skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is writers block and is very common, don’t give up.

My solution was to stand in my lab for hours with an iPad on a stand and dictate 70 pages of my thesis.

It was actually an invigorating experience and you learn a bunch of random Siri/dictation syntax to boot.

Also, if I were to do it again today, try using chatgpt to write the bulk fluff from some outline concepts. The quality of your thesis doesn’t matter as much as doing the bare minimum to graduate :)
Would also be good to have a dedicated emacs mode for faster editing; you could use it with polymode and latex/python/cc/matlab-mode with some function for converting regions of iheartla to the appropriate language inline.
The TSA no fly list is a blatant violation of the Constitution: for the government to be able to remove a right, you must be convicted at trial.

The fact it still exists at all is incredible, but a disturbing precedent.
Or maybe another way to look at productivity and effectiveness is that there are the ~1/10 performers and top performers at 1 x, of which in most fields there are very few, but there are lots of 1/3 … 1/10th performers.
I would be surprised if 1 in 10 drivers do that or even anticipate the acceleration or deceleration of surrounding cars.

Regardless this is an error margin and reactions speed issue ?
It’s not like if the car can’t abort if the error margin keeps shrinking
That's "lost" money in the sense of compared-to-being-paid-in-gold.

One could also say that dollar-based annual comp dropped 7% in 2022 due to inflation.

And out of the three of those, stock has the best prospects for future appreciation, if one can afford to hold, which I imagine most C-levels can.
This presupposes that the first computers to become self-aware and self-directed will have a) physical bodies that they can move at will, and b) the ability to communicate their thoughts/desires to us in a language that we can understand.

I think those are both fairly large assumptions (especially a).

I think that if we ever end up creating something that is self-aware, it is much more likely that either

1) it will be 100% intentional on our part, and its sapience and agency will be a cause for great celebration on the part of those closest to it, or

2) it will be a self-awareness and intelligence that is nearly incomprehensible to us.

(If it is #2, then its sapience and agency could very well still be a cause for great celebration on the part of those closest to it, once we actually understand it.)
He did not even say america was an authoritarian regime, you made that argument up yourself
TL;DR: trade association
I'm not in Twitter, but I clicked that link just to see what you're talking about. I must've scrolled 50 messages and saw a total of 2 pepes. That's it.

Maybe Twitter is showing you that based on your historical account behavior? :-)
Happy no, but he didn't fire them because he had to. He fired them because that's what's expected of a CEO, maximizing shareholder value.

You know, he could have fired 11k instead of 12k. I'm sure he sleeps just fine and would have also been okay with 15k.
I got a lot out of "Unknown Quantity" by John Derbyshire. Subtitle a real and imaginary history of algebra. I particularly enjoyed the lead up to the Chapter "Assault on the Quintic".

Also, I hold "The Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers" close to my heart for the endless fun it brought me.
> What "negative consequences" would you like to see?

None. But if taking responsibility for someone else's injury just involves saying that you're taking responsibility, it's nothing but playing with words.

If your grandmother got sick, I don't think you should be punished. But if you take responsibility for your grandmother getting sick, in English people will expect that you're at her house taking care of her until she's well.
Yes but
Back in the day https://m.twitter.com worked great everywhere: Lynx, Links, Dillo, Emacs, a toaster, everwyhere. Even under low bw places. Now Twtr's turd without Ublock Origin it's unusable. Also, no JSless clients, so bye legacy users with underpowered smartphones and desktops/laptops.
It is still market manipulation, but made legal by the US gov, like other crimes such as lobbying.
sure, but the problems back then were immediate for google et al: "we need more people to deal with the increased flow". they hoped those covid patterns will remain after covid. they didn't.
i agree, except for the scaling, a 10x can make an entire project it takes 100s of engineers for, and they'll do it in magnitudes less code.

but that long topic aside... i was just pointing out the ideal environment for "10x programmers".

you put a 10x on a team and treat them the same, they become a 1x (or worse because they are bored and procrastinate), the others will drag them down to their level.

to make teams work, let the 10x design and develop the initial system solely. then the 1x work in a scoped domain (using a plugin/extension system etc) within the 10x's vision
I'm not sure what's wild about it. As far as I've seen, what I said is entirely true.

- If someone very low on the totem pole (ex. factory worker) is late a few times, they're far more likely to be fired than someone higher up.

- If a low/mid level manager at a company screws up a project so bad that a bunch of people under them get layed off, they're far more likely to lose their job then a VP that does the same.

The point isn't that everyone should get laid off for every mistake. The point is that, the higher up you are, the less likely you are to face _any_ consequences at all for any mistakes. And it's also not a certainly; just a probability.
> You shouldn't concern yourself with how high you rank in this hierarchy.

I find that many people commonly believe themselves to be a >1x programmer who is simply misunderstood, which is damaging. This leads to them thinking they deserve more, and therefore can make less effort to compensate this delta, or imagining that those above them who disagree with their own characterization must be idiots.
I've always thought of myself and my family as oddly stoic, though less over time. We don't react, we form attachments well. We deal with people pretty well, but tend to be solitary. We also tend to like controlling our emotions.
Oh, you would be surprised.

I once met a bank director that would call Google “those hippies”. In his view Googlers where “not enough money-centered”.
To be fair, the skills required to do what is written about here are basically fancy-googling, not exactly "most capable hackers" level. The author walked around town and turned the knob on all the doors they could see. Some doors weren't locked.
Mouse wheels. That‘s the issue. They mostly scroll only vertically. Horizontal scrolling frequently is a massive pain for everyone involved.
"Full responsibility" is just humblebragging. Superficially, it's humility about making strategic mistakes that led to the need for the layoffs. But really, it's bragging to Wall Street. "I am tough, confident CEO. I know what takes to make shareholder value and line go up. Praise me!"
This is opposite. Marketing budget is second to be cut first being building (space expansion). The R&D budget however goes up mid recession.
Here is how the cuts work
R&D, space expansion, marketing, parties, raises, new product building, warehouses,
Multicolor Ghostbyte Shine-Through: How to Make an Unexpanded C64 Border Scroll
I don't understand your thought process. Who is owning this "account" on which "strikes" are going to happen? Twitter?
GitHub introduces CodeQL, a new tool for automated code review and vulnerability
Sadly the Gen-Z ers are not used to the term RSS, download and offline. Specially for podcasts.
Not to mention the devs who can look at a problem and say, "Software isn't the right solution for this. Let me give so-and-so a call and we'll have this ironed out in 5 minutes."
Yes, exactly. I don't buy this "contagious" notion. It's simply a change in acceptable behavior. Everyone else is doing this objectionable thing, so suddenly it isn't as objectionable, relatively.

It's like looting. If you take any one looter out of the environment, it's unlikely that he would act. But when the crowd of a thousand gets going, well, he doesn't want to be left with nothing while everyone else is gaining. Gotta strike while the iron's hot.
"Some of you may die but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make"
Sounds exactly like Masterclass edutainment.
Pg_idkit: Postgres Extension for Generating UUIDs
Dear mystery HN’er, thank you so much. I hadn’t heard about RSSM, and your explanation was wonderfully helpful.

Much appreciated. Have a great weekend :)
It does have an effect on his life if the group he belongs to isn't a "diverse" one. I say this as someone who would probably be considered "diverse", I'd like to be judged based on my merits not by diversity quotas the blue haired gestapo has dictated.
In any field where there are multiple possible directions for optimization 10x can be in many different directions.

Compare GRRM with Stephen King. Both are very skilled authors but one is releasing books like clockwork and the other has propensity for getting authors block. Is one of them a 10x author and the other not? I think the answer depends on your reading taste.
Perhaps dropping to a single income would make kids a more tolerable experience.
Which areas of the business are likely to be impacted? I assume it'd be primarily ads, but any other obvious areas I'm not aware of?
>- where US law does not apply.

Us law applies wherever they want. Very, very few governments will refuse a request....it's too expensive in the long run.
I also have a few wireless switches, and in some cases, the light doesn't immediately respond to a press requiring a few tries, and sometimes it doesn't respond at all. Could be distance, could be the battery is running out, but either way it's a problem I'd never had with regular light switches. At our last remodeling, I had some of them removed and replaced by regular wired switches wherever possible. Nothing beats the user experience of direct interaction with a system.
Tests find the 0.1x developers that studied for the test.
> "It" refers to inanimate objects

It may do so in English, but it is Swiss, so probably also speaks German, where 'it' - 'es' is Genus Neutrum, exactly meaning neutral gender. For example 'the child' - 'das Kind' is neutrally gendered. Hope this makes sense.
Love it when someone just throws up the first study with their keyword in it. I get a potentially relevant study to parse through, which I feel is good for my brain probably. Then I get to cite chunks of their own reference right back at them to explain exactly how wrong they are.
Being put to good use is what multiplies profits imo. Don't get me wrong, i have seen with skilled/learned engineers, taking horrible technical decisions and causing their companies a lot of financial headaches. So I understand what you mean. Especially about "managing finances ahead of the game".

But at Google's scale (and profits..) it was a little weird to see(/not see?) no efforts of reorganization before all those layoffs.
This is just about what to call the variable. Instead of:

if disable_foo:
...

I'm recommending:

if not enable_foo:
...
Twitter officially bans third-party clients after cutting off prominent devs
It would be probably be very successful as a fake-rich influencer
Easier but not better.
If you have a performance problem, there is a process in place to to deal with it. Not easy, but it gives the employee notice and the opportunity to improve. Vs. Gone.
In my experience, there certainly exists a 10x gap between those who aren't very helpful and those who are extremely helpful. That is the crux of the research as I understand it anyway: You'll find a big distribution in talent, but a median producer is not 1/10 the best.

I've found those who produce significantly faster do so by creating well justified shortcuts that do not sacrifice the end goals (but may run around the requirements a little.)

That's exactly the story in TFA: Someone decided "I'm not going to satisfy this silly requirement of writing tests, I'm going to just auto-generate some tests, regardless of whether this has full coverage of all corner cases, because I bet everyone is just happier to move on."

This is why I believe a 10x-er can be trained, by building a deep toolbox of solutions to pull from, learning to read the room when it comes to designs, and learning to recognize and take well-justified shortcuts whenever possible.
It means "I take the blame and some consequences thrown at me" .. that means yes I will do nothing just absorb the hit which is probably nothing.
> One thing that most people don't realize (or willingly try not to think about) is that every "higher education" level, all the way from the BSc to the last day of your PhD, is actually, first and foremost, a selection process.

I also have no interest in funding a selection process with my taxes (EU resident), I have an interest in funding a process which prepares people to be productive members of society, which means prepares them to contribute in a commercial for-profit setting as without this the state has no revenue with which to fund anything.

I also don't think what it selects for is of particular value to industry.
I'm so rapidly becoming someone who just feels no guilt. It's balance against the abject anxiety I feel no matter what day or time of day it is. The balance against waking up on in a panic that's it's 9:30a and I missed 2 hours of EU meetings only to realize that it's Sunday and everything is fine and I'm supposed to be relaxing. It's clearly not healthy.

But yeah, I've got a FAANG(+? what's it called now? I think I'm in whatever the new one is called now?), and the market isn't _so_ bad, I think? But at the end of the day, the checks clear, and it's mostly on me to decide and act on the prerogative that software is just software, and I need to chill. (But it's really hard...9s are addictive...)
Of course he faces consequences for getting that wrong. He's losing the services of 12k (soon to be former) employees and the costs it takes to separate them. Those employees are now job searchers, but they were able to take advantage of months or years of Google's infamously adequate pay and benefits. They shouldn't have any trouble finding jobs with Google on their resume.

I get the impression from your writing (and others in this thread) that you feel Google owes something to it's employees other than adequate compensation and a mutually acceptable working environment. That's not how (US) companies work. The CEO has obligations to the board of directors (to run the company in a way they approve) and to the shareholders (to be profitable). No obligation exists to employ as many people for as long as possible, particularly when to do so would impact the aforementioned actual obligations of CEOs. This is why layoffs happen.

When labor is cheap and business is booming, you hire. When labor expenses increase or business declines, you fire. Sometimes that means layoffs to hit quarterly goals. Sometimes that means your five year strategy has a pandemic and economic downturn happen in year three and you have to downscale. The CEO has to take responsibility for that, as he does for everything the company does, but any apology relating is simply a socially graceful admission he lacks omniscience.
Seems like a bit of both. Serge Vakulenko of RetroBSD has responded recently to issues filed on RetroBSD, but has stated that he has limited time to work on adding ports for other architectures.

https://github.com/RetroBSD/retrobsd/issues/87
It sounds like what you're experiencing is a sense of freely-chosen duty to the company, rather than that duty being taken for granted. It's perfectly okay to choose to feel duty to your employer. A company can earn your respect and sense of obligation, and then instead of resenting the demands it makes on your time, you can feel a genuine sense of shared purpose that drives additional levels of commitment.
Do you mean iCloud keychain? That's arguably one of the most secure cloud storage in existence.
Only accepting remote work positions has fixed this problem for me.
Open source high value domain purchase data
Random question from someone who's never touched ML professionally:

Can we optimize hyper-params the same way we optimize weights and biases (e.g gradient descent)? Or would that be too expensive (since you have to optimize weights and biases for each hyper-param configuration)?

Of course that might lead to hyper-hyper-params...
My dude, if you are among the lucky few who survive the initial filter of starvation, disease and mass violence following a nuclear conflict I wish you the best leading your band of raiders across the Great Plains or Central Valley feasting on the scraps of civilization and eventually dying of dysentery, typhus, scarlet fever or simple exposure.

I am not here for that lifestyle.
I think folks miss the point when thinking about 10x devs. The point is that there are some folks out there that can do the work of entire teams or entire companies.

When you have a team you have hours long sync meetings, communication lag, and middle managers. A single capable individual doesn't need any of that.

The tradeoff is that the resulting code might be unmaintainable in practice.
Minecraft is a great example. Notch wrote the complete game largely by himself (with one or two other folks), but now that it's managed by a team and owned by a megacorp, it's effectively rewritten. With 100x more people is it 100x better? Probably not
crimew's stated viewpoint and goals are "radical transparency". Hiding her legal name would go against this goal. It has nothing to do with competency and everything to do with her worldview.
it absolutely sucks ass and is a major psychological hit. Also, when lesser brands decide to follow the trend these companies so prominently follow, it will be even worse.
Literally defined an echochamber.
I understand perfectly well how I achieved success: a little bit of work and a whole lot of luck, mainly in the form of being in the right place at the right time on more than one occasion. The problem is not that this is hard to understand, the problem is that it is hard to replicate, even for me.
Untangle – Solving problems with fuzzy constraints
I understand the frustration with the PR corporate speak, but that’s to be expected of one of the largest companies in the world.

Cash on hand isn’t a reason to keep people. They probably recognize there’s unhealthy parts of the organization, and this is a restructuring opportunity. It sucks from the employees side.

employee at will goes two ways, and saying that this is bounds for a “revolution” seems a bit far stretched.

Yeah it’s shit, and sucks for anyone who looses a job regardless of severance. Typically at this scale, it’s not on the individual as to why he/she got fired.

But your rhetoric reminds me of a mid-century revolutionary calling to overthrow the Provisional government.

Let history be a teacher as to the consequences of that.
As a 1/10th developer, I can confirm that net negative devs exist.
The funny thing is, the companies themselves muddy the water significantly. By buying critic websites, critics and and raising there own numbers for cultural relevance and viewers. But money does not lie, and as soon as the audience has to pay for something, the real viewerbase shows some streaming empires naked.
while I agree with the attitude you promote. But it is not that simple. If your visa is attached to your job, you are pretty much fucked. Same goes if you decided to leave your previous job just to join Google (because it was your dream) and now you are let go - you are fucked.

So yes, it is your responsibility to take care of yourselves. But it is hard to be prepared for everything and layoffs like this one doesn't make it easier.
OK I'm a human and it looked like a good Idea to start this bot. Will remove the bot and these comments. Sorry for the trouble/the interruption
> I'm sure he's not happy about it.

Why is it that some people make up internal states for people that they've never met? He may have fought for months internally in order to lay off 12K people. He may be disappointed to the point of despair that it wasn't 20K, as he may have originally recommended.

Being against making up callousness shouldn't be responded to by making up concern.
Meta did, I think MSFT and GOOG will do as well. It has to be balanced among all sorts of groups otherwise the company is liable to be sued.
Most hedge funds don't beat the market, and this is widely known. Moreover, from the few that beat the market, some are involved in insider trading and other deceptive practices. From the remaining ones, a good portion can be explained by sheer luck.
This comment from a NYT opinion piece by former Slack CPO added some clarity as to one reason why tech companies are doing this: pressure from investors to keep the share price up. Public companies lose that freedom to do whatever they want even if they have tons of money in the bank.

> Meta and Salesforce combined lost more than $700 billion in market cap last year. Both companies are now dealing with activist investors who have taken prominent positions in their stocks. The activists have called for the companies to slash costs, reduce nonstrategic investments and, notably in Meta’s case, aggressively reduce its work force.

edit: link to article: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/19/opinion/tech-layoffs-meta...
One of the great stories:

In early 1982, the Lisa software team was trying to buckle down for the big push to ship the software within the next six months. Some of the managers decided that it would be a good idea to track the progress of each individual engineer in terms of the amount of code that they wrote from week to week. They devised a form that each engineer was required to submit every Friday, which included a field for the number of lines of code that were written that week.

Bill Atkinson, the author of Quickdraw and the main user interface designer, who was by far the most important Lisa implementer, thought that lines of code was a silly measure of software productivity. He thought his goal was to write as small and fast a program as possible, and that the lines of code metric only encouraged writing sloppy, bloated, broken code.

He recently was working on optimizing Quickdraw's region calculation machinery, and had completely rewritten the region engine using a simpler, more general algorithm which, after some tweaking, made region operations almost six times faster. As a by-product, the rewrite also saved around 2,000 lines of code.

He was just putting the finishing touches on the optimization when it was time to fill out the management form for the first time. When he got to the lines of code part, he thought about it for a second, and then wrote in the number: -2000.

I'm not sure how the managers reacted to that, but I do know that after a couple more weeks, they stopped asking Bill to fill out the form, and he gladly complied.

https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...
we are measuring something about humanity here
Ah, yeah, that's where I heard it from first. Thanks!
This was a point that was brought up after the Meta layoffs. Yes the executives lost a lot of money before the layoffs - but they also benefited the most from the post layoff bounce! And none of them were laid off…
You are not entitled to your multi-six figure job, and no one should feel bad for you if the company decides you are an excess. If you are not creating enough value to justify your presence, the company has every right and frankly society should demand that you be let go, otherwise you are wasting all of our finite resources. Sure, Google should have been a bit more cautious in their hiring during the unsustainable COVID bubble conditions, but at least they are correcting the mistake now.

This sort of attitude is exactly what makes left coast limousine liberal tech workers so insufferable to the rest of the country. Thanks for living up to the stereotype