skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Unionization is the correct response here

That makes sense on the face of it, but if you look back over the other professions that have unionized (steel workers, auto workers, truck drivers), the lives of the actual workers always seems to have suffered post-unionization.
I think it’s a little more subtle: the ad focus means they’re unwilling to consider other revenue models or deeply appreciate how customers are different than high volume ad impressions.

The Google+ and messaging debacles are obvious examples but I think GCP and G-Suite were also seriously held back in a way which an independent subsidiary which had to make a profit on its own would not have been. Their executives just weren’t sweating the way they would have if they knew their shares would go down when they didn’t execute well. Contrast with AWS, whose leadership are running the service in a way which makes it clear they have no plan B involving ongoing subsidies from the parent company and thus aren’t blowing off customer support, features, security, etc.
Tech companies are "factories" of software products and features. During COVID, there was an increased demand for such products, justifying additional investments in new products or features to remain competitive. This required a wide variety of staff members.
That's fine in cities, but in the US we have countless roads that stretch for hundreds of miles through remote locations far from developed areas. The cost to install, maintain, and power these hypothetical cameras along just one of these roads could easily stretch into the tens of millions with expensive upkeep as well. It's just not tenable.
I had a different experience, when I was in front of a Defense Investigative Service agent, filling out my forms in 1989, for a TOP SECRET/SCI clearance required for the job I had accepted working for the Defense Information Systems Agency, in the basement of the Pentagon.

I told him that I had smoked marijuana (I was still studying for my degree at University), and that a number of my friends also smoked, and they were the reason why I smoked (peer pressure). I also informed them of the damage I had seen done to our friendships inside the group, as certain friends had gotten into fights with other friends over the money needed to buy the stuff. I also gave names and contact details of various friends in that group. I informed those friends that they would be interviewed, and to just tell the agent the truth -- as I had done.

They all reported back that they had been interviewed, and told him the truth. But they also didn't give me any more details, and I was fine with that.

What was a little strange about that whole clearance investigation process was that the agent also wanted to know the addresses of my grand parents, in addition to the fifteen year history of everywhere I had lived myself. And about a month later, one of my grandmothers got a visit from a Secret Service agent. Turns out that the Defense Investigative Service didn't have any agents in that area, so they farmed out that work to the local Secret Service office.

So, yes -- I did smoke, and I did inhale. And all the agents cared about was whether I was trying to hide something like this, because that would mean I would be vulnerable to blackmail over those events.
Yes, I do agree its complicated. But... while it may be unrealistic to expect them to be an expert in teaching, I think it is absolutely realistic to expect them to be competent in teaching, seeing as that is a fundamental component (along with research) of being a professor.
That's orthogonal to having a programatic ID for them
These kinds of automated enforcement are absolutely dystopian.

Imagine describing almost anything other than speed limits and suggesting automated camera based enforcement.

Drop a food wrapper on the ground? instant fine.
Jaywalk? Instant fine.

If we can't be bothered to enforce our rules in person, the problem is with the rules not the methods of enforcement.
Speeding on the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, the longest contiguous bridge in the world, can have dire consequences for you and other motorists, especially in bad weather. So yes, they have Speed Enforced by Aircraft signs up, and sometimes you can see the police planes as you cross.
> Irresponsible for who? Corporations are in the business of their own interests. Employees are a resource to furthering a businesses goals.

Personally, I find layoffs irresponsible at a corporate level. When they happen they disrupt team relationships, gut out tribal knowledge, break trust, and create friction that trades short term savings for long term cost. The human cost for unemployment is also hard to ignore. For every 1% increase in unemployment there is a 1-1.6% increase in suicides.

I say that as someone who is working at a company that made headlines for layoffs.
Architecture Decision Records: Helpful now, invaluable later
Yellow Pages were companies who wanted to be found. Normal citizens could opt-out of having their numbers published in the White Pages.
> three(two(one(value)))

const oned = one(value);

const twoed = two(oned);

const threed = three(twoed);

This proposition goes out of its way to find problems with code that is written in a confusing and uncommon way in the first place.
Leaving aside the simple physics of more kinetic energy making those 'standard deviations' clearly more serious for all involved, we clearly don't want high speed traffic in environments with pedestrians and cyclists. So while the Autobahn may not be a nonstop catastrophe, I would think it's clear that speed limits on non-freeways are far from "100% political".
I for one welcome the death of Twitter, one can only hope.
It seems like being employee-owned might be a prerequisite for that, but I'd love to see examples that persuade me otherwise.

There are tech co-ops, which are worker-owned: https://tech-coops.xyz/
I love that this is a substantially nicer read than the kind of stuff GPT generates, and the amount of human effort to produce it is pretty close.
I remember about a decade ago standing outside our house and watching an incredibly long trail of ants leading from an ant-hill in-between our patio bricks towards our driveway - I followed it figuring they were migrating to a different hill but it ended up leading to an absolutely massive swarm of I assume two different breeds/colonies of ants fighting - it was honestly very interesting to watch - like how you'd see medieval armies fighting in movies - the thin lines of combatants on either side walking to war ending up in a thick horizontal battlefront of ants and ant bodies.

Absolutely amazing stuff. Makes me wonder if humans are controlled by our pheromones/scents/secretions/etc more than we think we are.
Probation exists.

And it's possible to hire contractors too.

At-will is worse than contract work, because the contractor knows when he will be let go.
any idea what was the selection criteria?
Show HN: Taggy – Open-source package to auto-tag input/text
Hello!

I'm building a typescript based frontend package to tag/categorize any form of textual input.

Straight to the demo -> https://open-taggy.github.io/demo/

Project focus:

- lightweight (frontend package without any backend server stuff)

- easy integration (currently npm/vanilla, frameworks to come)

- free and open source

It works on the basis of a pre-defined list of trigger words (glossary).
With this approach there is no need for any external services or heavy backend/ML-things.
I've often wondered, yes, that's the law, but do most restaurants actually do that?
I could hardly imagine a dumber thing to say but you do you buddy.
Possibly naive question:

Everyone's talking about how these companies are preparing for a global recession. But it's striking how specific to large tech companies. Is it possible these companies are just seeing the new remote-first paradigm as an opportunity to replace US devs with cheaper, foreign developers?

Obvious this is absurdly difficult, but it's likely more realistic now than it's ever been before.
> That being said I’ve always felt frustrated by speeding tickets. Everyone goes 5-10 over the limit at all times so it makes a system where cops can basically pull over everyone and give them a ticket at will.

In some countries such deviations aren't punished. Either they simply don't have a fine/points for going 5-10kmph above the speed limit, or have a relative window depending on the speed. The error of the measuring device might also be considered. And until recently most cars had a builtin "error" in the speed reading of up to 10% mainly to account for slight differences in tire wear and to remove any legal liability from the manufacturer in case of false readings. These days I've seen plenty of cars being spot on because they use GPS to measure so that changes that "buffer". So going 5 over limit usually means a bit more.

Too much flexibility for the police officer isn't great, I agree. It incentivizes abuse of power. The case above isn't one of those though.
more often than not one doesn't have any choice in DB, especially when it comes bundled in product like in my case
It doesn't matter that much if 70% or 90% of carbon offsets are flawed. In both cases the conclusion can only be that by default you shouldn't trust carbon offsets.
"co-op" or "co-operative" is what I see them being called in Canada. A few small "craft" industry in my town is structured like that, where every employee is an owner with a stake based on their position, tenure, etc, and all profits are distributed back out each quarter/year. They're also common in agriculture, where a feed mill will be owned by all the farmers that use its services and/or store their grain there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative
A sheriff's helicopter providing evac: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dckKcpqSgDs
previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28916775
Does a moonshot mean funding a team of 50 without tangible goals for ten years? The original google moonshots leaned heavily on individual engineers producing Herculean results eg gmail.
Clojure has thread first ->, thread last -> and even thread as as->, to define where the pipe will be applied. I find it very cool!
It sounds from reading your post that you need to have an honest conversation with your supervisor.

And - he needs to be honest with you about what's possible from this point onwards.

Currently, you are trying to sugar coat the situation and he is too nice to really challenge you. He's probably fallen into the "Ruinous Empathy" trap and it's damaging you.

You need to at least be prepared for the honest answer to be that there is no way forward.

Some questions that you both need to answer (I'm making some assumptions here as I don't know what your thesis is about).

- Do you even know what your thesis is about?
- What's the question it's trying to answer?
- What's the hypothesis on the answer?
- How are/were you going to test the hypothesis?
- What's the conclusion going to be?
- Do you have enough experimental results to answers any of the above
- Is it feasible to do more experiments
- If it's not feasible to do more, can you add in enough theoretical discussion/hand waving to get a thesis out of it
> I guess it's referencing the fact that education today is largely about having textbooks shoved in front of you until you're able to recite enough of it.

I would argue contrariwise, the education today is bad because the textbooks are devoid of content and nobody can recite any of the little they have. For my parents' generation it was not unexceptional for people to cite poems from memory. I have bunch of their middle school books, and it appears they read more and longer texts for middle school than some university students today. During my grandfather's time kids were expected to recite a chapters of textbooks aloud in front of class, and he also remembered good bunch chunks from the Bible.

Compared to that, fill-in textbooks we used when I was in school seem a bit underwhelming -- and I am in my 30s. Kids today use e-learning environment (makes direct comparisons difficult).

Today, very few people appear to read anything, let alone books, even fewer remembers anything. Thus conversations about anything factual seem often pointless. But it is not like one can blame anyone for that, it only makes sense: Why truly should I remember anything when I can flip out a smartphone and hit query to a search engine? But people reading the same Wikipedia article or repeating the same news cycle talking points at each other makes for a boring conversation.
Can't wait for this. Pipes are awesome in Elixir and bringing them to JS/TS will be great.

To me this is both concise and readable:

const weather = `https://api.weather.gov/gridpoints/TOP/31,80/forecast`
|> await fetch(%)
|> await %.json()
|> %.properties.periods[0]
> Microsoft is famously still doing quite well

IBM is also doing well by that metric and if you check, GE isn't doing too bad
either¹.

Every incumbent will be replaced eventually². What really matters if these companies are at the forefront and driving innovation or not. Google at one point was at such place and so were IBM, Sun etc. Google has become a shadow of it's past and has become a place to pump up the promo packet and kill products loved by users.

1: https://www.google.com/finance/quote/GE:NYSE?window=MAX

2: https://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html
Yeah, check out Mondragon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
The pipe operator is awesome because you can use it to “extend” objects without messing with their prototypes.

Missing String.titleCase ? Write your own!

“hello world” |> titleCase
I originally thought you were referring to this as a "hack proposal" as a way of denigrating its value, but in fact it is the "Hack proposal" where "Hack" is Facebook's fork of PHP.
I have a question what do you guys think is the best back end for a video search engine app?
Fear isn’t a good long term strategy though. If your culture is fear driven, engineers will be less likely to join, or you will attract certain kinds of engineers. When operating on survival mode teams will switch from collaboration to competition. It can become really bad really quickly.
Growing past thousands of people is very hard to do “correctly”. Maybe it’s not even possible.
Async/await is pure syntactic sugar. Look at python 3.0 era coroutines that were iterator/generator based as an example of async coding without special keywords. JS did not need those keywords to enable coroutines and async coding. People were already making their own promises, coroutines, etc. long before the new keywords were added.
>>when it's really just much better 5x-10x-100x.

At seventeen Hussain went on forty-day self-imposed retreat known as a chilla, where a musician practices in isolation until a state is reached in which the music and musician become one. The removal of everyday distractions, combined with single-minded concentration on the practice allows the musician to attain a state of Samadhi or meditative absorption, where one enters into a deeper relationship with one’s own music, and comes in direct contact with the source of music itself. Visions and hallucinations are not uncommon, where one’s musical ancestors may appear and offer encouragement or criticism. What is certain is that the musician makes remarkable progress in his craft. Hussain recalls his first Chilla in Hart’s drumming “I saw things in the music that I had never seen before, new combinations, new patterns”. Six month’s later, against his father’s advice, Zakir was ready to do a second chilla. This time around, the visions were more intense, and Hussain had a premonition that he would soon go to America.

Peter Lavezzoli in Peter Lavezzoli (24 April 2006). The Dawn of Indian Music in the West. Continuum. pp. 108–. ISBN 978-0-8264-1815-9., and this vision came true a year later and Hussain went to America and made a huge successful career for himself.

From : https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Zakir_Hussain_(musician)

What most people don't get-- There are not only 100x professionals, it can also be very hard to understand just far ahead they are when it comes to putting in efforts at a scale normal people can't even imagine.
"The company's management and General Works Council have jointly agreed to pay all eligible employees a special lump sum bonus of up to 7,300 euros, a figure that is even higher than the current maximum payment cap of 6,465 euros."

This General Works Council seems to be something like a separate "union within the company", in addition to whatever union represents various workers within the organization. On top of that, Mercedes Benz has a corporate Supervisory Board with 1/2 of the members representing the employees.

Interesting how this structure has a headline like this one, vs the ">10k workers laid off from giant corporation with record profits for the past two years" headlines that seem to be popping up here daily.
Tech workers at the New York Times have unionized. Not sure what kind of result's they've achieved.

https://nytimesguild.org/tech
Pun not intended but noticed while typing.
> each clearly defined step in makefile would turn into multiple unreadable function calls in cmake

Utter nonsense. For most projects CMake is far more readable and maintainable than Makefiles. There's a reason it's the only build system even close to being a de facto standard in the C++ world.

And yes, CMake is totally awful. But it's still slightly better than Make.

(Feel free to post the Makefile!)
Standard Model of Cosmology Survives a Telescope’s Surprising Finds
Really, do you have some studies on that? I'm pretty sure it was unionization that got us the 40 hour work week.
Unless there's something else involved, most other animals that have good night vision is simply because they have bigger eyes that collect more photons. A single photon test would be the same with those animals eyes versus our own. I think the bigger determining factor is visual acuity as that corresponds to how easy it is to activate a photo receptor area which is easier to do the smaller those areas are.
Your first sentence about loneliness hurts to read. I'd immediately have a few beers with any friend if I knew they were feeling this way, just to talk, vent, whatever. I hope things look up for you.
I used to work in a unionised engineering department. There were benefits, such as being hard to lay off large amounts of the workforce. There were also disadvantages, such as collective bargaining which meant high performers generally weren't rewarded and salaries were generally below market.
Link to actual announcement on their site https://blog.iconfactory.com/2023/01/twitterrific-end-of-an-...
This is why Christmas is becoming more and more important in my life. Apart from milestone birthdays, it's the only time when it's possible to get everyone together.
>Lots of folks saying that his actions are inexcusable, but nobody's provided anything even remotely resembling a solution to them (as you have not here).

Not spraying a homeless person with water is the solution to the current issues he's caused. Suing the city for damages is the solution to homelessness.

> If this guy is going to end up losing his business because of this woman, and he has already exhausted the appropriate legal/government avenues for solving this issue, what should he do? What you're proposing is that he just lose his business. Obviously being sprayed with water is bad, but is that worse than losing a business that you've invested years of your life and large amounts of money in? If not, what is your better solution here? What would you have done if you were him?

If he has not sued the city for damages, he has not "exhausted the appropriate legal/government avenues for solving this issue".

He's not losing his business.

I would have sued the city. You don't get to assault people because you want to. What if he decided he wanted to use a hammer instead of water? Are you "oh well his business" then?
I need a citation for this. IATSE has some of the best benefits (pension and healthcare) for their members in media/entertainment, as I understand it entirely funded by cuts from residuals.

And their take is, directly from their site, "$95.00 per quarter and 1% of gross earnings under the contract."
It probably depends on the company and project. If it's a hugely ambitious one with tons of challenging tasks to work on, then everyone being '10x times better' would mean it'd speed along and get done in about a quarter of the time.

For most projects/companies? I suspect you probably couldn't get much more efficient if everyone was significantly more skilled, and quickly realise how little meaningful work there is to do there. Given 10 super expert programmers the task of creating another CRUD app or client website and I suspect at least 9 of them would probably quit by the end of the month out of boredom.
LGR on youtube had a video on a home automation system from the 80s. IIRC it had a modem listen interface, although I don't recall the details.
if you're losing out to a "diversity hire", you weren't that good.
Journaling about Job Loss Shortens Time to Reemployment (1994)
During this period of tech layoffs I just wanted to highlight some research done 30 years ago which is part of a larger body of research around expressive writing. My apologies for re-wording the title, but the original paper and the linked-to summary have vague / convoluted titles.

Original paper:
Expressive writing and coping with job loss
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1994-39375-001
The Hack proposal is horrible imo because it doesn’t look like JS anymore. The F# proposal is 99% of the benefit whilst being actually approachable.
I've noticed the same as well. My main hypothesis is that parties are just less interesting to all concerned because they're not that novel, and often just retreading old ground.

When you're younger, parties are full of new experiences, lives are often changing rapidly (e.g. jobs/relationships/homes), so parties feel like a worthwhile way to spend time.

As people get older and get more settled, then parties often feel similar to rewatching the same movie over and over (sure it's a great movie, but you'll never recreate the experience of seeing it for the first time). Often less is happening in people's lives too ("How's the job?" "Good, same. How's the house?" "Good, got a new sofa. How are the kids?" "Good, difficult as usual.").

Free time also seems to be more of a premium for me and my friends (as work responsibilities grow, kids take time, need lifts, etc.), so events like parties need to be worthwhile enough to give up other things for.

One way that I approach it is to think of what it is I'm be trying to get out of a party. Meeting new people? There are other approaches for that. Keeping in touch with friends? Smaller gatherings or individual catchups work better.

I.e. rather than trying to recreate my idea of what a party should be, I try to break it into individual apsects that I'm looking for, then try to achieve those using simpler/smaller alternatives, instead of looking to a single party event to provide them all.
We're at the point in hn history where unsubstantiated news reach the front page.
I worked on Sundars team at Google in 2006. He is highly technical and understands the nuance of software.
I have very nerdy and musical follows, no violence of any sort that I can think of other than the occasional snarky vlogger but even those tend to get pruned. I did find that the NI/DRTC method did help me to prune all political content - I do subscribe to one political show for sure because it's genuinely funny (even they rarely get much of a watch these days though), but with a concerted effort over a good week of daily instruction I got it to stop recommending all the talentless pandering pundits of the same stripe who desire my attention.

The real concern is if Google really has accepted money from this channel in exchange for access to the feeds of people who are into violent content. To say that scenario is believable is an understatement, but to believe it is dark. I'd prefer not to.