skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> But still, you can't compare apples to oranges

right, because WhatsApp is a small company that makes very little money and has virtually no users and it mostly does not work nor scale...

We could all write that in a single weekend, if only we had no family to spend time with.

It's interesting how the prospective shifts when people are told "yeah, that's impressive per se, not very impressive compared to what the others are doing"

It's like discounting Sputnik 1 because the Russians did not employ an army of people selling ads, but just the people necessary to launch a satellite in orbit, which is actually the real achievement.

Anyway, from the news: Nearly 1200 software engineers left Twitter last week

Suddenly the Twitter engineering team sounds not so capable, which clearly is not the truth, the truth is that if you have hundreds of managers, you'll end up with hundreds of small teams competing to boost the ego of the manager, usually wasting thousands of man hours on miniscule returns (if not losses) while those power point slides will help someone else to get promoted for the new project that nobody uses.

Been there, done that, I don't know why a demographic so well versed in the dichotomies of the tech industry such us the users of HN is so baffled by the claim that 2,000 engineers for a single company that does what Twitter does is a complete waste of human potential.

Elon Musk is a person I would never work for and I think he's not even a good entrepreneur, but one thing he does right: he calls the shots and then executes them.

He said he would fire people and he did, many helped him by leaving on their own, which left Musk with the responsibility of proving he was right.

If Twitter will still be up and running in a year time, we can be sure that there were 1,200 engineer too many working there.

because, honestly, who really believes that the "influencers" will actually leave for the fediverse, where they'll have to work hard and compete with mere mortals, while they could keep cashing from advertisers to promote shit to their already established audience?

nobody believes that.

Also because the fact that Twitter will sell less ads in the next future doesn't mean that advertisers won't spend that money on Twitter, they will simply not pay Twitter, but the Twitter users. For them it's exactly the same thing, for Twitter celebrities it's a giant opportunity.
Let's implement Stripe webhook signatures in Golang
1) tech companies should not be Doctors. Apple is not a doctor.
2) there are additional privacy protections around medical uses, for these reasons.
Could be time zones. I recall reading an article about Mechanical Turk that suggested the highest-paying tasks get done the quickest. I wonder if those are often posted on US hours, leaving lower paid tasks for Indian daylight hours.
> Apple is basically loopholing all the shitty ad-tech engagement surveillance bs that plagues the rest of the industry

That's a pretty extreme description of what's happening here. I agree that they should not be doing this, and that App Store analytics should be opt-in like the rest of the device analytics, however, they are not correlating your unique identifier with other web properties — i.e. when you visit through Safari. I also doubt they are selling that data to third parties, allowing ads to target you on the basis of it, or using it to build a profile against other application analytics.

In fact, it seems like the article says: they do no clever stuff with it whatsoever. They should remove it in a future update
Was it? The author claims that it had previously been explored and found not to be worth it.

That could be puffery of course. But I have worked in several fields. A big advantage I bring is that I have an outsider's perspective and experience from a different domain ("Hey, why don't we try it this way?"). But a very big disadvantage is that when exploring something I find out that people often have thought of it and don't do things that way for good reason. For me that means I look before I speak.

A lot of the bomb-throwing suggestions of crypto revolutionaries is similar, and I have no reason to believe SBF was any different. In fact there's good reason to believe that SBF and his colleagues lacked adequate perspective, from their statements, their actions in retrospect, and frankly because of his MIT background. I'm also an MIT grad and was also an arrogant know-it-all into my late 20s (at least!) and am simply lucky that I got a few things right along the way so people were still talking to me by the time I grew up.
> This is a vacuous non-sequitur

In finance, liquidity _is_ adoption. They’re the same thing.
> The ability for those guys to skirt any serious investigation or attention is truly magical.

>yet will still be a "how could we have known?!" Situation once it collapses (i.e. wealth transfer complete)

"Tether is a scam" accusations are well known and has been around for years. As a quick reference, the "Bitfinexed" account (on twitter) has been around since 2017. It's certainly not comparable to FTX which seemingly imploded out of nowhere.
I've found that to be absolutely not the case, at least for me. If the job is super disorganized, boring, stresful for stupid reasons or just plain not interesting for me, no amount of money will make me engaged or excited. I've been in such jobs which paid a lot of money (for me) and the result was golden handcuffs - I didn't want to lose the money, so I was basically pretending to be way more engaged than I really was. I suspect majority of FAANG employees are like that - the money's just way too good to not put up a charade and keep milking the cow.
That's fair. I'm still not sure who would be an example of a good right-wing comic, though. Most of what I’ve seen involved material that’s repetitive (how many by now have delivered a variant of the One Conservative Joke - “I identify as an attack helicopter”?) and was designed to make the viewer validated in their right-wing beliefs at the expense of, say, some clueless “libtard” rather than exploring the form at all (ie it’s to make you “clap”).

I dunno, I saw someone complaining about left-wing comedians was curious to hear who might be a right-wing comic.
Two Estonians arrested for running $575M crypto Ponzi scheme
This is absolutely genius. Would be nice to upstream it and make it fast. I would start using it.
As to not repeat the same argument: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33704199
> advertiser-friendliness is a sort of low-resolution but approximate passable democratic mechanism for marking boundaries of civilized discourse

This reminds me that progressives have historically always supported corporations as complex hierarchies, scientific enterprises, run (ideally) by “experts.”
This was envisioned in several movies but my favorite example was Oblivion [1]. The tech must state their name and tech number clone number but I can imagine where this could go horribly wrong if one can't speak for some reason. Curious if drone AI developers will factor in potential failure scenarios rather than being reactive and just review logs to see why their drone took out a friendly.

Some day humans will not be in the loop because people will do what people can do.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX4d4CvdZLA
Unfortunately, git rebase has a very very annoying limitation that git merge doesn't. If you have a branch with, say, masterX + 10 commits, and commit 1 from your branch is in conflict with masterX+1, then when you rebase your branch onto masterX+1, you will have to resolve the conflict 10 times (assuming all 10 commits happen in the same area that had the original conflict). If instead you merge masterX+1 onto your branch, you will only have to resolve the conflict once.

Even though I much prefer a linear history, losing 1h or more to the tedious work of re-resolving the same conflict over and over is not worth it, in my opinion.
Sounds like you're getting tablet layout on mobile?
I'd very much like to see someone coming up with nice syntax for hierarchical finite state machines and entity components systems just like people came up with nice syntax for queries in the form of linq and nice syntax for html generation in the form of jsx.

Doing these things in vanilla syntax of general purpose programing languages is not exactly great.
Link to get past paywall: https://scribe.rip/@bellmar/all-the-best-engineering-advice-...
Elevated water is very good energy storage. I suspect they have no viable energy storage plan to replace it.
> Our biggest site (about dozen million users, a bunch of services and caching underneath, few gbits of traffic) took zero actual maintenance for 2022, "it just works", any job was implementing new stuff. It took some time to get to that state but once you do aside from hardware failures it "runs itself"

Nobody is adding changes that blows out the DB? or add some inefficient code that burns CPU much faster?
So anyone should simply be allowed to drive buses and trains without proper training, if they feel like it? Why not expand that to cars, while we're at it? Safety regulations are written in blood.
feel free to submit a PR to make comparisons against tools on text-to-diagram.com, happy to include you Billy!
Two steps forward one step back. So it goes.
> The failure there isn't journalistic,

It absolutely is a media failure. It exposed how corrupt some outlets are, in insidious ways. The media built a positive image of SBF and FTX without ever doing serious investigative job because he was giving to the right people... and still, when FTX scam scramble, instead of apologizing the same media continued to be lenient toward the fraudster trying to spin the scammer as some idealist who just made bad bets, when he was already deep into his scam.

> Journalists don't have the privilege of looking deeply inside books and how company conducts it's business, but auditors have.

Many people in Crypto and finance had already figured out FTX business model was some sort of scam, the media and their glowing reviews of SBF weren't interested in hearing them, because SBF was being too generous about donations...
Do you also have a source showing that the number of engineers required scales linearly with number of users?
I love this. Programming is so much fun. Even when my work means I don't program for work any more (which inevitably happens) I continue to do so recreationally.

I'm really sad for people who chose the field just for the money and are miserable about programming. I hope it works out for them, but that's no way to live.
Would love to read about experiences actually using this (I mean Mycroft in general) — good, bad, or otherwise.

Also, though: why don't we have "text assistants"? Seems to me the process of deciphering spoken text is (or should be) entirely orthogonal to performing the actual task — changing the lighting, cranking up the AC/heat, arming the security perimeter, or whatever.

I think the reason is that voice recognition is hard and so far only the "BIGASS TECH!!!" corporations have been able to make it "mom or granny ready" — and they have no incentive to do that for free and let us make our own mash ups. They want to wall us into their ecosystems.

So from that standpoint, this looks pretty cool to me — even if the voice recognition isn't as good as the big three.

OTOH, to rebut my own point: I got the new Apple Watch Ultra and I noticed that I can map the side button to a "shortcut" (the Apple term for a script you create yourself to automate something) that just transcribes whatever I say, and sends it as text over SSH to any host I want. On my local LAN, the delivery time is well under 1000ms.

So that's getting pretty close to being able to use Siri as a generic voice recognizer, and then piping the input into whatever arbitrary/homebrew system I want.

To do it purely with voice though you have to be like "Hey Siri, do the funky chicken" (after naming the shortcut "do the funky chicken"). And then say the actual command phrase you want your home automation to do.
Yes. It reliably responds to the wakeword ("hey Mycroft") from men, and only responds about 50% of the time to women.

When my sister visits, it almost never responded to her for example.

And in my personal experience, I used to have a very deep voice and it always responded to me. I decided I would rather have a more androgynous voice and did some voice training to accomplish that and use a pretty neutral pitch. Now it only responds to my normal voice about 50% of the time, so I intentionally drop my voice an octave whenever I speak to it.

But somehow it's not just about pitch either. I have friends who are trans men, and speak in a deep voice but they still have trouble getting Mycroft to respond.
Yeah this entire thing is just people overreacting on Blind and then that getting picked up by garbage forbes contributors.

There's been a performance review system forever. There's been expected distributions across large groups forever. The only two things that are new are

1. The system has a new name

2. There is a new bucket for "below expectations but not so far below that it crushes your compensation for next year"

That's it.

Nobody knows if Google will lay people off. But this game of telephone rumors is a mess.
And you're letting your simplistic take on democratic government being "nice" color your own thinking.

Canadian banks and regulators looking into money laundering might be reasonable when carefully permitted by tried legal procedure. A bunch of freely donated money for a peaceful protest of a type with lots of basic precedent being suddenly frozen for blatantly political reasons by pressure from the country's leader is not the same thing. Quite the opposite, it's a small bit of third world tinpot, would-be authoritarianism that has no place in the legal proceedings of a highly developed country like Canada.
>"if there is smoke, there's fire

I want you to take that sentence and throw it away and instead have a mental paradigm shift.

"Where there is fuel there is risk".

One day when you have a lot of time look up the USCSB (United States Chemical Saftey Board) channel on youtube and look at the decade of very well done videos on deadly industrial disasters they have done. People will ignore risk for years accepting the danger because it's "always been that way", they will turn off alarms because they are annoying, they will bypass safety controls because they slow the task down.

I don't care how dangerous FB/Google/whoever is, Apple is its on seperate factory capable of blowing up in it's own spectacular fashion, and much like a gasoline refinery they are building up a massive amount of fuel that is at risk of a spark.
Oh we use distributed day in and day out for everything. Once you start battling censorship you’ll get it.
I am glad to pay for software, but I want it to be free as in freedom: I insist on being able to modify, fix, extend and share it. So all of my tools I rely on are AGPL, GPL or BSD-licensed.
And can you switch it on when you need to cover the peak of electricity consumption like with a dam? No. You need a gas turbine.
No, it really isn't. It is perfectly normalizable.

Every twitterer is a newsletter. Most hardly ever tweet and sporadically at that.
The followers are subscribers. They hardly even see most tweets they subscribe to as the whole thing is quite ephemeral. Same as never reading all your emails (very few people are inbox zero freaks).

The timelines are just that, an email inbox. It is very soft "real-time" at best.

Tweets older than 48 hours can just be archived to a blob store and served as a static website. Most people consume it as such, logged out and from the browser.

You think brainyquote.com is hard to scale? Think of twitter.com as unbrainyquote.com.

All the other froufrou built on top of it is more complicated but 2007 style twitter is dead simple. That is its (completely accidental) genius.

There is no shortage of systems that are x10-100 times more "web scale".
>The nuance is in the value that Google Maps brings: expertise, scalability, and proprietary map data.

note that this proprietary map data may be completely beating OSM or being vastly inferior, depending on your use case
> I want the 'merge' function completely deprecated. I simply don't trust it anymore.

Merge is perfectly fine and it is the only way to synchronize repositories without changing the history, which is very important for a decentralized system. It certainly has the potential to make a mess if used improperly, but so do rebase, cherry-pick, and basically every other command.

> If you use merge to sync two branches continously, you completely lose track of what changes were done on the branch and which where done on the mainline.

If you do things correctly, that is by making sure that when you merge changes from a feature branch into the mainline, the mainline is always the first parent, you shouldn't have any problem. Git is designed this way, so normally, you have to go out of your way to mess things up. If did it like that and you don't want to see the other branch commits, git-log has the --first-parent option.
Same here.

Your description perfectly matches my experience.
Might be by using that hashcrash tool.
Commit once read forever
> make money holding ETH, by staking it

Where to start with that. Sure yeah its part of the protocol, but its essentially baking in fiat like inflation.

not only that but its deliberately reducing liquidity, and makes you rely on large exchanges that have bigger stakes.

This basically undermines the point of crypto which is a secure way to quickly exchange value in a peer to peer way.
> Wireguard never had, and probably will not have, a serious vulnerability (one allowing bypassing a tunnel).

True, but even the bare minimum WireGuard VPN still has a lot of stuff other than WireGuard. There's going to be a configuration protocol, software to create a tunnel device on the system, a management protocol, software updates, a UI, identity management or some kind of login/auth system, etc.
> To survive as society, we need lots of trees growing as fast as possible to fixate CO2 from the air and clean our mess.

Unless you're going to then burry all the wood that won't come close to enough. The mass of carbon in oil and in the air is far too much to make up with tree planting.

Also, society can definitely survive a couple of degrees of heating. Though it might not be that pleasant for many.
Don’t download Qatar World Cup apps, EU data authorities warn
This (plush toy and projector) has “feel good” all over it :)
Google has split voting and non-voting shares. Larry and Sergey have majority control over the company.
Great! I was looking forward to this as a nice-looking alternative to Mermaid etc. Thanks for open-sourcing your core! I really like the cheat sheet:
https://github.com/terrastruct/d2/blob/master/docs/assets/ch...
Lost 8th century Japanese medical text by Buddhist monk has been found
Sure, many namespace collisions for D2 exit in the universe of possible meanings for the acronym, but in a computer context, and whose headline is “now open source”, it’s reasonable, expected even perhaps, to assume Diablo 2.

Also, and I may be showing my age here, who refers to Destiny 2 as D2 without any context?
Rents in Singapore increased a lot lately, so probably not anymore.
But your ORM example could be considered a DSL in itself, so it doesn't really work that well. ORMs can be implemented in various ways too, as a syntactically looking different DSL or as something like objects and method calls or whatever the language already provides.

Regexes can be abstracted from exactly by making a more readable DSL.

Config files and the stuff accepted therein are small languages as well.

What are the alternatives to making little languages?
Shell languages are a very good example, because they have been replaced mostly by bigger languages. First by perl, then by python.

Now a day, most people don't write bash if it must be more than a few lines: it fits niche perfectly, like horse ridding.

But you are not going to do website with bash anymore, server swarm deployment with powershell or build your encoding pipeline in fish. Tasks that we used to do using those small languages, until we found out that we prefer a car to do shopping.
SpaceX has disrupted the world with technology 50 years ahead of its time due to unprecedented organizational leadership and teamwork.
Perlis was a research scientist so had freedom not everybody does.

But I have worked with people in other fields (mechanical engineering, biology, medicinal chemistry, etc) who took similar delight in their field, and it was infectious.

One can design a bridge and still have room for whimsy.
Fixed point, not floating point. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed-point_arithmetic
It will become free in time. We are amidst an adjustment. The old way, buy our software. The new way, buy our cloud services.
That's why there are sculptors and there are mechanical engineers. And for the engineers, the engineering part of it is what makes it fun.
Bloom’s 2 Sigma problem revealed that one-on-one mastery learning leads to significantly better outcomes than group instruction.

High-quality adaptive learning apps can generate similar results.
> without having to do marketing, sales

May be some open-source software becomes notable without any marketing or sales, but I constantly see a lot of very conscious effort by FOSS maintainers to popularise their work. They go to meetups, do talks, post on twitter and HN. And yet the most that majority of them can hope for is getting a boost to their resume and being hired as a distinguished staff/principal-level engineer somewhere because of their open-source clout.
Revenue is not the whole picture either, or growth rate.

If it is all loss making or tiny low single digit profit margin, then a $10B loss is still a $10B loss.
Most of what Lua offers will not be a requirement for what the ad ops team needs to create and maintain campaigns and there will be specific requirements that are not easily expressed in Lua.
Who has heard it? The rumors presented in the article are about the renaming of the performance review system, not actual evidence or even rumoring of layoffs.

This system was announced in like March. Nothing about it has changed since then.
> Though I can't help but to wonder why it wouldn't be possible to decrease the maximum level of detail that the map files contain, like the levels that you can zoom in or out

Note that processing to reduce accuracy will require even more resources and what someone wants to preserve or drop depends on person.

And in the end - at least sometimes you will want to zoom in to the highest detail when using map data.
What's bad about searching for money?
> it'll end up being used as a worldwide centralized monorepo run by Microsoft, and no one will ever use any of that distributed stuff.

And I thought I use git in a decentralized fashion all the time … at least I don't need to connect to any other machine when committing, switching branches, merging, rebasing, etc. And my colleagues can do the same without any network connection at the same time.

Also, while it has the biggest brand recognition, not everyone is using GitHub for all their repositories, are they?
In my mind the issue is less “is it conceivable that a small team can run a bare bones version of the Twitter app with hundreds of millions of users” and more “can a small team manage a big distributed system that was designed to be managed by many different teams, with no handoff period”.
You can do it - but for the big dams it’s too long/tall.

Arguably you could instead of damming a river divert a portion of it upstream into a new valley for a lake, leaving the old river alone.