skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For reference, I believe this is the link to the particular comment in question (and, yes, it's worth clicking through to read it):

https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/10ft5iv/amazon_...
Mathematicians roll dice and get rock-paper-scissors
> at least thats how it works for the rest of us.

Is that true? If you make your SF salary of >$200k and manage to down production, are you sent a bill for lost revenue?

I don't think so. In fact, since CEOs are (usually) mostly compensated in stock and their job is to create shareholder value, their income is likely far more related to their performance than for your average engineer.
Same as the UN plan to remove private transport from people. Makes them vulnerable and dependent.
Yes. It was free until 1 week ago (we now ask users to either get a free trial plan or set up a demo). That's a temporary setup, but for reference 0.2 credits is very little (equivalent to <$0.002). Plans start at $19/mo and it includes access to our full suite of API partners (you can access 100+ APIs for data enrichment, web scraping, etc. without an API key).
>Every time I read stuff like: "Over the past two years we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth. To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today."
I feel taken for a fool. Every damn body knew that the last 2 years were not representative of the future. Everybody knew that free-money, COVID and related phenomenons were a phase.

How are they taking you as a fool? The point of a company is not to maximize employment, it’s to maximize profit.

That means hiring up in growth periods, and downsizing in contractions.

That’s exactly what they said they have done.
“AI Identity Crisis” – A Poem
Really? Cause I'm making a public note here that I didn't know. I fully expected WFH and automation to continue to fuel the need for software development, albeit at a slower rate. I'm also making a public note that even if I foresaw a crash after printing free money, I didn't expect it to be compounded by the most drastic eco-legislation ever, plus a war in Ukraine. And I sure as hell didn't expect the last two to be so perfectly synergistic in increasing energy prices.
Direction group. The direction group is a small by-invitation group of experienced participants who are asked to recommend priorities for WG21. Currently, that group consists of: Howard Hinnant, Roger Orr, Bjarne Stroustrup, Daveed Vandevoorde, and Michael Wong. Their charter includes setting forth a group opinion on:

• Evolution direction (language and library): This includes both language and library topics, and includes both proposals in hand and proposals we do not have but should solicit. The direction group maintains a list of the proposals it considers the most important for the next version of C++ or to otherwise make progress such as in a TS, and the design group chairs use that that list to prioritize work at meetings. Typically, work on other topics will occur after there’s nothing further left to do at this meeting to advance the listed items.

• Providing an opinion on any specific proposal: This includes whether the proposal should be pursued or not, and if pursued any changes that should be considered. Design group participants are strongly encouraged to give weight to an opinion that the design group feel strongly enough about to suggest.

Source: https://isocpp.org/std/standing-documents/sd-4-wg21-practice...
Amiga still runs school district's HVAC (2015)
> Leaving aside why someone is still using RSS in 2023

I got this article via my RSS client; it's the best way to consolidate everything I follow from YouTube videos to things that hit the front page on HN, all in one place.

Then I can browse through doing my morning coffee.
This is not remotely close to "Plus"
10x compared to the worst programmer definitely exists. but there is no average programmer. that's like saying "average sports player". pocket billiards and Olympic lifting are both sports.
Yes also see DC choosing a black woman to play an orange alien from Tamarin /s
You're not wrong of course - this would come with heavy UX issues though. E.g. it's hard to type 10 words into a password field without messing up. And _really_ hard on a mobile device.

1P would allow you to have a password like "1234" and still have the same key entropy as that 10 word password alone.
Not 1 but 5-9 photons, still less than billions :)

pretty amazing
This is the way systems should be more generally: visible, modular, redeployable.
Every light in my house is Hue, and all rooms have those Hue dimmer switches mounted over the normal light switch.

I absolutely love it. It's never been anything other than instantly responsive, works without the internet and I can turn all the house's lights off from my bed. Additionally, the utility rooms, hallways and bathroom lights are just fully automated so you never think about it. The regular switches are still there if you need them, but in over a year since installing it, I've not touched any of the traditional light switches.

My only issue is that the Hue Bridge has a maximum limit for the number of lights and accessories you can run, which I'm starting to get close to. The lights are also expensive, especially the low voltage outdoor lighting, so for that I just use a standalone ZigBee dimmer switch which integrates with the Hue system.
These companies must hire the same marketing or PR people to write these letters.
> highly consumer tech literate person

Watching his videos on this subject I do not get the impression that he falls into this category.
Who Owns the Generative AI Platform?
If I remember the quote has to do with programmers who are worth 10X more, which most programmers tend to think of as being 10X better programmers. Not sure what would make them 'worth' more in Jobs' view, but it might not be just their ability to program. That said he worked with Steve Wozniak - I guess that guy might count as a 10X programmer for just about anyone.
If you were given unlimited research time, why couldn't you build those things?
That's the Lawnchair app founder LOL
People seem to be assuming that this request for certain pronoun usage is made in good faith. Asking to be called "it" is probably just trolling on "its" part. "It" would probably laugh at the people bending over backwards to accommodate.
I’ve been aware of this fact as Feynman points it out in the course of the lectures, but find it totally nuts — there is some sense of scale I’m missing.

Matter consists of discrete chunks, atoms, but these chunks are so infinitesimal and numerous that there is no question of seeing them and any effect involving a handful of them is far, far below the human scale.

Light also comes in chunks, and the number of these chunks should be comparable to number of atoms since, e.g every single atomic transition generates a photon. Actually they should be far more numerous as they are massless and easily created, destroyed.

Yet, somehow, they are not far below the human scale of detection — as few as 5 (!) results in a perceivable flash.

What am I missing here? (Obviously this boils down to a numeric estimation and the numbers are what they are — my question is why do the numbers wind up even remotely in the human ballpark.)
The government and their policies aren't responsible at all (not just the USA but other countries as well)?
This seems like a nice alternative in some way to me.

I never run docker commands by itself unless it’s really simple. Simply whip up a docker compose file and aliasing compose works pretty well for me.
One thing that works for me is to just start writing figure legends. That seems easy, it doesn't feel like "writing the paper". I end up basically writing the results section for that figure or table, so I just cut and paste most of it to the actual results later, and keep a summarized version for the actual figure legend.
By coincidence, I'm trying to submit a PhD thesis today (Genetics/Computational Biology).
So that would be yes but our noise filter in brain doesn't let us see it
I only see some crypto and space/nature stuff. It usually has something to do with stuff you've previously viewed on twitter or whatever their algo thinks you do.
I assume there’s been a post-mortem for this incident, considering the cost to the company in terms of morale, pain for former employees, damage to hiring brand etc. They’ve probably learned lessons from this so they don’t repeat them in future.

It’s hard to make the results of the post-mortem public because most of this would be decisions taken by specific people, instead of systems misfiring. They would not want to publicly throw the people under the bus.
When I bought my previous house I changed to door to my bedroom to swing open the other way, as the original direction awkwardly swung open "in to the room" rather than towards the wall.

The downside was that the light switch was now behind the door, and because I didn't want to re-route the cables for for the light switch I used a wireless switch, which seemed like a good solution. It was, but I also had all of the exact same problems you have.

For "just a guy" like me it's still an okay-ish solution as routing cables through the wall is a lot of work (or fairly expensive if you have a professional do it), but I don't think anyone who has ever lived with these things actually likes them.

I apologize to whomever is living there now. Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't even realize it's wireless and were confused why it's such a shitty switch, and when the battery eventually ran out.
Another comment on this: don't forget that no matter what these CEOs say about their workforce, we're family blah blah blah, they are first and foremost beholden to their shareholders. The very purpose of a capitalist corporation is to serve the interests of its shareholders, aka make more money; everything else is secondary.
But that's not the intended message when they send out these memos.

They're not saying: "Hey, we knew this wouldn't last, but we hired a bunch of people in order to milk the situation for everything we could, knowing we'd have to fire you today. So, sorry we willingly and knowingly did this. But you're fired."

I could respect the honesty in that, but that's not what they're trying to say. They're trying to act surprised by the economic shift. "Oops, sorry we have to let you go."

Of course it was rational for them to all do this. Lying is often a rational thing to do.
Sorry where it says dealers it should read RealWear. Damn you auto correct
> The parser might indeed encounter an identifier without knowing whether it is part of an expression. However, it does know whether an expression is valid at that point. This isn't encoded buried in the stack but it is encoded in the top-of-stack state (this is the part that I was confused about).

No, it really isn't!

Table driven parsers basically have two actions encoded in their tables - for any (state, current input symbol) pair (i.e. table indices) they can either SHIFT or REDUCE. A SHIFT action means to push the symbol onto the stack since it doesn't yet know what it's part of. A REDUCE action means to pull the top N symbols (terminals and non-terminals) off the stack and replace them with the RHS of the grammar rule they represent that it has now recognized.

e.g.
If there was only one grammar rule:

A -> x y z

Then when the parser saw "x" it would SHIFT, then "y" => SHIFT, then "z" => SHIFT, then (with next symbol end-of-file) REDUCE - popping (x, y, x) off the stack and replacing them with A. This REDUCE action is the first time it knew that those x, y, z were part of A. In a real grammar with more than one rule there may be multiple REDUCE actions (with different RHS) depending on what followed x [y [z]].

In a top-down (recursive descent) parser you know what you're parsing at any point, and then go looking for what you hope to be there. e.g. if you see "if" then you will call ParseIfStatement which will call ParseExpression etc.

In a bottom-up parser you're discovering what you're parsing by SHIFTING these bottom level (then progressively higher) symbols until finally you've seen enough to recognize what the constuct is and can do a REDUCE action using that rule.

So, using the above example, if after "x" and "y" you see something unexpected like "w" rather than "z" you can't generate a top-down error like "Invalid A", because you don't yet know this is part of an "A" (and indeed in a more complex grammar there may be multiple things that "x y" could be part of). So, in the bottom up parser all you can generate as an error is something like "z expected" given that you know "z" would be a valid next symbol (leading to a SHIFT action in this case).
I think this and the rest of the FAANG (plus M$) layoffs show us that these are now all established corporates. When you're growing and innovating and building new products etc, you hire during recessions to make the things you will sell during the booms (and just to keep up with your growth). But when you're a stable, mature company with no plans for new products, business lines etc, then the name of the game is efficiency. And efficiency is doing the same as last year but with 12k fewer people.

It's not "wrong" per se. It's just that these companies are no longer what they were. Investors and Employees should know what they are engaging with: out is the growth machine where you will have a team hired under you and revenue can be expected to 10x in a decade. In is "every year we get to 5% more revenue and pay 5% less in expenses".

Such is the company life cycle.

Google have done very well to be fair to keep the growth phase going so long...
During Covid, there was an increased demand for certain online services. As a result, companies hired additional permanent staff members to meet the extra demand. Instead, they could have chosen to hire these people on temporary contracts. Hiring staff on a temporary contract would have been more transparent.

In the end, this is a business decision, and it is fair enough. However, claiming responsibility while knowing full well they would make the exact same decision again in the future is a different matter.
> Some of these are Nvidia issues

As unfair as it seems, they are desktop linux issues, not Nvidia issues. If your OS does not work with the most popular discrete graphics solution, it's a "you" problem. Like I said, completely unfair :)

Speaking of which, the windows graphics subsystem is light years ahead of anything on the linux desktop. It can handle a driver AND card kernel crash, restart the card, and your system keeps running. It's actually very impressive.

> Cubic

That is installing with a disk image, which is a different thing than an image based install (Windows DISM).

> NixOS or Guix

This is much closer to the reproducible install mechanism windows has, although still has some key deficiencies (and key benefits that windows doesn't have!). I think this is the future, but IME is not completely ready for casual desktop use.
Old proprietary software, everyone's favorite. Next time they should just use Home Assistant or some other open system so they don't have to rely on the continued existence of the maintainer.
This is the thesis swamp.

A lot of the young people in these swamps are in a bad place.

The university I attended many years ago almost didn't have that swamp for Master's students. It was largely attributed to students working in small teams thus pulling each other through.

I learned about this when I attended an evaluation group with some of the high-ranking staff members on the faculty. At some universities, most people end up in the swamp and have for decades if not centuries. Unfortunately, it's shameful, so people don't hear about it, and little changes.

If you work as staff at a university with a big swamp, the one single biggest contribution you can do to society is probably help fix the system at that university so people don't fall into the swamp. Even if it means putting your research on hold.
Yes, I’d love to find the person who has never made a mistake to be the CEO. Undoubtedly you must be speaking from personal experience of being infallible?
Hadn't looked at it this way. I usually interpret it as a meaningless phrase that everyone expects to be made. How often does "taking the full responsibility" have a real consequence for the top-level management? I would expect several of them to resign and the salaries to be used to pay 5x the number of employees that are way more productive than management anyway.
Choose Your Adventure
It seems like this model would say that Google should not hire without an ironclad assurance that they will never need to do layoffs. Is that fairer - to never employ people in the first place?
> You treat social constructs as immutable part of the universe like rocks and trees.

Fair point.

> If we lived in 1500's you'd replace the word 'company' with 'medieval lord'.

In some ways I see the equivalence because they both have power but luckily our justice system has evolved since then and there are more checks on power. We've also evolved from feudalism to whatever kind of capitalism we're in now. I think capitalism is a long way from perfect because it often doesn't align with our internal belief systems, partly because nobody has a complete view of the situation (even the CEO who cannot see the future) so our belief systems act on incomplete information and partly because there are perhaps not enough rules baked in to insert moralistic behaviour into it.

I don't think that turning companies into social security is a good way forward. Just have social security. Don't loose sight that if your economy isn't competitive in the world then all this becomes moot because you all loose.
The crypto market is the trash, a decade old speculative bubble with zero real world applications.
Come again? UN Plan?
My 90s Toyota truck got moved from one side of the street to the other one day. Turned out friends dad noticed it was street sweeping day so moved it for me.

His Toyota keys from a different year / model truck fit it just fine.
> ...suggesting that I could build ffmpeg and qemu the same as Fabrice if I was just given more time.

The way I see it, 10x programmers have something (or things) that most programmers lack. Usually some combination of raw intelligence, creativity and dedication, often combined with a much deeper understanding of theoretical fundamentals than other developers.

> And also, the 10x meme, and how it’s often used, implies that skills are interchangeable. Should a great database internals expert be able to build a great micro-services architecture?

As I indicated above, I think being a 10x programmer is not so much about learned practical skills as having innate talents, and then making use of them. Such talents can be surprisingly transferable between technical domains.

I know of cases where a developer unfamiliar with both a codebase and the language it was written in can, within an hour or two, identify bugs and vulnerabilities that the dev team spent months failing to find/fix.

I think one aspect of this is the ability to break ANYTHING down to first principles, when needed, without losing sight of the whole.
I have seen this as well. What in the world is going on at Google?
They are the thief of the world. Their first advice is to privatize public services so their buddies can profit off a working system.
I'm convinced industry captains are given stronger indicators from the government that a recession is happening. Yes, they have amazing advisors that could feel this out naturally. I also think senators and representatives tell them directly to prepare before the average consumer gives this forethought.

It's in the government's best interest to support those with capital. All the rest of us be damned.
Thing about an echo chamber is that it feels amazing to be in one. Everyone agreeing with me, slapping my back when I say something to reinforce the groupthink. I feel so smart! Love it!

The negatives of the echo chamber are felt by people not in it, not me and my group.
No. The site will not resolve at all.

If you dig around the web youll find out that it's because one of their books infringes on the rights of some publisher.

The book and the publisher are unknown to me, but they succeded in getting the site blacklisted, all of it. The optics of the whole thing are horrendous imho
I agree, looks a lot like Gumroad
"Can"? Sure, just like most systems. "Did"? No, that's ignoring the fundamentals of how the system crashed. I'd recommend doing a deeper dive into what actually happened.
I wonder if some of what is behind this here and at other companies, is the thought that LLMs will make devs more productive thus less are needed. It seems like a reasonable assumption with zero-sum-game mentality. However, I suspect what LLMs actually mean is a more vibrant startup space as fewer people will be able to do more.
> blows my mind that a screwdriver is all it takes to bypass the lock and ignition of a car made in 2016. c’mon, is that really the best we can do?

Capitalism would say of course not, that's the best you were willing to pay for.

As a mid-50's, the "I think they're called singles?" made me chortle.
Not defending him per se, but the phrase does have a meaning: "I'm not blaming anybody under me for this".

As for what are the consequences for himself, that's definitely not for him to say or chose. It's up to those who hired him.
Credits to mmcgaha, who posted this in the thread about the school that can't turn off their lighting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34452424

I did some digging on how the Amiga actually controls the HVAC systems, because at first I assumed it was through GPIO, maybe the parallel port or a dedicated I/O expansion card. However, it seems like it's talking directly to an HVAC control box by made by Johnson Controls (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnson_Controls) which communicates over radio and that seems to be the cause of the recurring radio interference always reported in articles about this school.

It seems like a pretty good separation of concerns. The Amiga could probably be trivially replaced by a more modern computer if someone actually wanted to. Same goes for the radio box, which is probably the even more pressing concern. At the cost of running data lines to the boiler rooms or even switching to a modern digital remote control system, you could keep most of the system as is without swapping out hardware extensively.
For NL: Those severance packages generally have to be applied broadly so everyone can make the choice. They usually result in the ones who know they can easily find a job moving on and the rest staying and thus don't happen that often. In general they let term-limited contract expire and offer people in early retirement. Doing layoff's when you are making a massive profit is not easy, it might be doable but it's not easy.

Fun part: Sometimes you cannot chose who you fire, the age distribution in the company may not change so firing everyone older than 45 is not an option in general.
I interpret it as “a decision was made, it was wrong and I take responsibility for that decision”.

The other option is he blames some external force or some other leader in the company.
Some are savants
> a marvelous "race-automobile" or something

Ah yes, the well-known wagen of the German volk.
And how does one learn reasoning skills?
The whole thread reads as CYA and trying to pass blame somewhere else. Looked it up and yes, guess who also has legal action headed their way?
10x programmers, and dare I say, 100x programmers exist. I believe one works in my team. It's not the speed at which they write code, but the intuition and motivation with which they write it.

The code is as solid as houses, yet as flexible as a piece of plasticine.
Delphi made an awful lot of things incredibly easy. Com automation for example. It is just too bad Borland had fucked up.