 2% is a hard problem and business doesn't really want to deal with a such unreliable platform. You wanna onboard big advertisers which potentially spend $100M ARR? Then you need to assign a dedicated account manager to handle all customer escalations. PMs then triage and plan their feature requests and later engineers implement it. Which all adds up.

And they also uses your competitor's product, like Google, FB, TikTok etc etc... Twitter is a severely underdog here, so you need to support at least a minimal, essential subset of features in those products to convince them to spend their money on Twitter. That alone takes hundreds of engineers, data scientists and PM thanks to modern ad serving stacks with massive complexity.

Yeah, it ultimately boils down into a simple fact that it's really hard to take other folk's money. You need to first earn trust from them. They want to see if your product is capable of following a modern standard of digital ad serving for now and foreseeable futures. Twitter has spent lots of time for earning trusts and the original post is one evidence of such efforts. And this usually needs more man power. You might be able to do that in a more efficient manner, but I don't think that's as simple as firing 75% of your entire headcount.
> That's only if you have a single through ticket for your whole journey, which is often not possible to buy.

If you don't purchase single through ticket for air travel, you aren't protected if you misconnect either!
> Keep in mind that everyone at google passed one of the hardest technical screens on the planet.

Nope.
But what is the downside to sharing the code in an incomplete state, in case the folks working on emulation cease their work? The world is full of projects that never get "finished."

That's an honest question, not a rhetorical one.
If they're reportedly selling the devices at cost, how could they possibly be losing $10B on Alexa? That would imply $10B spent on Alexa R&D and non-manufacturing costs, which seems like .... a lot.

And if it's "server costs for processing requests", then how come Google / Apple aren't losing $Bs on their VA systems? (Also, if no one is using Alexa then request processing costs would be low; if everyone is using Alexa then it seems there would be some return in higher sales.)
This is really wonderful! I don’t really know much about this, but Nairobi is one of the main cities in China’s Belt and Road initiative to bring Chinese goods in to Africa. This means Nairobi could become an appealing place to do manufacturing in Africa. And Raspberry Pi is doing it! Big respect to them for taking this step.

I also learned about a new manufacturing facility in Nairobi thanks to this. There’s a large manufacturing park where they are making these boards. I happen to be designing an open source solar powered farming robot and we hope to help people start up manufacturing all over the world. This looks like it will be a great place for us to help start production of our machines in Nairobi!
Organizer here!

This talk will be published in a few days, fully-annotated at the Conference Guide [0] where you can download presentations for free. Sign up for the newsletter [1] to stay up-to-date (we're indie and the extra eyeballs help.)

Anyhow, the other comments linked the raw streams already :)

[0] https://guide.handmade-seattle.com

[1] https://handmade-seattle.com/newsletter
Solaris, maybe.
I have a Google Home, and the only things I ask it to do are to turn on my TV when I’ve lost the remote, play music on my HiFi via a Chromecast Audio (which they don’t sell anymore) and play different radio stations.
You're assuming they didn't just fire 50% of people at random. It's not like they had a lot of time to think about whom to let go.

It also seems like a lot of the layoffs were achieved by offering everyone the severence of they left.

Assuming only people on visad stayed, I wonder if that skews more or less competent.
It is. I don't think I've ever used voice commands in public.
Welcome to America - compete or starve.
Adding a crypto hash allows to check that the hashed value was not changed, because finding another value with the same hash is hard, by definition of a crypto hash.

But here the problem is not forging an ID, it's guessing an ID, and hashing does not widen the search space, does not increase randomness.
> These qualified people thought at the time it was a good idea to get up to 7.5k people. How were they all wrong?

Come on, just look at the tech industry. When rates were low and stock prices kept going up, "headcount" was used as an indicator of future growth. Grow headcount, investors are happy. After all, the promise of tech stocks was "growth". Usually you're not looking to cut costs until you think growth is over. Of course, Twitter was a dog and did nothing useful for years, no innovation, no new products, nothing. But tech investors definitely saw rising headcount as a good thing...
They may very well be able to find their own 0-day exploits, which are far more likely to even exist than a "crack a crypto algorithm" method (which often just doesn't exist).
Créments tend to be much sweeter than Champagne, hardly comparable, not like I enjoy either.
To me, Champagne is basically a nostalgic drink at this stage.
> Not for you, because you want to use a turnkey solution, and you don't want to pay for it (instead relying on whatever model they have where you are the product, I guess?). But if you use IRC to talk to me, I can run my own bouncer for free, and I can run the client I want. I can even write my bouncer and my client, and still talk to you.

> That's infinitely more open than Discord. It's just that you don't care about others.

I care a bit about whether you can run your bouncer. But I also care about whether non-technical people can talk to me without an unreasonable level of effort. Expecting everyone else to pay extra for a worse experience so that you can use it the way you want seems pretty entitled.
The problem with having a lot of money sloshing around is that you can no longer say “no”. You estimate a new feature will take your team a year. But someone wants it in 6 months. “Why aren’t you hiring to meet the deadline?”
Rereading I am guessing you're merely pointing out that the comment regarding shortening the length is untrue. If you already understand the entropy issue here, please treat my "you"s as royal you's.

You have a 128 bit value. That's 128 binary digits. Each digit can be zero or one. That means you have 2^128 possible distinct values. (Ignoring the fixed bits in UUIDs since it's not important for sake of this argument.)

Now you use a one-way cryptographic hash on top, like sha256. This will return a specific hash for any given input. It is always the same for a specific given input, and it is nearly always distinct. The output that a hash has may have more bits, but the number of distinct values can't increase; it can only ever decrease. That's because you could only ever give it 2^128 different values. How could it ever return more outputs if each input corresponds to one output?

To make it more clear, let's say you have a database where you want to store a customer's zip code so you can use it as some kind of validation later on to ensure it matches, but you don't want to store it in plaintext, so you hash it. The hash is 160 bits. Secure, right? Wrong. There are less than 50,000 zip codes. It would be trivial to calculate the hash of every single one and use it as a simple hashmaps from hashed value to plaintext.

You may be thinking this is impractical for an input domain as large as 2^128, but realistically it only adds a slight roadblock. Knowing the only valid values will be hashed UUIDs, instead of picking 160 random bits, you'd be much better off picking a random UUID, hashing it, and trying that for each attempt.
UUID, as the name implies, is used for identifiers - You know this.

These use-cases you're implying seem to be the real problem.
> Yes, I've heard it all before. People who were drawn in to the baseless Russiagate conspiracy theory

As you can read in the Republican-written Senate Intelligence Committee report, everything about Russiagate did in fact happen and it was 100% real. (except for the Steele dossier/pee tape)

This essentially comes down to Trump realizing that if you say all your crimes in public, nobody will think it's a crime and it won't be reported as one, because you don't "seem like you have something to hide".
I wouldn’t be surprised. There were definitely a few bugs. I think ppl unhappy with Elon overplayed things though and now it will look silly.

Our expectations were anchored by the idea that Twitter would cease to exist. So very real problems like 2FA going down look trivial compared to the former.
That depends on Musk’s goals. If his goal is to make money to pay off the massive amount of debt he gained as part of buying twitter, (as the attempted quick roll out of twitter blue would indicate), then yes he probably needs to care about what advertisers think. If he just wanted to leverage his position as one of the richest men in the world to ensure that twitter was a haven for free speech and screw the profitability, then no he wouldn’t need to be guided by advertisers. He probably can’t both want immediate returns on his investment and to quickly rock the boat though.
People want voice control because they see it in movies and TV.

But what they forget that the only reason movies and TV have it in the first place is because that way the audience hears what the character wants!

It's not because it's actually a better interface - because it's not!

Same with glass interfaces with no buttons - they make them because they are cheaper, not because it's better. But they look really cool, so people start to think they are actually better.

I'm sure there are tons more examples of things people think are done because they are better, but are actually done to save money or for some unrelated reason.

Maybe shoelaces that are laced inside-out. In the box they want the ends to point inward, but when you wear them you are supposed to relace them so they end up pointing outward.
outages are not usually rot.
Nobody understands computers in their entirety but someone understands each part individually. It's just division of labor in action. And it seems to work. Software hasn't really gotten any slower in the last few years, and SSDs made it fast enough again.

Software isn't piplinable because we don't write software to process data as much anymore. We write software to interact with people and the world. The pipeline model doesn't apply, we need things like the if this then that model or extension APIs.

Which, admittedly, we are not great at, if it was up to me a standardized IFTT-like interface would be a core feature on every platform and it would be easy for apps to expose blocks.

I'm pretty happy with most of the software world at the moment, even though I have issues with tech culture and some of what tech is being used for.
Show HN - Looking for beta testers/collaborators for www.bookclub.ai
Hi, I am working on this website, www.bookclub.ai
It help readers find their next book based on their past preferences. It currently has ML-based recommendation system for 'More Like This' and 'Mind-Map' features.

I am looking for a few beta testers or collaborators who want to work on early-stage product development, community building or training AI models to solve real-life Natural Language Processing & Computer Vision problems in the book industry.
Would love to get some critical feedback.
If someone is interested, please reach out to me at 19aditiyadav@gmail.com or +1-206-228-4232.
That's as dumb as saying US has the highest debt among all countries and don't live there. Probably good to pick Somalia because they have low debt
That might be true for you, but way back when, I took a course in programming and thought it was the most fun I'd ever had. Couldn't believe that people wanted to pay me to do it. Spent the next 40 years making a great living. The only jobs I disliked was the ones where there were "glass bowl" bosses and co-workers. Problem solving was always fun. Not saying I didn't enjoy being paid well, but it wasn't the major consideration in whether I wanted to stay in any particular work environment. Here we're talking about the potential for huge schedule and technical pressure and low morale. A whole lot more money wouldn't keep me in those circumstances.
> Old wines cost more because you have to pay for the storage.

And loss. A bottle of wine is not a lug nut, it does not sit nigh imputrescible.
no love for our homie Jamie, Geoffrey?
> Currently I'm running my production and staging servers as two Hetzner instances running docker-compose stacks. But I've heard it's not a good solution since docker-compose can't really create a development environment as a copy of production (I don't know why this is bad.)

What are your concerns? What bad things™ will happen if your production environment goes down for a few minutes, hours, or days? Where do you store your state on the server?

What can kubernetes do that you can't do by hand assuming you are available to do it?

How much do you spend on production vs non production infrastructure?
I thought that name sounded familiar. I had a few Comp Sci papers with Nick about 16 years ago. Small world
I mean, they got an offer for roughly a 10x deal. At that point it was in the best interest of shareholders to sell. Especially that it was yet to turn a profit.

Like, I like my car, but would probably sell it for an order of magnitude its worth.
Gonzalez vs. Google – Amicus Brief of Liberty Justice Center [pdf]
Uhh, you sure about that? Also, what did the Mexican government come from?

Hint: the best kind of Mexican to be, used to be Peninsular.

Also, if you want to deflect from the Spanish, try looking at Guatemala. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemalan_genocide
Right, but those are a lot more practically available. Most rail routes are only available on a single national operator, and there's rarely any "code sharing".
Or they could just charge for costs + profit and let people decide if it’s worth the price. The SV business model is good for small companies to get rapid growth but after that it’s just bad economics
Those are stretches, for sure.
Gorf as cartridge on C4?
> he used his tesla shares as collateral

No he did not. It was initially proposed but there's no margin loan against his TSLA holdings in the final deal. For the debt that Twitter took on in the buyout the collateral is the company itself. There's zero connection to Tesla in the actual financing.

https://www.cnbctv18.com/business/who-is-funding-elon-musk-i...
This is how I know it's not fake: I was fortunate enough to taste very expensive wines repeatedly as a teenager, not understanding their significance. Yeah I thought the whole thing was snobby, but the wine just tasted so good! When I bought mid-tier wine for the first time at age 21, it tasted "hot," like rubbing alcohol. Same with all the others from the grocery store. I still buy it but often leave it sitting for hours before drinking it, even though I haven't tasted any expensive wines in several years. My friends always say I have low standards for living conditions, which maybe I do, but when it comes to wine, seems like I'm permanently spoiled.
> So this explanation would only make sense if the blind tests are also using sipping and the unblinded tests are using drinking.

The blind tests are using small, sipping quantities.

People purchasing soft drinks for at home generally are drinking them.

The article draws a distinction between blind taste-test ("Pepsi Challenge") behavior and consumers' purchasing habits/general preferences.
1/3 the salary may well give you a better life quality in China, though.
Yep, doing it right would've been harder, but Musk was after doing it right now.
Orbiter spaceflight sim - learning orbital mechanics, modifying add-on spacecraft and learning how to program my own.
http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/

NASA flight software source code for Apollo and other spacecraft.
Emulator: https://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/yaAGC.html
Code: https://github.com/virtualagc/virtualagc

Probably the most realistic Space Shuttle simulator ever created (runs in FlightGear).
https://wiki.flightgear.org/Space_Shuttle
Why can't Germany break up with nuclear energy?
The QRT system doesn't work (if a post says it has 200 quote tweets, you can always open it and never see any), but then again, it never did seem to work.

It's still entirely believable the site will go down and remain down for a week or two at any time.
Textbook ad hominem attack. This does not say anything about the point he made or the texts he wrote.
The stories of migrant workers have been part of World Cup for many tournaments. Civil rights has never been a high priority to FIFA, else there would be no country left to choose. The Olympics share the same situation, and apparently, the same level of corruption. Yet we talk about the Olympics.
I wonder how many of those could be run device-local on 2-4 year old smartphone equivalent hardware (so, something you could build today and sell for <$300 as an Echo-equivalent) with some kind of trust-minimized cloud backend (or homekit, etc. integration for local device control).
She mentioned you: https://youtu.be/g-voQsFY6SE

She was assistant to the gender health support board.
This is the result of a propped up economy avoiding recessions at all cost. These large conglomerates are completely out of touch and money has been so cheap they were not really competing for or providing good services.
> you don't run out of disk space (from logs for example)

For a social media / user-generated content application, the macro storage concerns are a lot more important than the micro ones. By this I mean, care more about overall fleet-wide capacity for product DBs and media storage, instead of caring about a single server filling up its disk with logs.

With UGC applications, product data just grows and grows, forever, never shrinking. Even if the app becomes less popular over time, the data set will still keep growing -- just more slowly than before.

Even if your database infrastructure has fully automated sharding, with bare metal hosting you still need to keep doing capacity planning and acquiring new database hardware. If no one is doing this, it's game over, there's simply nowhere to store new tweets (or new photos, or whichever infra tier runs out of hardware first...)

Staffing problems in other eng areas can exacerbate this. For example, if automated bot detection becomes inadequate, bot posting volume goes way up and takes up an increasing amount of storage space.
I spend 10k years falling through a tunnel of knives, screaming, literal hell
I also want to add a #3: the crew that's left is probably on-call 24/7. My thoughts are with the poor souls on that rotation (if your team even still has a "rotation")
The progression of greys is fun. In order:

Black
Dimgrey (hmm)
Grey
Darkgrey (huh, darkgrey is lighter than grey)
Silver (all righty)
Gainsboro (of course)
White

That's 3 out of 7 making sense.
Amazon has been adding that too which makes me want to switch away (I'm already uncomfortable with the security risks of a third party controlled cloud microphone, but it's ok in my kitchen and bedroom where no sensitive audio happens.)
Oh, please, making reasonable good DSL might take a month or even years.
Also wrestling with parser and borrow checker not an easy task for average user.
This is also the kind of thinking that people use for public-key cryptography: it's perfectly possible to guess the private key of any TLS cert, for example, it just takes a very long time with today's computers. Future computers may well guess it very quickly, so should we stop using it?

Cryptography is a moving a target. Any cryptographic method except an OTP used with perfect opsec is brute forceable, and will need to be changed when your threat model changes (for example, when computing speed advances significantly).