skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Democrats are beholden to the unions in education, so they won't bring it up.

I think you could jettison this. It seems like pro forma both-siderism. I don't know any Democratic-leaning people who are unwilling to bring this up. If you're afraid of rocking boats you can -- as has been done in these comments -- differentiate between the noble teachers and the parasitic administrators.

That being said, I know that in my own company we have benefited from adding managers (I am not one myself). Communicating with people, budgeting, scheduling, managing expectations, keeping track of legal obligations, and so forth are non-trivial work which, for the most part, engineers are not skilled at or enthusiastic about. I imagine the same is true for academia. This isn't to say a vast bureaucracy can't acquire inefficiency. I'm sure there is a problem. But it's facile to wave your hand at other people whose jobs are a black box to you and say they are redundant.

I think the problem with the people "saying this" with questionable politics is that they don't have a serious analysis of the problem. They have political enemies they want to disempower and the "deep state" is a useful cover story. They want to destroy academia, not fix it.
I'm reminded of a couple of my favorite quotes:

"Use only that which works, and take it from any place you can find it."

"Absorb what is useful, discard what is useless and add what is specifically your own"

~~ Bruce Lee
How Does Bluetooth Work? [video]
Author here. The way to test "does this code send 0, 1, or 500 emails" is the Output Tracking pattern: https://www.jamesshore.com/v2/projects/testing-without-mocks...

Thanks for the wallet!
> Of course if that traffic included advertisements, you'd also lose 95% of your ad revenue.

Not so, serving an ad to a bot gains you no revenue, because ad networks charge for clicks, not impressions. If a significant percentage of your ad clicks are from bots, you're running a defective advertising platform and won't have customers for long regardless.
Those are pretty small companies. Imo discussions at that scale should be separate than mega corps; though people leverage the same criticism at both.

It seems like bureaucracy is at worst inevitable and at best actually provides a lot of competitive value. For example has there ever been a successful empire without a strong bureaucracy? And aren’t mega corps just modern empires?
Completely agree. The overcorrection applies in both directions.

The two value (estimate and confidence) is just a simple approach that is rather intuitive to interpret directly. As you note, diving into 3 point estimates gives to ability to extract beta distribution or other weightings that may or may not be suitable for the given domain.

Complete top down planning for any work that involves discovery is useless, at best. That doesn't mean no planning is better.

(Source: have experienced and been actively involved in both sides of that overcorrection.)
Congrats on the traction and Good luck
Curious to hear the full story!
I didn't get the impression that this would duplicate the entire functionality of Twitter, just what amounts to the MVP functionality. If you are only talking about the MVP it's at least somewhat plausible with a lot of careful engineering and highly efficient data manipulation.

I agree mostly. Where I differ in that I would argue that hashtags were THE thing that Twitter is most known for but that could be a perspective from having been on the platform for forever and a day and I recognize not everyone may make that same association anymore.
The self-service dashboard is scoped only to privileged users (typically account/tenant-specific admins like IT admins) that have a specific permission.
> I suppose the thinking is that by having each employee of a big organization do a small amount of work, they can avoid hiring a central person who just accepts receipts in envelopes and deals with them.

I think that's precisely it; see my other comment about legibility here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34294834. That's the conclusion I reached from listening to overworked finance people complaining about their understaffed departments handling the "audit seasons" around expenses.

And I think there's a lot more of it happening, mostly thanks to software - starting with the ubiquitous office suite, that made everyone their own secretary, manager and graphics department.

> When companies need photos of their employees they find a photographer who provides that service.

Do they still? My last experience with this is the company asking every employee to please kindly submit a current photo by themselves.

Obviously, the error in this kind of thinking is assuming that "having each employee of a big organization do a small amount of work" is free, because "it's just a small amount of work". It is, but a) the more iterations of this happen, the more of it adds up, and b) it's disruptive to every employee, as it competes for time and focus with the specific jobs people were actually hired for, slashing productivity across the board.
Yours is by far the most negative post in this thread - in tone and content. I’m sorry but this kind of proposal is intentionally controversial and invites picking through it like this. Glad the author has thicker skin than you.
University police forces are common in the United States, and are an explicit legacy of the Vietnam War and Civil Rights protests, and the Kent State Massacre in particular. The idea is that the kids are less likely to be beaten or killed by police that answer to the university.

https://www.vox.com/2015/7/29/9069841/university-of-cincinna...

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/09/colleg...
We’ve found one of the biggest issue with RBAC services to be the integrations with our tech stack. Building the RBAC system ourselves helped it be congruent with our stack.
Is the storage really the complex part? Isn't gathering the actual information and avoiding errors (ex: I have a co-worker who's name is incorrectly spelled three different ways in prod services) the hard part?
Imagine having a 0 to 100 scale of how much we value the device. Some of us are somewhere around 70 or 80 for the mac laptops, and 50 for iPads.

That’s why you’ll hear very critical takes while people might still be buying the device.

Also I’m of the opinion that buying something shouldn’t mean closing ones eyes about its flaws or being lucid on what you hate about it. The “voting with your wallet” thing is to me just a meme that want the world to look more simple than it is, except if you’re actually donating to lobbies to bribe politicians.

To take another example, I would understand someone buying iPhones while completely hating Apple’s attitude toward developers and consumers in general, the world is just that complicated.
Solar needs to slim down on silver
Somebody somewhere would be doing these things. Does it matter that that somebody is called “Harvard”? It’s not like it’s all run top-down; it’s just a bunch of affiliated organizations that have contractual relationships. I.e. an economy.

The people who run those theatres et al aren’t directly benefitting from the donations of Harvard alumni; they’re rather benefitting from the (presumably) Harvard College(s) of Performing Arts paying them for use of the space—same business model as any commercial theatre. Those affiliated businesses aren’t “Harvard” (the University) per se, any more than the people working for businesses in a food court in an airport work for the airport.
This is a very fertile perspective. Explains so much about CCP.
This line of reasoning is increasingly popular for some reason, probably because it's pushed by people like Bill Browder and some influential think tank types but it doesn't really stand to reason that dictators' primary motivation is money. I'm not doubting that Xi or Putin or whoever are probably worth at least a few hundred million (definitely not $200 billion) but if all they care about is money and the high life why have they been in politics for 25+ years when they could be living in London with a new identity and a few billion dollars?
The function of management exists for a reason, but the question is who should do it. Many knowledge workers are self-managing and the "oversight" provided by the managerial class is superfluous at best.

In the past 6 years of my working career, a manager has meaningfully intervened in my work exactly once, and the outcome was weeks of time wasted. Manager-originated assignments have tended to be of inferior quality and impact to the ones I generate myself. I have not done a manager-assigned task for the company for 3 years, and I have not done a worthwhile management-assigned task for 6 years.

My personal example is probably extreme, but what I bet is not extreme is the lack of accountability. There was never a time where my choices were recognized as superior to the managerial choices, no matter how many times this was proven true. Instead, managers seemingly just lost interest in assigning me work and let me figure it out myself, which frees me to be one of the objectively most productive people in the organization.
Maybe they can get rid of SAFe and save half of that?
CockroachDB is nice to use but every database has complexity you have to deal with.

Here's one I ran into recently: if a range has only 1 of 3 replicas online then it will stop accepting traffic for that range until it has 3 replicas again.

(for the folks at home, "range" is a technical term for 512 bit slice of the data - CRDB replicates at the range level)

So, in some code I wrote, I had account for not only 1) the whole DB being unavailable but also 2) just one replica being unavailable (they're different failure modes that say different things about the health of the system).

It's a good behavior! Good for durability. But I had to do some work to deal with it, spend an hour coming up with a solution, etc. There are databases that work at Twitter scale but no there are no silver bullets among those that do. You need full time engineers to manage the complexity and keep it online, or else it could cost the company shitloads of money - I've seen websites of similar scale where a two-hour outage cost them $20 million.
The first word of that post was not necessary, but the rest I agree with. In particular, the article layed out that they are bound to freedom of speech by the "TOS" of the sponsor.
It certainly does not mean that poor choices and addiction haven't lead to any or even most of the outcomes in SF. It means that the exact combination of dynamics in SF have produced different rates of homelessness than other places.

Nothing more or less.

It does not even come close to justifying the statement

> Rates of homelessness are not correlated with "life choices" or "events" at all
Expected expansion of PV production could use 85% of silver production. Best alternative, copper plating, requires changes to PV cell manufacturing.

Paper URL: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/pip.3661
I flip a switch and go to sleep.404
I live in Minnesota which gets plenty of snow, and chains are banned on public roads.
Of course not having a direct connection to products and productivity doesn’t mean there is no value provided. Things like private campuses, private buses, chefs, ping ping etc. may or may not improve product productivity but they provide value. Sorta akin to “home makers”, it would be easy to infer a lack of economic productivity as having no value.
The dose and the purity is what makes all the difference here. When someone takes Adderall orally, they are taking racemic amphetamine and dextroamphetamine at a dose typically around 10-20mg per day. When someone smokes pure d-methamphetamine, they are typically smoking 50-70mg in one or two large hits. Now, I do not condone or suggest this, but imagine taking 50-60mg of instant Adderall in the morning.
Show HN: Hindsight is a free and open-source retrospective board
These holidays I've been working on this side project. I learned a ton and I think it has some neat little features to show:

- It's a React application written in TypeScript using Parcel[1].
- No back-end. Data is shared via WebRTC directly between connected browsers. I'm using Yjs[2] to help me with that.
- Synchronized timer and YouTube player (audio only).
- It isn't responsive yet and lacks some polishing but I did put several hours on tweaking the UI. Things like volume slider being logarithmic instead of linear, high precision timer display using request animation frame (so no longer/shorter seconds) and force/sensitivity aware volume scrolling with both mouse wheel and trackpad, among others.

I started using it in my current job and my team is super happy with the experience. Still have some work left to do though:

- Actions and comments.
- Different user roles, so only select people can control the timer, music, etc.
- Data export.

Feel free to leave feedback here or on GitHub[3]. Perhaps it could be helpful to you as well. Cheers!

1. https://parceljs.org/
2. https://docs.yjs.dev/
3. https://github.com/haggen/hindsight
Sensors are not that far from fundamental limits for their size. The "standard" DSLR sensor is 1.7" on the diagonal. (A quarter is less than 1")
Can LLMs be updated quickly the way search engines are by crawlers and what not? ChatGPT is a couple years out of date and there was a lot of human involvement. Doesn’t sound like a quick or automated process. GPT-4 is still under development.
Serial lump sum is not quite DCA. Both involve a series of purchases.

The opportunity cost is the inverse of the S&P500 in that case.
You're right, no progress has ever been made in software, no new ideas are better than any old ideas, and it's fads all the way down. The only difference between software today and software in 1980 is that today's software is hip and software from 1980 is square.

I understand the frustration with flavor of the week "best practices" and the constant churn of frameworks and ideas, but software engineering as a practice IS moving forward. The difficulty is separating the good ideas (CI/CD, for example) from the trends (TDD all the things all the time) ahead of time.
Very little of the standard C++ library is not "kernel safe". If a bit of it might need to allocate, you may provide it a kernel-grade allocator to use; but you probably use custom kernel containers, for other reasons. If you don't want any filebufs, you do not make them.

And of course asm {} works the same regardless.
> It is literally impossible, for example, to get a smartphone from another vendor anywhere near as powerful as the latest iPhone

What's the point of having all of that extra power if the pre apple silicon iphones could already run their workload fine? It isn't like it will make the device last any longer because of the planned obsolescence with the battery

What's the point of having the most powerful mobile cpu if the average mobile workload won't come close to ever using it?

edit: Maybe it's because apple is trying to diversify the average mobile workload to cover more use cases. This way people who struggle with a full desktop OS won't have to leave the safe and happy garden
Unlike the entirety of the tech system, the school system is ipso facto in charge of the school system's own operation. I'm sure Altria is working real hard on a non-cancerous cigarette too.
I agree, Google has gotten worse, I find more and more often lately I do not find what I am searching for. I try to change my question/wording and it just gets worse. I think their algorithm is failing. Did they lose their way? It used to supply useful information. I think they may need to reduce their reliance on website performance. Site performance does not equate good information. They are excluding the best information just because the site loads slightly slower. Sure, it's nice having a site load fast but that's not what I'm searching for. I want the best result slow or not. As a web developer I have had to spend a great deal of time optimizing sites and clients feel it's extremely important for SEO to have the fastest Google Page Speed score possible.
Shitty, yes. But it goes (slightly) beyond the area that I would deem to be indubitable.
I developed a language called TXR Lisp, which has ties with Common Lisp in many areas. If you look at the reference manual, which is conveniently one giant manual page available in HTML form, there are numerous dialect notes that mention ANSI Common Lisp; a chunk of that would likely be things I might change in Common Lisp.

Some things I would fix without changing Common Lisp:

* redefine "binding" as being an association between a symbol and a location.

* I'd make (setq x y) have a predictable, documented effect when x is not a defined variable. It would cause x to be bound to its value cell, and place the value of y into that cell, and that would be the same as (setf (symbol-value 'x) y).

* pick up some outstanding issues and resolve them, like this one: during a dynamic control transfer, an exit point is identified for that control transfer and then unwinding takes place. It is not specified in CL whether the intermediate exit points (the ones not selected for the transfer which are being skipped) are torn down before the control transfer takes place, or torn down as-you-go during unwinding. I'd fix that as being tear-down-as-you-go. This affects situations when an unwind-protect intercepts a control transfer and then tries to initiate a new one to a different exit point.

* I'd fix the order of evaluation of a function binding relative to the arguments. We know that in (f x y z), the x y z are evaluated in left to right order, if f is a function. However, we don't know whether the f binding is resolved before or after the arguments. I'd pick one order and require it; probably before the arguments, though that requires the longest possible temporary storage. Obviously there are situations in which the binding isn't evaluated each time the function is called, like when it has been inlined.

* loop would support application-defined clauses.

* structs and CLOS would be integrated together; conditions would be CLOS instances.

* in the area of pathnames, I would have the language specify precisely how POSIX and Windows paths correspond to pathname objects. Every implementation would have to follow that. For instance, it couldn't be that one implementation sees "foo.c" has having a type "c", and another one doesn't. Everything would be specified down to what happens with double slashes, and trailing slashes.

* string literals would support escape sequences for special characters. Also, Unicode would be required. Implementations would have to support UTF-8 code.

* string literals would support a way of splitting across multiple lines, such that the reader eats the leading indentation. Thus, the format function wouldn't need a hack for this.

* FFI would be in the language.
One of my biggest complaints about depending on _anything_ not in the language's standard library, even standard extensions might be deprecated.
Lol. Yes! Self help startup accelerator.
You’re missing metadata in your size estimates.
One Walter C. Pepys, a genealogist, did some research on this. This quote comes from the introduction to the Standard Ebooks edition linked in another comment: “The accepted spelling of the name ‘Pepys’ was adopted generally about the end of the seventeenth century, though it occurs many years before that time. There have been numerous ways of pronouncing the name, as ‘Peps,’ ‘Peeps,’ and ‘Peppis.’ The Diarist undoubtedly pronounced it ‘Peeps,’ and the lineal descendants of his sister Paulina, the family of ‘Pepys Cockerell’ pronounce it so to this day. The other branches of the family all pronounce it as ‘Peppis,’ and I am led to be satisfied that the latter pronunciation is correct by the two facts that in the earliest known writing it is spelt ‘Pepis,’ and that the French form of the name is ‘Pepy.’ ”

The English sure seem to have a fondness for weird pronunciations. Not long ago I was informed that P. G. Wodehouse’s surname is actually pronounced “Woodhouse,” and even more recently I learned that “Ralph Fiennes” rhymes with “safe signs.”
No Child Left Behind handled #1 by closing failing schools. The problem is that it was designed to close more things than it replaced, so eventually you'd run out of schools. Which is convenient if what you actually want to do is send everyone to private religious schools.

Anyway, this is an example of libertarian first principles thinking. The problem with first principles thinking is that in the real world it's literally always wrong (because there are always factors you forgot about), but that this doesn't convince people to stop doing it, because they know it must be true despite it never in practice being true. Does the profit motive actually stop Google or Uber from constantly doing useless makework projects and releasing unprofitable products?
I don’t need a justification for other peoples use cases. The device does exactly what I want so I bought it. If I waned a device I could run webservers on, I’d buy something else.

If they changed the advertised capabilities after purchase, that would be different.
That was a great article and it is unfortunate that you had to deal with that tone-policing behavior. There is an interesting article on tone-policing in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_policing
Also see: https://www.robot-hugs.com/comic/tone-policing/
ChatGTP maybe, but OpenAI hasn't even tried to train a model to replace search.

Until somebody tries to fine-tune a model using RLHF explicitly with the goal of replacing Google it's very hard to know what the resulting experience would look like. It could be shocking if ChatGTP is any guide.
Tens of millions of people in the US are prescribed amphetamines. They don’t spiral into a cycle of addiction and loss of self control.
It's been weaponised since Nixon. Pretty much every regime since then has targeted groups that present a thorn in their sides
> people are great at working not in their own interest, together, on something greater than themselves.

Only really true of small, tight-knit groups of people engaged in very similar kinds of work, where everyone knows that their contribution will be evaluated by everyone else. Hence small partnerships, co-ops or very early startups probably don't need management. These roles start to appear as scale increases.
Oh hi Grant! I didn't know you read HN! Hahaha.
>GPS has nothing to do with satellites being able to see lots of things from high up.

It does in a sense because the radio waves need an approximate line of sight to reach your GPS receiver. Being high up gives them a large coverage.
Vastly, vastly is ridiculous. An iPad Pro is a bit faster than the Samsung Galaxy Tab and there's some nice iOS apps. But it's not leagues better, it's not like comparing a C64 and modern PC, it's like comparing an i5 with an i9. And the limitations Apple stuffs in place actually makes it worse in some ways. Multi-tasking is just plain old better on Samsung Android with the ability to do radical things like have 4 way app splits, overlapping resizable windows and to top it off it's actually somehow MORE intuitive than multi-tasking on the iPad.
Disagree on 'Firewall' at the app layer. That's a security domain and there should be a standard way for apps to _ask_ the security layer for something.