skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sorry to push back on this but I'm a little suspicious.

I found a list of (independent) errata for the 2nd edition [0], presumably because it was used in a class. I see one note about the "Rule 2" for transistors but, to me at least, it looks like the author just forgot a "not" in the sentence.

In general, the errata looks like what would exist for a textbook that was written by a person. It has mistakes, mostly typos but just a quick glance doesn't uncover some fundamental lack of knowledge from the authors part.

I'm no expert in electronics, so I don't have enough confidence to make a statement about the competency of Scherz, but your assessment seems hyperbolic.

[0] https://my.ece.utah.edu/~ece2210/errata.pdf
Studying Conformance of MANRS Members (routing security)
Why would it matter how much Hohn moans? He is small fry next to Alphabet. It does not look like he even has a seat on the board.

Makes for nice clickbait though, I guess.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/15/alphabet-must-cut-headcount-...

>TCI’s stake represents 0.27% of outstanding Alphabet shares, according to Factset data, a position that the hedge fund has steadily accumulated since 2017.

>However, the company has three classes of shares, and co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin still have solid voting control thanks to their nearly exclusive ownership of Class B shares, according to the firm’s 2022 proxy report. That makes an activist takeover effectively impossible.
So what? I'm not going to live my life for future generations, we only have a limited amount of time in this universe and personally, I don't want to waste it having and raising children for the next couple of decades. I know what one would rebut with, that it's "your" kids and that there's a lot of fun in raising children, and that may be true, but again it is not something that appeals to me and many other people these days.
Alphabet is actually working on some marvels.

But mostly trying to find another cash printing machine before their current one runs out.
The future according to Musk.
I guess practical is a term that changes somewhat based on the level someone is at. As more of a beginner, the book looks great. Eg, for a beginner it's highly practical to learn how to read resistor bands or calculate Ohm's law.

Whereas "for Inventors" seems a bit of sleight-of-hand marketing. Beginners in the field may also identify as and aspire to be inventors, making a more broadly-appealing title vs "for Beginners", though it may have been more accurate.
The lengths to which people go to accommodate line-based diffing algorithms instead of creating better diff tools.
I partially agree with you if he would had suddenly started doing something wrong, but he was doing this for a lot of time and no one complained before. Cloudflare should give him the possibility to clarify or resolve the issue.

Obviously, in some cases immediate shut down is fine (eg. crazy resource usage, serving some illegal content) however doesn't seem to apply here.
Care to elaborate on anything you wrote?
Just electrons
What went right in 2022: the top good news stories of the year
Being laid off and being fired is not the same and this has legal consequences.
No I get the concern. I’m asking how many companies are realistically mitigating that risk, today. Like why is RoJ being called out for it here, when building systems that are tightly tied to various cloud providers is a pretty common thing (and dare I say the risk is even a bit overblown).
My salary is 100, I have to spend 99 on food monthly, leaving me with 1 money as profit. If I can eat only 98 money, I double my profit.

I am not saying that is the case here, but reducing a small percentage of cost could matter if your margin is small. And in the case of those big corps, you can think of them as multiple companies internally, it’s likely they are doing layoff on departments/ divisions that have thin margin or unprofitable (ie. if you are in ads, very few were probably laid off)
Why do people view this with such vile? He's a shareholder, and he's in because he thinks the company will make lots of money.

We should decide whether we like free market capitalism or not. What this guy is doing is very much the core of free market capitalism. He's also not doing something inhumane - it's not about funding new sweatshops or something, it's about not paying extremely high salaries to people if there's no need.

I know we're mostly well-paid tech workers here on HN, and I think we're all a bit scared that power balance might change a bit. I get that - but it doesn't make this action that despicable in my opinion. He's just trying to make money, and a public letter to call our the management is just so much better than eg. releasing self-driving cars that cause accidents or even hyping up worthless "currencies" that'll make less informed and vulnerable people poor.
How much more is that cost, and how does it scale? Are we talking 5%, 10%, 30%?
I keep asking the same question about Vercel and no one wants to give an answer.
I used to run Clara.io. It was a SaaS-based 3D editor. We shifted priorities back in 2015 but we were able to keep Clara.io running until December 2022 with less than one person investment per year. Details: http://www.cgchannel.com/2022/12/clara-io-is-closing-down/

Keeping a well designed website running isn't a major investment. Evolving a product though is.

I think the jury is out whether Twitter is going to continue to being a going concern. It could very well a major success.

But the fact that it didn't just crash and burn isn't that surprising.
> If that is the case, I hope new legislation will correct that oversight very quickly.

i hope that legislation is not introduced to prevent training, as this right would stifle progress.
I mean, if all mechanics and car designers and the entire auto industry were Thanos-snapped, my car would keep running for probably 6 months. There wouldn't be any new cars, though?
This is exactly my knee-jerk opposition to 'refactoring'. In many cases the cause for it isn't that the factor (seams along which the problem was separated) has changed, but rather the factor wasn't known at the time and was more like primitives composed without context or deduplicating patterns/machinery. Going top-down you'd be conceptualizing/picking/naming the factors as you go. Sometimes they change too but not at arbitrary points in layers of implementation, and this all happens sooner than later.
Thanks for the link. Simply disgusting.
True, I phrased it too strongly. Let's put it this way: zfs (or btrfs, ...) can make for a bullet-proof system through checksumming and self-healing. However, its Achilles heel is non-ECC RAM. With it, at least in theory and excluding universal disaster, data can live perpetually and remain intact indefinitely. Without ECC, zfs remains at the mercy of what the RAM might get wrong. That's what I remember learning about it a while ago.
No established company invests 75% of their people into new features and services. There was definitely bloat. The degree of bloat is the unknown.
Sounds like you happened to get a good batch or a good manufacturer.

I had some from around the same time that were becoming unreadable by the mid-2000s.

The point is, you can't count on them lasting unless you specifically go out and buy the archival type.
Mostly, I try to be a better person. For a living, I trade futures and do contract software dev work.
As I remember my military history book, all modern weapon systems are unreliable and need adequate supplies and protection by other systems. Modern meaning "since Alexander".

The systems which need protection also protect their protectors, in complex ways, against different threats. As a simple example, some weapons like howitzers are kept well behind the front line and shoot across it. They protect the front-line troops, but if the troops weren't there the enemy could reach the howitzers.
> wow. the hubris and inhumanity

It's a business, not a charity. They have absolutely no obligation to keep tens of thousands of overpaid people on their payroll. It's not like we're talking about abused minimum-wage workers with no alternatives here either. And they're getting some pretty big severance packages, too.

I feel bad for the people on work visas, but that's a problem with the American immigration system, not Alphabet, and would apply anyone working at any company that needs to lay off people.
Instead of the focus on AI, I'd like to see something like Shortcuts on iOS, which allows users to automate frequent tasks, and due to being developed by Google it would be a first class citizen of the OS, for which app developers will add integrations.

That way it at least serves the user, and not a paperclip maximiser for engagement.
I disagree. I think that companies should have a strong obligation to back their employees during downturns otherwise it is just another form of externalization: make the profits when you can and saddle society with the costs when you can't. That leads to more and more wealth inequality.
"Beyond Measure" [0], by James Vincent, is a good well researched read on the history of metrology. He doesn't mention the Dombey story. He does conclude [p. 265] that the ultimate reason that the imperial system stuck in the US and Great Britain (100 years after Dombey) was that these economies were dominant incumbents and didn't /need/ to change. Great Britain had metric and imperial in parallel. For the US, the switching cost was too high.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jun/07/beyond-measure...
What would be interesting is if these layoffs ended up becoming the spark for widespread unionization within the tech industry.

Even with the economic downturn, a lot of the companies that did these layoffs still were making massive profits.

Maybe these companies need an organized counterweight to the activist investors in the form of a union.
It just means "we have no idea what they were thinking".
less than a year is called short term capital gains, it's basically same as ordinary income, except can be negative )
Yes, sadly, there is nothing illegal about being a giant pile of <moderators will ban me for continuing this sentence>.

Instead of suing, unionize and take a bit of the power we all ceded to the hedge fund managers back. It won't make things perfect, but at least you'll have federal protections and Weingarten rights and the like and the ability to push back and have the tiniest bit of power in your work place.
Taken as a whole SI units are really what makes the difference
But no license (that I'm aware of) says "You are allowed to read this source code, but you may not produce work as a result of learning from it"; for a start, that would clearly be impractical to enforce.
> Demonstrating ability to trim staff without affecting revenue.

That is, demonstrating the business was suboptimal?
This is awarding incompetent.
More religious yes, but not necessarily meaningfully “poorer” (at least not if the goal is a sustainable TFR). France and the US had birth rates around 2 as recently as the early aughts.

Two big issues are probably the cost of housing, and educational credential inflation. Young people these days spend four years in college, and concomitantly postpone establishing their real lives by four years, just to get the kind of office jobs prior generations got with a high school diploma.
Are there ads on Google Images? Then Google doesn't care.
Tokens-Pls: A Web Application to Test OAuth2 Code Flows
Anyone else experienced google trying to be too clever for their own good lately? I've had a couple of searches where they incorrectly started recognising synonyms that didn't fit the context (e.g. file+extensions -> file+plugins).

For now duckduckgo works a lot better when you want to search for literal keywords.
> Twitter laying off 75% and still running fine is the elephant in the room here...

Only for people who don't know how software works.
Just wanted to note that while the posts were terse, I can't say I would consider them arrogant or non constructive. If I were the author of Enigma I'd be thrilled to get feedback from Filippo. Also, it seems immediately constructive just from the reply you replied to.

That said, I kind of have to agree, "you don't know what you don't know" often holds true in the matter of cryptography, and failure tends to be pretty damaging to the user. Actually, not posting a disclaimer when trying to solve a difficult problem as an amateur might be what should be considered arrogant.
Is this guy serious? Imagine having so much money and then being mad for other people trying to earn more money so that they don't have to work for 40 years.

There is absolutely no accountability today. Is it not the CEO at fault if the company made a wrong decision? If he gets to reap the benefits his employees make which results in him getting obscene compensation, is it then not logical to also get a pay reduction if employees get fired.

I have a feeling these CEOs would be a lot less willing to do firings on a whim, if by firing 20k people they lost 30% of their compensation.

The older I get, the more I realize how much Nassim Taleb is right. All of the points made in his book are valid and are still standing the test of time.
There is no Skin in The Game today, hedgies and C-execs just jump ship when it is time to face your consequences. There is a big difference between being a Founder and being a CEO. The former actually deserves some respect.
Ah yes, one or two TikTok videos means that thousands of people at a company aren't working hard. Get real.
We're talking about a publicly traded company. They don't "take on" investors.
Being an Amateur in IT
I would not have criticized if they started as a "private" AI company, or hey, just an AI company trying to figure it out in this market. Every one is. However, they took the higher morale ground and named themselves as such: OpenAI. And as soon as they had some good results (gpt-2 and gpt-3) they flipped instantly. I think, they thought, that they had a unique edge comparing to anyone else, and they'll own the market.

They are wrong, and I think in the future, they'll be just another AI company out there.
> How is this responsibility defined?

For sure not seppuku. Probably nothing will happen. In big companies it is a golden parachute, but this is not a big company.
When I read your comment, I assumed he actually had a 365 million salary, which would be amazing. He'd be paying 50% tax on the majority of that. I'd actually give him some respect for that, actually paying tax "fairly" and not optimizing.

But no, it's not his salary, it's dividends.
Yeah, if I was on one of the core teams I'd be quite annoyed at having given a big chunk of my time bringing coworkers on board just to see them laid off.
Job security might be a good thing at the individual level, but imo it's pretty awful at the system level. It promotes inefficiencies.
It's much better to have a liquid employment market with a solid social net instead.

Switzerland does it pretty well. Employment is at will (in that employers can fire anyone without a justification), but health insurance is mostly not tied to employment, and you get 70% of your salary for up to two years. Compare to say France, where short term contracts are very common and other shitty employment practices abounds because employers are scared to commit.
> I've previously assumed that the choice there is either:

> a) don't save CC info at all

> b) save CC info in tokenized form (whatever that means)

> And since I never save CC info on websites (only in the phone wallet feature) I've always rejected these "tokenized" prompts. But it seems I need to research this thing more next time.

Tokenization means that the payment processor saves your cc information for "easier" use when you make purchases/pay bills in the future. The seller/service provider can of course use that token to charge you anytime they want. I hope this helps with understanding how it works(and why I am hesitant to allow tokenization of my cards).
In a home with only responsible adults, it would be fine. With kids it would be a repeat of the olden days before unlimited texting when the parents would get the cellphone bill at the end of the month.

But I wonder how soon we’ll have fine-tuned or otherwise customized specialized LLMs that are cheaper to run? In the mean time this kind of thing is a really neat proof-of-concept of how ChatGPT’s abilities can be harnessed.
Standard zero-sum business school stuff. Translation: focus on cost-cutting like a mature, stable utility or industrial company, not growth.

Interesting argument for a purported long-term investor.
I have written a web site in C about twenty years ago, and it was terrible. Absolutely Turing Tarpit category, the language is just completely inadequate for this problem and so you spend all your effort trying to build something which is suitable out of the language, which again, yes, Turing Completeness, of course it's technically possible but it's a bad idea.

Web sites are full of strings, and C doesn't really grok strings. Not in the way WUFFS doesn't grok strings (there are no strings in WUFFS, it has no string type, it's not a general purpose language it's not for that), more like the way New Forest ponies don't grok traffic laws.
Unless the resulting "derivative work" is sufficiently transformative. Which, i would argue, training an AI/ML is.

Therefore, using a training dataset does not constitute copyright violation.

If the AI outputted an exact copy (or a close enough copy, that the laymen would agree it's a copy), then that particular instance of the AI's output is in violation of copyright. The AI model itself violate any copyright.
There's always bloat somewhere, but some of that bloat is there to allow your company to weather unexpected occurrences.

Sure you have two extra SREs you don't "need", and your HR department might be slightly overstaffed. But then one critical employee gets cancer and is off work for 6 months, and another employee has to go on maternity leave, and you don't have any extra employees in that department anymore. Hope you didn't fire your bloat!
Here is the thing...

Person A and B create system X that is responsible for some % increase in revenue.

Person A and B should be compensated well, so they don't go over there and create system Y. Especially given the FTC might be clamping down on non-competes, this is a plausible scenario.

Person A and B eventually tired of maintaining system X, so they bring in new people. The new people, once they have earned the trust of persons A and B are now the successors. The successors should also be paid well for the same reasons.

Scale this up, and you get the salaries.

I know this because I spent my career becoming the new persons A and B, and the bean counters always hated people like me.

The salaries are thus well deserved, but that is why the companies are trying to create electronic slaves that can be driven by a few persons A and B.
When you can't afford getting a house/apartment big enough to have kids comfortably, and the job eats most of your life getting kids just looks like massive problem.

So fixing that would be a good start.
> Future generations will replace you and your wife with those who think quite differently.

If that is so, how can people like this exist today, after hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution? Could it be that biological evolution alone does not predetermine one's desire to procreate?
Compensating Employees During a Recession
Times are good now. $3.6 billion is $36 billion in a decade. One day, Google may need that money to survive. Also, Google’s 2022 profit was $67 billion (down significantly from 2021) so they just increased profits by more than 5%.
I'm still a datalog guy, but imo PRQL is indeed the nicest of the SQL family. Thanks for the hard work, and best of luck.
Interestingly a common pattern: fork (and no exec) is also what Android does [0] to not only speed up Kotlin / Java app start-up but save on allocation of shared dex/bytecode (a couple dozen megabytes); code: https://archive.is/GMka3

[0] The state of ASLR on Android 5 (2015), https://archive.is/ADx65 (copperhead.co).
The Western media loves to nitpick on Japan because it puts us to shame on almost every front. The country is clean, safe, efficient beyond anything the average Joe can imagine. Let me spell it out for you: Western countries are kind of a shithole compared to Japan. The issues the author wrote down pale in comparison to what we're dealing with. I just can't take this kind of criticism seriously with the sheer amount of filth, crime and misery that's part of any major Western city. I had the privilege to live in Japan for one year, the real culture shock was coming back home to what we call normal.
In human societies younger working people take care of elderly people who can’t work. Financial systems can’t change that fundamental dynamic, it can only shift things around. You can’t eat stocks. They are just an earmark on the productive capacity of the working generation.
Agreed. This is the first book that made stuff click for me and helped me enjoy electronics.
Early high-density development unit from Palm
I live in Western Europe and immigrants make up most of our bus drivers, trash collectors, store assistants, nurses, taxi drivers, builders and basically anybody who has repair skills (clothing, tech etc). Also, many of my colleagues in tech came to this country to work. So it's a mix, because immigrants also take jobs that the natives aren't qualified to do. And that's a good thing.
> Nobody would sue you for copyright infringement if you memorized a book, song or movie in your head.

No, but what if you then produce "your own" rendition, or "remix", of that book, song or movie and offer it to the public? E.g. you memorize a collection of Taylor Swift's latest songs, and then start performing a medley of her hits in your local clubs, you may well find yourself in trouble.
The title is missing the prefix "Generative".
I also interpreted it as eyes watering up on the verge of crying.
Nothing (that aligns with classically liberal values). Offering child rearing incentives like free childcare, education, outright money, etc does not seem to work, such as in the Nordic countries. People who grow and experience wealth simply don't want to have kids.

If you truly want to raise the birth rate, at any cost, you would reduce education levels, make people poorer, raise religiosity, and ban contraception and abortive services for not just women but everyone. But your country's economy would suffer over and above the slowed birth rate you'd otherwise have.

In the future though, with artificial wombs, I'd imagine we'd go through a Brave New World type scenario where the government grows children themselves (and maybe has the bright idea to stratify the children's gender, race and intellectual capacity as well, but the latter is unlikely if we have AI and robots that do the jobs instead of needing perpetually content Street cleaners).
That's what a real corporate leader says! (/s)
Agreed. They are not letting go of major contributors. Note that this is not the same as "top talent". Leetcode is not that important.
>If you have properly set pension system population decline is completely irrelevant and beneficial for everyone.

excuse me? pensions need a robust young population to work. otherwise who is going to be providing all those goods and services the pensioners want to pay for?
An investor who holds enough equity to get Sundar on the phone?

You think they took a $6B position without chatting with the company about it?
> Probably nothing will happen.

That's what I'm worried about and that's why I'm calling BS on this. The executive uses big words like "responsibility", I'd like to know what concrete measures are then hidden behind it.
Are you expecting people on tiktok to post videos of their actual workday of "Sat behind a screen for 8 hours, tapping on a keyboard"? I get its a bad look, but people purposefully curate their images and lives on social media platforms to look more fun/exciting/interesting than they actually are.