skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I shut down during off hours, 100%. One of the perks of not being front-line.

HOWEVER, I don't work at Google. Every Googler I encountered seems to be selected because they are naturally confused by the term "work-life balance" or look forward to vacation so they can spend time on projects that need deep focus.

So yes, "they didn't check their email?" does seem an appropriate comment to me
Probably not. But if you owned a warehouse and you left it unlocked without security, and someone steels from it stuff that is owned by somebody else, then maybe you are liable somewhat.
Are layoffs at a furniture reseller something hackers find interesting?
I call this "the plumbing law of the internet business."
I use the Feedbro RSS reader which can subscribe to twitter accounts as RSS feeds. It gives you what you want: Every unread post highlighted for each account, and you don't even need a twitter account.

The Nitter fronted supports RSS feeds directly so you can use any RSS reader, and never need to even connect to twitter.com. For example this is Carmack's RSS feed: https://nitter.net/ID_AA_Carmack/rss
I saved this to copy/paste whenever I hear about a party I'm not invited to (my fussiness scales negatively)
The larger companies get, the fewer moves they can actually pull off. There aren't that many options on the buffet table, so it can look like everyone is eating the same thing.
> Their many modifications included some fine- tuning of the keyboard design in the course of which the "R" wound up in the place previously allotted to the period mark "." Thus were assembled into one row all the letters which a salesman would need to impress customers, by rapidly pecking out the brand name: TYPE WRITER

> Touch typing gave rise to three features of the evolving production system which were crucially important in causing QWERTY to become "locked in" as the dominant keyboard arrangement. These features were technicalinterrelatedness,econ- omies of scale, and quasi-irreversibility of investment. They constitute the basic ingredients of what might be called QWERTY- nomics.

>Technical interrelatedness, or the need for system compatibility between keyboard "hardware" and the "software" represented by the touch typist's memory of a particular arrangement of the keys, meant that the expected present value of a typewriter as an instrument of production was dependent upon the availability of compatible software created by typists' decisions as to the kind of keyboard they should learn.

Full pdf here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305389640_Clio_and_...
Google is too big to be efficient

Layoff would be inevitable. Reading its past history, the current Google is nothing like what is was. It used to be a pretty intense place where creators are eager to work (check the history of Android book, it is very informative on that)

Now it is famous for getting paid without caring
VCard: RFC 6350 file format standard for electronic business cards
This is what I'm talking about. There are and will continue to be AIs that aren't language models at all. Do not incorporate them, do not use them, are not based on them, do not have the same characteristics. They already exist and already affect our lives and world.

Large Language Models are not equal to AI. Making conclusions about "AI" from "LLM"s is not valid.

And the day will come when some other model entirely outperforms the LLMs. Personally I think there's a bit of a selection process in play here, where they are the most flashy and impressive AI models to date, but if you get down to it, they are not in fact very useful. Almost every use I've seen proposed for the LLMs range from completely impractical to "yeah, it'll sort of work, but you'll never really be able to count on your LLM to do that, it confabulates too much and too freely and it's not something you can fix because confabulation is the very foundation of the technology". Honestly if I had to guess LLMs will be seen to be a dead end in another 10 or 20 years. AI will not.

(Or, to put it another way, LLMs are the AI equivalent of a demo-scene demo. The demos look very impressive. But if you try to naively look at a great demoscene demo and then come to conclusions based on that demo as to what the underlying hardware is capable of, you will be hugely misled. What you see is not the normal capability of the system, you see a hyper-optimized system being driven to its absolute limits to achieve the visible results you see, and it can't do anything else because it has already "spent" all of the engineering budget available. I see LLMs very similarly. Very impressive. Nowhere near as useful as the demo may make you superficially think, though. If I were trying to build an "AI startup", I would be zigging to everybody else's zag and looking at what else the AI world is producing; I think there's far less potential in the LLMs than meets the eye.)

Unfortunately the things the LLMs are best at will be flooding the internet with an infinite stream of directed content and manifesting the Dead Internet theory.

Edit: Here's a concrete example. Consider Boston Dynamic's robots. Do they run on a Large Language Model? No. Of course not. The question doesn't even hardly make sense. But whatever they will be doing, they do with AI. ChatGPT can't kill you, except through a very lengthy and strained series of events. Boston Dynamic's robots and their fellows can.
Interestingly, I'm currently reading a book on the history of austerity and the author shows how worker councils were a thing in the UK during and immediately after WW1; however, austerity was put in place to systematically prioritize capital and the minority capital class over working class people. Lest that sound slightly conspiratorial the author cites specific memos and comments from the Treasury at the time that make that point explicit. They simply insisted that working class would have to "sacrifice" so that the system of capital could be restored. The interests of capital was always prioritized; it was all that mattered. People were expected to be more productive, consume less, and earn less.
> you just don't stand near cliffs

Actually we don’t _just_ do that - we also put up fences, we reinforce parts of cliffs that need to stay up, we supply safety equipment to people who need to be there for some reason

Similarly with companies, we don’t just “avoid going near them” (is that actually your proposed solution - opting out of society?); we regulate, we unionise, we hold people accountable and make the most blatantly harmful behaviours illegal
I guess yes but the question is how do you model it and with what tools. And what are the questions you want to have answered with a Markov chains? Not to mention that they can likely explode with the number of data points.
I also have no idea what I am talking about.
Maybe the incentives don't align with possibly being forced to die in the front lines of world war three? Military recruits tend to be younger folks, and if you haven't noticed they aren't particularly enamored with the state as it stands today.
If they had any class solidarity they would. I guess this is why I have generally never been interested in working for FAANG despite the relevant skill set.
did you know in advance your job was cut??? because most people did not. some of those people left everything 1 month ago to build a new life in a new country. and for having done that a few times in my past it includes using some of your own money to move / sell things cheaper and obviously for people having to come back to lower wage country where it is harder to find a good job (because tech is not a huge sector like in the US) then it become horrible if you have debts or loans. especially if you left a good job for growing at FAANG
I love the pipe operator in OCaml!

I wrote this line for a compilers class:

let _ = apply_effects effs in ()
in m |> fetch |> decode_execute |> memory_writeback

Actually looks like a RISC pipeline! It looks even better with code ligatures[1].

[1]: https://i.imgur.com/Qwx8CDr.png
Pipes work really well with named arguments and partial-application. Both functionalities make it easy to get the unary function you want with minimal cruft. Lambdas solve the more complex case.

In Ocaml, you often end up doing things like:

List.create 0 3
|> List.map ~f:(fun x -> x+1)
|> List.fold ~init:0 ~f:(fun acc x -> x+acc)
|> Stdio.print_endline "%d"

I'm ambivalent about adding them to JS however. It's a nice feature but I don't think it works well with the rest of the syntax.
It’s pretty great in R too
LSD as well as psilocybin and a number of other natural psychedelics exhibit what's called a "classical psychedelic effect". I've tried a couple of them and consider LSD to be essentially the same

It's worth noting that psychedelic fungi and plants are absolutely GLOBAL in distribution. Psilocybe can be found basically everywhere and there are a few related genera of fungi that also contain psilocybe. South America has a ton of psychedelic plants, but even Native America has some psychedelic grasses used to make "prairie ayahuasca". There's a ton of psychedelic cacti species including a very famous cactus (which I shall not name) that very few people know is psychoactive because the Native American group that uses it wishes to protect it from being overharvested. Some very poisonous plants like nightshade are also psychoactive. The fact that indigenous people throughout the Americas have managed to develop techniques to safely utilize these plants suggests close study and attention. There's a famous "Jesus was a mushroom" take by an archeologist that the early cults from which Christianity emerged dreamed up Jesus through their use of psychedelic mushrooms. The take doesn't hold much water but what is agreed upon is that even those groups regularly consumed psychedelics. Christmas also comes from cultural usage of psychedelics. Amanita muscaria, perhaps the most famous mushroom, is that red mushroom with the white spots (kinda looks like Father Christmas, don't it). It's poisonous and very psychedelic. To consume the psychoactive, indigenous European groups would drink reindeer piss. The piss neutralizes the poison but leaves the psilocybin. And so these reindeer allow Amanita muscaria to fly around dropping gifts for us.

I could go on about sweatlodges, the tens of thousands of different psychedelic plant species known, and other ways psychedelic experiences shaped cultures around the world.

My point is is that psychedelics are likely a universal cultural norm. In fact I'd argue we're living in a very strange culture where their use is not very widespread.

I personally didn't try a psychedelic until after highschool. My first experience cured my debilitating social anxiety and I went from my heart racing any time anyone talked to me to organizing community events within the span of a year. I've had similar effects with my depression and other mental health struggles. I'm not trying to suggest they're for everyone, but I'd say the fact that there's "irreversible changes in how [you] think about things" is exactly what makes them such a useful medicine
It's a great resource and all but I find insane that hyperparameter tuning isn't more automatized at this point. This artisanal approach doesn't seem scalable.
I won't speak about the specifics of the chosen syntax (Hack/F#) but in general - absolutely.

With pipes you can visually follow the manipulations and function calls in the order that they happen instead of being forced to scan the code inside-out & outside-in, matching parentheses and function call parameters in your head, while still visualizing intermediate results to get 1 final return value.

I find Elixir code much easier and quicker to understand, in large part thanks to its (admittedly, imperfect) pipe syntax. Code written in this way is also much easier to debug because you can quickly add `console.log`, breakpoints, or equivalent between the pipes.

I find this unnecessarily time-consuming and difficult to parse and I'd likely raise some flags in a code review:

console.log(chalk.dim(
`$ ${Object.keys(envars)
.map(envar => `${envar}=${envars[envar]}`)
.join(' ')
}`,
'node',
args.join(' ')
));

Without pipe syntax, I'd refactor this to:

const envStr = Object.keys(envars)
.map(envar => `${envar}=${envars[envar]}`)
.join(' ');
const styled = chalk.dim(`$ ${envStr}`, 'node', args.join(' '));
console.log(styled);

But you often find yourself having to add additional logic, e.g. to scrub sensitive values, so it would probably end up closer to:

const sensitiveEnv = [...];
const envStr = Object.keys(envars)
.filter(envar => !sensitiveEnv.includes(envar))
.map(envar => `${envar}=${envars[envar]}`)
.join(' ');
const styled = chalk.dim(`$ ${envStr}`, 'node', args.join(' '));
console.log(styled);
Any userspace can call it, but unless you have the SUID bit set on the binary and have it owned by root, it won’t really do much.
If you generally say that laws are written by lobbyists for the benefit of the group(s) that are in power at the expense of the powerless, no one bats an eye.

But as soon as you start applying that to sacred cows like minimum wage, people fall into immediate cognitive dissonance.
You're right. However only law enforcement has the standing to enforce the law.

Sue the city. Make the law act.

Again, he cannot spray her with water. He is then breaking the law.
It’s not just that they staffed up, but also that it was really hard to hire since everyone was hiring. So salaries went up, and internal recruiting teams expanded to meet the hiring need.

When the hiring slowed, there was not as must work to do hiring and onboarding new employees. This is why so many companies are including “HR” in their layoffs.

The other piece is even if they didn’t over-hire, they over-paid. I believe these mass layoffs are a natural way for salaries to go back down to pre-pandemic-ish levels.
I'm not saying it's taboo to the point of not being discussed at all, but when have you last seen anyone come out strongly against child labor laws in some news outlet? It may well be true that child labor laws can effectively worsen the situation of children in third world countries, regardless of how good the intentions of the lawmakers are. Minimum wage laws do price out the lowest-value workers from the job market - whether that's a net detriment to society or any individual is debatable, of course. As for the "perverse glee" that you see, it's probably the satisfaction you may get from disabusing others of their foolish idealism.
The book American Steel by Richard Preston is an engaging read about the rise of Nucor.
California has a gas-price mystery. Too high, but why?
Ah, I really wish someone would make a new set of pads that are easy on the hands.
I'm not sure the author will ever read this, but I am also a PhD student, have been one for far too long, and in the past have struggled with similar `time management' issues, though I'm not sure that's really the problem.
As time passes, especially when things go wrong, projects and writing become very emotional. Having memories of looking at something a few years ago and looking at it again a few years later to try to resubmit it tends to trigger guilt, anger etc in me. I've found some strategies to help me, because I'm close to finishing and think the marginal benefit/marginal cost makes sense (benefit is large, finish your phd in 2 years, 1 year, 6 months, depends on where you are).

One tool I use to help me work even when I'm not feeling it is Focusmate (google it). I've found that sometimes, working out my issues is useful , but sometimes the emotions are overpowering and no amount of working them out will make me not regret something. That used to make me stop. Nowadays if I use Focusmate, I tend to think less of such `large picture' issues and instead work on just a little bit, and get a little done. then after a day, a get more done, and so on. I do sometimes get upset and avoid it altogether, but I'm definitely much better at `time management' this way. Also, I don't want to leave a focusmate in the middle of a session, i just need to stick around 25 minutes, and the feelings can pass and i can even enjoy some of the craft of the specific thing I'm doing. I hope it helps someone.
There's always going to be valid reasons to have non-guessable identifiers. But it shouldn't be used for security. It's not a replacement for not checking resource access.

Sometimes it's not 'sensitive', and even when it is, it doesn't really matter.

An invoice id, doesn't matter. You need to be logged in to access it, and when logged in, you can only access your own invoice. If you're going to try discover other invoices, well you know the user who is trying to hit random urls to find an invoice that doesn't belong to him. If you want to prevent random signups from doing it, block users who don't have => 1 paid order from accessing the page entirely.

Claiming "Exposing predictable identifiers to the world is never a good thing." tho is just FUD. There are use cases. But it's not 'never' a good thing.
I was very excited, but it seems external dimension only, and I've found time and again that outside dimensions have lose relationship to inside dimensions. Choices and tradeoffs around engine orientation and placement, front vs rear vs trunk sizes etc, can all make a massive difference. They include cargo volume in numbers but not front/rear seat sizes, which is critical to me both as tall driver and with children seats :-/
Yes, you can do that in lambdas:

> `${50}: ${[1,2,3].map(a => `${a+1}`)}`
'50: 2,3,4'

Whether that's a good idea or clear code is another issue. But it's allowed.
Why would you use Scheme over Racket, when Racket has so many basic libraries for useful things?
What happens if a company's "lay-off-via-security-access-badge-not-working" computer system malfunctions -- precisely when the layoff is going on -- and blocks everyone, all employees, not just the fired ones -- from access to the company's building simultaneously?

?

(I don't know -- but I think there's a future sitcom episode there... <g>)
Two words. Record profits.

https://fortune.com/2022/03/31/us-companies-record-profits-2....

Everyone saw an opportunity to make MORE money during the pandemic, and instead of focusing on long term health, focused on quarterly profits. This lead to massive expansion.

The second answer is that these companies have mass layoffs every year. Are these really that abnormal, given the context of their mass hiring's the year before? Facebooks headcount went absolutely bonkers, they are still up over a two year period.

I think saying they were wrong is a mistake. It was more of a hedge on a bet, a bet they could afford to lose, but not afford to miss taking. It was akin to a game of chicken or mutually assured destruction, where if somebody else was expanding, you had to as well, defensively.
Calling a bonus chump change is reductive. Two key items to consider:

1) You don't know the size of the bonus relative to their annual salary. If this is a 10%+ bonus, it's sizable.

2) The bonus was given to all
-- "have jointly agreed to pay all eligible employees a special lump sum bonus of up to 7,300 euros"

I can't recall an American company that gave out bonuses that satisfied both criteria listed above in the last 3-5 years of intense hardship.

Edit: Added specificity on bonus eligibility
It’s acting out on the weakest link in the problem chain. Normal bullying and lashing out. Nothing more or less.
And yet, I'm looking at a team that was affected by layoffs where solid (or even high) performers were fired while also having been in meetings this week to discuss low performers who weren't fired. "Getting rid of duds" is clearly not what is happening, at least at Google.
Nested calls can be a code smell, sure. But easily fixable:

one(two(three()));

Becomes

let a=three();
let b=two(a);
one(b);

Clean and easy, no sugar required.
We hear this platitude a lot.

Specific to this article they're saying "the Republican special prosecutor has good reasons to do this (that aren't political)" to cut that argument off.
Life insurance, disability insurance, https://mprimi.github.io/portable-secret/
If you do this unilaterally your best employees will rightly interpret the layoff as a sign the good times are over and will jump ship. However, if you do this at the same time as everybody else then your best employees will be less likely to jump ship.
I love sneaking into defcon and blackhat. They let me in with a coffee cup lid on some lanyard I had in 2019, I just dressed like a federal agent and took off my sunglasses aggressively and made eye contact to divert the goon's gaze from the extremely fake badge upon entry. It's a real shame they took away the contest for fake badges but there's a bunch of us who make a point of getting away with it still.

I really just go for partycon though
What Is the Debt Ceiling and Why Does It Matter?
At some point I did see or hear Elon say that he also found it annoying, and they were working on disabling it.
Have a look at this: https://stevenpressfield.com/books/the-war-of-art/
This is similar to Elixir. It's such a natural way to program and so useful. I wish all languages had this.

Also shout out to bash pipes
The truth is that everyone takes the money when it's available.

Even if you "knew" a recession was coming and that you were overhiring/overspending, you get far less flak overall for riding the gravy train to the end, then making cuts along with everyone else, than for appearing to be overly conservative and not growing as fast as you could during the boom.

Taking the money and spending it while you can is the equivalent of buying IBM. No one else in your circle will fault you for it when things go south, because they all did the same.
^^ POTD. Roughly 50% of all US dollars in circulation were printed in 2020 and 2021 -- the status quo became simply unsustainable. On top of that add Baby Boomer retirement capital going low-risk (i.e. out of tech).

On top of the end of cheap money, add increased operating cost due to Baby Boomers leaving the work force (~400k net loss of workers), passed-down costs of reshoring supply chains, and a burgeoning energy crunch due to the war in Eurasia.

Roughly speaking, "tech" investments are riding the tip of the bullwhip here. I expect that not-yet-profitable startups are the most vulnerable, but the sea change pervades anywhere that 2023 dollars are being spent chasing payoffs that are "many" years out and even mildly at risk.