skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This might be seen as glib, but this is actually real solid technical advice.

We are machines that require social connections to function. If you want to spend 5 years sprinting and burnout, go ahead and do that, but if you want to build a career and run the career marathon, you really need to build a foundation upon which you can grow.

Spending all of your time on technical pursuits will come at the cost of social pursuits, and that absolutely leads to being burned out and a stalled career.
Probably means Alexa loses $10 billion instead of $9.5 or whatever and has to fire some more people
Not something I'm part of, but something I respect is the car tuning scene. I'm not talking about engine swapping or adding a bigger turbo, but tuning the original hardware electronically through the ECU.

Where I am in Europe diesels are king, and usually people import 2nd or 3rd hand cars from Germany. I'm from the UK originally, but it's kind of funny that I see a couple of magnitudes more BMWs here, which is much poorer country.

Once your engine has done two or three hundred thousand kilometers the original tuning doesn't really work that great, so you probably want to remap it. This is not only to increase performance, it is also done to decrease fuel consumption and burn cleaner (the technical inspection here is very strict about CO) or makes it start easier when cold.

This is done using software that lets you change how much fuel is injected across different RPMs and throttle levels. If you car has an Eco mode, this is how that works. The thing that there are only really 5 manufacturers of diesel engines for cars in Europe: Volkswagen (VW, Seat, Skoda, Audi, Porsche), PSA (Pegeuot, Citreon, Fiat, Opel, Ford), Mercedes (Mercedes, Nissan, Renault), BMW and Volvo; and the way they work under the hood is all pretty similar.

The fuel injection system and control equipment is not developed in house, but made by someone like Bosch, so if you have two engines made by differnet manufacturers but using an ECU from the same supplier, as you can understand there will be similarities.

To be able to tune engines properly you not only need to know how to edit the map, but also all the perculiarities of that particular engine. A lot of it is trial and error and reading Russian forums (where most the scene is developed).

As you can probably guess it's also used to work around emissions control devices, which are usually no longer functional when you're engine has done a few hundred thousand kilometers, and at this point can actually increase fuel consumption and can damage the engine. For some reason manufacturers do not sell replacement parts, so if you want to keep the engine running your only option is to disable it in software and have it physically removed. Because of all this it's common to see 20 year old cars still driving that have done over half a million kilometers.
I love reading this and seeing just how much science, math, and thought has gone into these. Most people driving by just have dunning-kruger and imagine anyone could throw some concrete barriers up and design them. The deeper I go into most things it seems I always find this to be true.
At least Bezos didn’t rename the company to “Alexa”.
That honestly surprises me. Having worked at a small subsidiary of a different big tech giant our costs for the big tech's cloud were charged at cost price at the behest of the accountants.
I like to communicate in Morse Code, copying it in my head, and sending with a manual "Straight" key. I've been doing this for 45 years or so, and have become quite proficient in it.
If there’s no code changes, reliability is greatly increased. Probably 99% of all outages and incidents are from a bad code change.

Within most companies you don’t want to pause innovation.
Taking 20 years to move from 0.4 to 0.4.1 seems like a long long time.
Strawmen, whataboutism, and JAQing off in these comments.

Regardless of whether they are “shills” they are detailing any legitimate discussion of the article.
Some of our friendships are not based merely on political affiliation. This is not a shot, but please understand that not everyone is automatically looking for a clan and an enemy to bond over ( even though it is not uncommon and perfectly rational thing to do based on our evolutionary path alone ).

Not to search very far, me and my coworkers discuss politics ( and we do have somewhat divergent views ). The bubble only exists if one does not talk with other people. In other words, other people being like-minded is not an automatic pre-requisite.
LG Chem to invest over $3B to build U.S. battery cathode plant
It was a leveraged buyout. They are a deal where the company borrows money and combines it with the investor's money to buy all of the shares back.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/elon-musks-twitter-d...
DSLs were a fad from the 70s that we thought would be replaced by frameworks.

Little languages are fun and trendy but it’s a pain to hire people who known a specific set of them.
I'm sure it's connected, but not because of the bots.

Millions of political moderates are stopping by to see what happens when a large-scale public forum begins to tolerate freedom of speech.
> Vacuuming, mopping

Please elaborate.
> and was moving some stuff to GCP

my condolences
Haha, thanks for this! This is going to freak him out enough...
It doesn’t bother me because it’s lascivious, it bothers me because it’s the comedy equivalent of fart noises. It was one thing when he was just a user of Twitter, but now he’s in charge, and it seems like a tone is being set that’s not really the vibe I’m into. Whatever floats your boat, I guess.
I’ve been assuming physical factors like dust was degrading the microphone quality
Yeah, there are a few companies who focus on optimization a lot. Rockstar's games are usually well optimized. Also Sony's recent offerings as well. Maybe even throw FPS games in the mix, Call Of Duty, Battlefield all look amazing and do not require super high-end hardware.
Now that Elon has cleaned house, when is Twitter hiring again? It might be a good opportunity to get in on the new ground floor.
...because it's only been a week and it takes longer for things to rot badly?
> How can us commenters on HackerNews sit from our armchair and say "ah, goofballs should've just not let headcount get so high!"

The cliche HN comment on sites like Twitter (and many, many others, any time headcount comes up) has always been "why do they need so many people?" I've mostly dismissed it the same way I dismiss "I could build Uber in a weekend," but with every other tech giant laying people off, maybe I shouldn't. Maybe the effect of all that extra money sloshing around in the system was to incentivize hiring everyone to make sure you didn't accidentally get a false negative, and not all of those hires were good ones.
Echo makes for a simple family “phone” for kids before they’re old enough for their own mobile.

I also created a free skill for kids to hear the daily school lunch menu. Such a morning time saver! https://github.com/jeffsheets/alexa-papio-lunch-menu

But yeah it’s still mostly a hardware solution looking for a problem
Until you look at everything in between that Bellard has done
Great post. Thanks for the insight on how mature Twitter’s Cache infrastructure tooling is. Having done similar work at a different place where you’re exposed to the realities of racks and racks of machines I could appreciate the evolution of the stack and knocking off problems one by one.

I suspected that the hopes and fears of Twitter’s quick demise were overstated and shared[0] some of those thoughts last week, on Twitter of course.

Also hi from another infrastructure person in SD!

0 - https://twitter.com/bitsandhops/status/1593637241527578625
As someone else said, Alexa seems to be very “voice command line”. I think Google is similar, no? It can be wordy but it’s easier to parse correctly (and faster).

Siri has always tried to be more conversational (though not by too much). But that’s also probably one of the reasons it hasn’t been as expandable.

Much easier to add skills (in Amazon parlance) when the command can be “tell Foo to bar the baz” instead of trying to intuit which app you want to use based on heuristics or something.
I actually find this fascinating and and am not taking sides. If Jan 6th was literally an attempt to overthrow the government, why hasn’t Trump been convicted of treason? I thought swift action would be taken if the slant in the stories news media have reported is accurate.

But more importantly, why can’t you be friends with people who have different politics? Honestly I’m not sure what word best describes a world where everyone has to think the same to get along, but I have to think it’s far from ideal.
Having dabbled in this a bit myself (using small dsl's to solve specific problems), some problems that immediately occur to me:

- more difficulty on boarding
- more difficulty adding new features
- more challenges with best practices/linting/code reviews
- different runtime behaviour between different languages

This all adds up to more complexity.

New languages are often really neat, and enjoyable for their own sake, but I'm not all that interested in maintaining a large swath of different languages for different tools.
Definitely stealing this as the right way to frame the issue. What would normally be a small kitchen mistake turns into no longer having an apartment complex.
What sickens me is that in New York, sports gambling, lottery and horse racing are all fully legal, advertised and endorsed (and in the case of lottery, directly controlled) by the state, but it is still illegal to play online poker.
It's not goofballs. It's generally misaligned incentives. Managing a 10,000 org leads to better job prospects than a 1000 person org, than a 100 person org, than a pizza box team.

Organizations tend to bloat.

Random, rapid cuts might not be the fix here, but headcount was too high.
An open-ended survey or focus group about how expensive most electric cars, and Teslas in particular, are would be really illuminating, in my opinion. There appears to be a sizable portion of Americans who believe that only people who are literally rich can afford them. I read it here https://nerdycar.com/tesla-model-y-psi/

Every time there is news about a city government or police department purchasing some Tesla model 3s, you can see a similar uproar on Facebook and Twitter, with people assuming that all electric cars, and Tesla's in particular, are comparable in price and performance to something like a Lamborghini or Ferrari.
Show HN: AssetsAI – Get unique and curated, AI generated game assets
Ahh that makes sense! So is this actually sensing a lower pressure than ambient? Since moving air results in lower pressure?
He also sold all the smoke detectors.
Have you tried this game?

https://playheyrobot.com/rules
I think this post is aimed at non-technical "RIP Twitter" posters from last week who are surprised it didn't fall apart in 24 hours.
Agree.

There's plenty of wealthy stealthy people around, who put a lot of effort into their business and not necessarily into themselves.

They'd fly right under the radar.

The following may not be a perfect example of the above, but just read up on the late Thomas Murphy and Daniel Burke ("Tom & Dan") of ABC. I find their no-nonsense no-bullshit down-to-earth frugal approach to business inspiring.
Alexa uses here:

1. Set timer

2. Convert weird US fantasy units to sane ones

3. Play music

4. Control lights

5. Weather

6. No, I don’t fucking care about the notification of some shipment I already got on my phone and my mail.

Alexa devices are cheap. Seriously cheap. That is the main reason I have not replaced them with Rhasspy [0] yet.

[0]: https://rhasspy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
Now, you are making me think. :-)

I have to go back and think from the first principle if I want to get better at Chess or play it as fun (as is happening now). Here is my dilemma. I want to get better, and thus strategies, openings, closings, mid, et al. However, I also want it to be intuitive that it is just my way.

So, I "don't care," but eventually, I might want to in the future. If life is Tetris and business is Chess, I need to be comfortable playing it simultaneously with both hands using both sides of the brain. ;-)

Eventually, I want my Chess games to come to me naturally with muscle memory and gut instincts, just as I wish I could solve the Rubik's without the formulae already muscled into my hands.
I'm glad you found somewhere you fit right in.
Ok, smarty. Why was there a conflict in Georgia? What were the events that led to it?

> Russia decided to escalate that and annex Crimea in 2014

Putin CLEARLY said that he will annex Crimea if X. What is that X?
That both are abhorrent but we wouldn’t be where we are today if NATO hadn’t been extending its membership eastwards since the end of the cold war and running arms deals with countries on Russia’s border.
Not actively developed. Only a few small changes:

- changed license to MIT

- fixed compilation errors

- fixed lighting bug

- fixed color conversions

https://bellard.org/TinyGL/changelog.html
4-7-8-0, mixed up the numbers. Not sure if it matters, though ;)
Tangent but I do hope that Musks trim down results in orgs that have less “executives” and a layered cake of a org structure, and more autonomous small teams that execute on shared overarching initiatives.

I really don’t understand why so many tech companies have like 8 layers of engineering levels. If the argument is that you need more money so more levels, just have a bigger band. Don’t chase titles they don’t mean shit. Not to mention the management stacks that seem to just hang out in meetings and take pvt. I haven’t worked at a proper startup but I’ve been on projects where a dozen or so people rebuilt apps used by tens of millions of people in a few months, or launched completely new applications for bigger companies.

Now that I work in a tech company (not big tech, but still a multibillion dollar corp) I’ve noticed that since IPO we have added a ton of bureaucracy whereas back in the day we were small teams building completely new and at times complex features. Literally was in a meeting earlier this month where people were patting each other on the back because we added a single attribute to a table. I’m obviously reducing the entire initiative to a small thing but it kind of explains all we had to do. It’s soul crushing but with the economy the way it is I must deal with it. Hell I’m down to show up next Monday and work for Elon if he wants a go getter. At least I’ll get to DO stuff. Or any other startup in SF if they are hiring.
The best format:

{opaqueTokenTypePrefix}_{crockfordEncodedEntropy}

Also: pass token through a bad words and "credit card lookalike" filter.

Optionally encode author cluster/region details in the low order bytes to resolve before eventual consistency in active-active systems.
I think we don't need to reinvent the wheel for handling user session, especially in web based application. There are common best practices that everybody already know such as using jwt, https and store in http only cookie
What kind of woke ideology exactly? Sorry not familiar the current climate in USA.
given that it’s showing Twitter in good light, it would be super silly to pursue anything IMO, even if it were illegal.

What would be a realistic fine in terms of damages (in $$)?

You could argue its actually negative damages.
The bubble where the cronies who helped plan it were huddled together in the Willard to watch the show put on by the people they directly interfaced with and who were equipped to breach the building.
It’s really too bad. There are so many companies (including Apple at this point) that I feel would be much better off if they could just announce they were going blue-chip and stop trying to grow so much every single quarter.

With Apple how long can the worlds biggest (or close, don’t know ATM) company keep growing?

So they’re doing user-hostile stuff like more ads and unnecessary subscriptions.

How many nice SaaS things had a perfect product bad had to pivot to enterprise just to find growth, ruining it in the process?
Yes, some hashes might not meaningfully hurt it, but they won’t add any entropy, which is the real problem.
I'm more cap R Romantic I guess. I center myself on my relationships to nature, the universe, human connection. Computers and the code they run are as romantic as a pencil: I can focus on it and where it came from, what went into it, what it can do and I can feel awe at what we've achieved together and what we can accomplish with the products of that. But I don't feel any particular way about the pencil itself, nor more deeply connected to the things I really value for having contemplated it.
Yep! Whenever I get a bottle that is too harsh I do it. Works great, much to the amusement of my partner
I'm not sure. I think I'm a good employee, but I like job stability. If I'm working somewhere with layoffs, I'll likely go somewhere without.

There also isn't a measure of employee quality, and layoffs are often not about the individual (e.g. Amazon cutting robotics). I've had no clue how likely I was to be laid off during most points in my career.
If Russia was not firing missiles at Ukrainian cities, Ukraine would not be firing their defense systems.
Another thing we noticed at Netflix was that after services didn’t get pushed for a while (weeks), performance started degrading because of things like undiscovered memory leaks, threads leaks, disks filling up. You wouldn’t notice during normal operations because of regular autoscaling and code pushes, but code freezes tended to reveal these issues.
I don't think it's so much "little" languages (commonly DSL) that matter. It's more the jumps in expressivity. You don't use a full on Turing-complete language when you need to match strings written in a regular language. Instead, we write the language we want as a regexp, and then use a regexp engine to match it.

I agree with much of the problems listed in the article. The author even manages to stumble onto some of the solutions (e.g. Dhall being a total language).

"Expressiveness is co-decidability" is the main theme of these things. The crux of the issue is in our everyday programming tasks, we have many levels of decidability, ranging from RE all the way to things that require full Turing completeness.

The majority of work however, lies in the middle. There are so many things that can be done with pushdown automatons, or with deterministic automatons. Most codebases don't actually use those though. An issue is that there is a dearth of "mini" languages that support these things.

Another issue is that somehow we are enamoured with the idea that our languages must be able to express everything under the sun (up to TC/Recursively Enumerable). This seems to be more of an industry attitude than anything - there is this chase for the most powerful language (a lisp, clearly... everything else is a blub).

I've recently experimented with embedding an APL into my usual programming language, and it was a very interesting experience. It feels like having the power to do regular expression stuff, but with arrays. I want to do the same for the other levels of expressiveness.
Wire this to Lightning and profit.
Dems didn't want to throw him out. Pence was a competent politician. Trump wasn't. They wanted him embarrassed, not out. Much like the Brits had a plan to assassinate Hitler before D day. Choose not to. They were afraid he would be replaced by someone competent.
All we do is ask it what the weather is going to be today, tonight, tomorrow
I’m not surprised it’s losing money. I would have been surprised if it was making money.

But I am surprised it’s losing it this fast.
I'm thinking about building a wood fired kiln that uses wood pellets for the fuel. As long as you know the rate you want them fed at, and keep the hopper full, the level of effort is substantially lower. I know there exist wood pellet kilns, but the ones I've seen are prototypes at a higher level of sophistication than "an auger that dumps pellets in a hole at a particular RPM"
Twitter is a lot of drama, but ultimately this is a common private equity play:

1) take private

2) fire/layoff until things break, patch up / rehire with cheaper labor. Repeat as necessary

3) spit shine/repackage what's left with a theoretically more appealing balance sheet.

4) resell to another sucker...uh, buyer, or take public again.

Fundamentally Musk bought 44 billion for 5 billion of annual revenue, and presumably 5 billion in costs. Unlikely to add revenue in twitter's model, he's cutting costs.

Honestly, at this point, is there revolutionary technology that is needed to keep the lights on at twitter? Do you need graphQL gods and SREs that would ace any Amazon raising the bar and master of silicon valley interviewing?

Nah. He'll honestly probably outsource a ton of the upkeep.

It's ugly, but the Twitter board and shareholders took their money and ran, and abandoned the product and the workforce. They could have backed out and let Elon Musk off the hook of his dumb contract with them, but they just wanted the money, and sold to someone that just wants to get his money out of it too.
The result is already showing up : https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/indias-brain...
Hey Elon, Twitter isn't a startup
I wish they'd get rid of wood fires in our area. Suburban houses in dense areas shouldn't have wood fires as a primary heating fixture in 2022, that's just disrespectful to the people around you.
America is such a great country that a random person can just fecklessly blunder into creating a revolutionary electric car company and cluelessly blunder into creating a rocket company that is the envy of the world.
Read the article. Most Twitter workers aren't H1Bs
The unemployment rate in Feb 2020 was 3.5%; by April 2020 it was up to 14%. It has never been lower than 3.5% since then. If there was a hiring glut due to covid it must have been a very industry-specific glut.
We use Echo/Alexa to play music, games, set timers/reminders, query for information. We get annoyed with up-selling and ads when issuing commands. The proliferation of fake reviews/products on Amazon has eroded any confidence in ordering anything via a voice command. It is a lazy, shallow and ineffective path to potential revenue. It lacks vision and creativity. There are missed opportunities in creating more sophisticated multi-command workflows. Ones that do not involve peddling what Amazon is already selling.

What problems should a sophisticated home assistant solve?
It should curate and offer SOLICITED services; find me washer dryer, fridge, plumber, landscaper, house/pet sitter, house cleaner, mechanic...
It should present these to me visually to choose from.
It should remember and be ready to automate any subsequent request for the same service.
This could be done via integrating with reputable third-party providers like Angie's list, thumbtack, google flights, aggregators...
Alternatively, Amazon should build reputable service provider network itself.
People need goods and services. Provide a path to solicit, opt-in to targeted curated offerings/ads. As important, provide the ability to opt-out when no longer necessary. Unsolicited ads are often inaccurate, invasive and damaging noise. Earned reputation and trust is gold.
I feel Alexa and voice enabled devices were innovative products, keeping aside the privacy and other concerns. 30 years ago, if someone had told us we would have a voice enabled assistant in home that can control music, lights, door etc., they would be called bonkers. So it was a technological marvel. But the world does not run on technical coolness, it had to earn money. I have no opinion on the monetization part.