skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> which definitely included motorized vehicles to carry troops

Yes, I'm not saying cars or motor vehicles didn't exist. I'm saying they were not available to anyone except the most elite and so they don't appear on the streets in the book. Orwell was painting a picture of a world so impoverished by useless and anti-human totalitarian bureaucracy that common things of his time were practically non-existent.

> I am aware of the Model T

I think you're confusing decades here.

Model T was 1908 to 1927. By 1948 you already had pretty much all of the big names in car manufacturing established. Just take a look at the 1948 London Motor Show[0] if you want proof that car production and culture were in full swing.

> That's 1908, but I would argue that the place cars occupied in the public imagination forty years later in 1948 would still look a lot more like that

You're flat out wrong with the above. That's like saying "that was 1983 but I would argue that the place computers occupied in the public imagination forty years later in 2023 would still look a lot more like that". It's just absurd and easily proven wrong by just looking at any media from that decade. It's 40 years for crying out loud!

> I think his non-mentioning of cars in 1984 merely illuminates the mindset and world from which Orwell was writing, rather than representing a conscious choice to say to the reader, "these poor wretches don't even have their own motorcars!"

This just makes it plainly obvious that you haven't even bothered to skim the book. I'll refer you to Chapter 9 where Winston reads from Goldstein's book.

"But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction—indeed, in some sense was the destruction—of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motorcar or even an airplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared." [1]

It's actually quite worrying how much you seem to be attempting to rewrite history given the context in which we are speaking.

[0] https://www.curbsideclassic.com/curbside-classics-european/c...

[1] https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/orwellg-nineteeneightyfour/orwel...
It feels a little crass to me to judge the wording and character of layoff emails, as if some of them are satisfying artistically and others are unsatisfying to consume somehow.

At the end of the day, a layoff email is a layoff email. Sugarcoating it is just PR.

“It’s only a layoff email if it came from the layoff region of France, otherwise, it’s just a sparkling pink slip”
Mr. Coffee perfected the effort/quality ratio 50 years ago. I'm not performing a giant routine to get 5% better coffee when a drip machine costs 10 bucks and makes a perfectly fine cup of joe
Assuming you mean that your expectations grow and shrink with your means:
The person in question is married, husband makes a solid wage, and she would be doing exactly the same if it wasn't for children.

It was a conscious decision/plan to do the kids thing.

I wouldn't focus on this specific example however, that wasn't my intention. My point is that people give up so much in order to raise children. One of the major reasons why people of child rearing age aren't going to parties and having as much fun as they used to is because they're now raising children, so they can't. They don't have as wide a range of interesting things going on in their lives because raising children is an all or nothing type of affair.
> "Fight for 15$" has been going on since 2008. It really now should be "Fight for $25"

Exactly. This is also what pisses me off regarding reporting on strikes and wage negotiations. If you're going to report on these accurately, any raise less than the rate of inflation should be called a pay cut. The fact that some workers have to strike to get even a 2% pay increase in an 8% inflation environment is nuts.
A company is a legal thing that is owned by shareholders. Like if I own a car, I want it to take me from A->B as expediently as possible. I don't want my car to have a social mission. I'm not sure why a company should be different. Now I do think that the disbursed profits to shareholders from the company should be used to fund many social missions, via charities and non-profits and the like.
Nobody can convince me that big corps are not taking part this "trend" of firing people with the purpose of rehiring them later and keep the compensation of the workforce in check.

As many comments have already pointed out, all these companies are sitting on a huge cushion of money, and if you have money the best moment to invest is during a crisis. Companies realized a long time ago that they should find ways of lowering salaries, now the big moment finally came it seems.
Funny this keeps coming up!

I wrote about my experience using ulids the other day, specifically with Postgres and some of the dis/advantages you get with it.

It's a deeper dive into ulids than this article is, and shows some real world issues that crop up:

https://blog.lawrencejones.dev/ulid/

That said, and spoiler alert: I'd probably go with bigint-sequence backed text IDs if I were choosing this over again.
Handling Side Effects in Unison Programming Language
Pretty funnily, quite a few companies in the US seem to exist not to maximize profit.

Some, like Amazon, immediately reinvest the profits into their growth and avoid taxes on the profits.

Some, like Uber, seem to exist to only sustain an illusion of future possible profits. Most of startups in the era of cheap money were manifestly unprofitable, and spent more and more attempting to achieve growth and grab the market share.

Beside these, there is a number of barely profitable companies that just exist to sustain their business and give the owners and a few employees some daily bread. Most small restaurants and small stores are like that. They maximize not the short-term profit but the probability to keep earning something in foreseeable future, a bit like subsistence farming.
Each episode felt formulaic in that he would get to solve a particular mundane problem (EG: dealing with local thugs and generally not fate of the galaxy stuff), generally being a "good guy" in the whole process and then a steady amount of overall story arc development.

It seemed to be me it felt like a deliberate style decision by the creators, a throw back to easier going older shows that I grew up with in the 80s and 90s.

This may not be for everyone, but I found it very easy going, slightly amusing at times and a refreshing change from the current typical high budget TV series which seem way more serious.
> Some places far from the northern countries taking part in that war will probably be survivable: think South Africa or Argentina and maybe Australia/NZ.

Yeah, but the OP seemed to be talking about targeted countries. I just think he was setting his minimum "prepping" in a contradictory way that spelled doom.

Also, those southern countries may be severely affected, since the big northern countries are also big (staple) food exporters.
That also explains why carriers are obsessed with buying media companies; they just can't let go of their dreams of a walled garden.
what is the exam?
Is this the "scalability of the cloud" I keep hearing about?
Building software is like building a house - a 10x general labourer, who can lift 10x the weight and do things without a break is great, but it really won't get the house built much quicker.

For any project that's sufficiently large, say more than 20 people, what one needs is someone who's contribution helps to make everyone's work just by a bit - say 1.1x programmer, but where the 'x' is the productivity of the entire team. They would do this by making correct & timely decisions on architecture, clearifying interface requirements and identifying gaps & errors early in the project.
AsciiMath is a lightweight markup language for mathematical notation. Most mathematical notation isn't compilable. I Heart LA is focused on a compilable subset of mathematics. We chose to write our own grammar for various reasons.
I'm almost 50. Parties change. The last party I had in November was a few couples drinking wine, eating charcuterie, and listening to Jazz records. Not a bad way to spend a night in my opinion.

I still like like to be social, so I took up vinyl DJing! That kindda tempers my urge for parties: https://baus.net/miami-vinyl-dj/
12k is just FTEs. How much if you include TVCs? Probably 30k+.
I loved Ars Technica in the past, but the site and forums seems to have become such a one-sided echo-chamber of left-wingers that nowadays I visit the site much more rarely then I used to. This is mainly related to let's say healthcare and political topics.

It seems to me that HackerNews has more balanced audience, which suits me better.
Similarly surpising, large cities can be seen from orbit if you know where to look.
Wrote about my experience using ulids in Postgres if people are considering it: https://blog.lawrencejones.dev/ulid/
I'm sure some element of perl is the middle ground of everything.
For the company that spent decades putting mom and pop shops out of business it is very hard to feel sad for layoffs. It's just their own bed these folks now have to sleep in. As an investor I am also happy. For the workers, it's sad maybe unfair but such is life.
Mercedes-Benz workforce to receive record profit-sharing bonus
"Consider deleting your view history if you haven't already. Go through your subscriptions and see who they're following. Absolutely do not click on more than one of someone's video if you don't want to get flooded with their content."

- Exactly ... which is both hard and sad. You don't always know what the content is before you click out of curiosity or otherwise. For example, I couldn't write this post before clicking on the Leather Apron guy to see what the heck was going on.

And we should be able to listen to normalize arguments from the "other side" of politics without starting a cascade ending with Nazi propaganda. And the easiest way to do that is to take the user "STOP IT" feedback seriously. Which is really the point of my post if my rant and need to keep things under 4k characters obscured the TLDR.
It means they like spending money to annoy you.

The question for advertisers --- is this really more cost effective than a simple, non-personalized, context based approach?

There is evidence that advertisers are increasingly deciding it is not. For example --- Amazon's context based ads are one of it's fastest growing areas.

https://www.businessinsider.com/inside-amazons-growing-ad-bu...
So, you do things in a way that would not support this approach. She’s not saying “this is always how it’s done”, she’s explaining what practices you would need to commit to in order for her approach to be viable:

> “If you want something like this to work, you have to commit to a certain amount of consistency in your code base. You might have to throw out a few really nasty hacks that you've done in the past. It's entirely likely that most people are fully unwilling or unable to do this, and so they will continue to suffer. That's on them.”
> What is the problem with this?

It causes meetings with people who think all predictable identifiers are a problem.
Google’s best days may be behind it. The search revenue is looking increasingly shaky. New business units like GCP are struggling to operate profitably. They had an amazing cash cow (ad revenue) for a long time but that cow is getting old and starting to look rather ill. Compared to some of the other tech giants Google has struggled to evolve its business to diversify revenue and profit streams and evolve offerings. Now the make or break moment to make more progress there or the company will slowly drift off into the sunset of has-been tech giants.
Too many of us kid ourselves about 'irrelevance'

The companies you list build a legal moat around their business (establishing some amount of monopoly) and then begin sucking taxpayer money
That's illegal in the UK, unless the company actually stops developing the product of the disbanded team.
Tiny Git – A tiny implementation of Git in Python, to learn how Git works
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._T._Barnum#Early_life

"He began his career as a showman in 1835 when he was 25 with the purchase and exhibition of a blind and almost completely paralyzed slave woman named Joice Heth, whom an acquaintance was trumpeting around Philadelphia as George Washington's former nurse and 161 years old. Slavery was already outlawed in New York, but he exploited a loophole which allowed him to lease her for a year for $1,000, borrowing $500 to complete the sale. Heth died in February 1836, at no more than 80 years old. Barnum had worked her for 10 to 12 hours a day, and he hosted a live autopsy of her body in a New York saloon where spectators paid 50 cents to see the dead woman cut up, as he revealed that she was likely half her purported age"
The enduring mystery of an aggressive FBI raid near Area 51
Well, there's https://twitter.com/defconparties of course.

I just spent a good amount of time talking to a therapist (first time) about how painfully lonely I am. I moved to the countryside because the city was too unaffordable but friends I used to see a couple times a month are now a couple times a year. And I just had my 40th where my wife invited one of her friends (another couple with kids) and it was nice, but it wasn't "my" friends, if that makes sense.

My days are wake up - get kids ready for school - work - come home and basically work nonstop dealing with kids (I love them but fuck they're a lot of work), pass out, maybe text an old friend or two, most of whom also had kids recently.

I suppose after your 30's anymore life is just lonely. Maybe it'll pick up again in a decade or so when I'm not getting summoned to wipe a kid's butt or screamed at because I used the wrong cup or plate but it doesn't really feel like it.

I'm hoping to at least move to a walkable city again. Leaving was a huge mistake I bitterly regret.
Dogmatism manifests in lowered information search under uncertainty (2020)
"Write drunk, edit sober."
Yes, the base idea is not that new. I store since years every GO based application I use as small (few kb) source code tree checkout only, no binary at all. At runtime the wrapper compiles a randomized individual one-time-temporary-uniq binary via garble [0].

[0] https://github.com/burrowers/garble
>The one who really is 10x, knows it,

I have a friend like this. I have never worked with them, but get to hear about how all their teammates are nearly useless on every team they work on throughout their career (mix of FAANGs and startups). Every time they join a company, they quickly become the team expert and biggest contributor, because they enjoy working long hours, spending their weekends coding, and are a very talented programmer.

I recognize they are extremely passionate for what they do, but I would never want to work with them personally. That kind of work relationship cannot be fun for anyone, except maybe the stake holders that are seeing rapid progress.
Uses and abuses of military history
Probably not, which is why an attrition strategy might work for both downsizing and trimming the fat, as the less motivated/willing to drink the "kool-aid" are filtered out and not replaced.
Ooh! I want motorcycles
>"It boggles my mind that for how hardline the WinDev is about using COM, they still fail to match Borland, nowadays Embarcadero tooling for COM."

I've been in the industry for 30 years just in Canada. Have come to conclusion that software developers in their majority rarely prefer most efficient, elegant (whatever that means) ways of accomplishing things. I have a theory that being "software developer" is sort of self servant. Because of that they enjoy unneeded complexity, tooling etc. etc.

I personally have never indulged into coding for the sake of it. To me software development was always just a tool to build amazing products people / businesses would use. So I always think about product, how it will be used and how to get there with the least financial "damage" either for my own company or for a client.
There is an umentioned security aspect that you should be aware of for adopting timestamp-based ids: you are leaking information about time, and this information could be sensitive.

This is how I would summarize a security perspective.

* autoincrement id: leaks information about the system as a whole. Users can attack each other. Might be suitable for an internal-only application or an application that doesn't care about leaking this information and goes to great effort to be resilient to users attacking each other.
* timestamp + random id: leaks information about the time the individual record was created. An attacker can attempt to learn sensitive information about an individual. Suitable for a record that is already publicly shared with its time (e.g. a tweet). Might be suitable otherwise if ids are not public. That is only the record creator can view the id and you don't send out links with the ids to the user (particularly over insecure channels such as email).
* random id: does not leak information. suitable for any use case that is okay with the performance implications (of a non-sortable fragemented index).

I am wary of how they call xid the best time-based id. It just removes all (run-time) randomness and thus performs the best. xid seems to be the same as MongoDB's oid. It is designed to be a conflict-free timestamp that can be used in a distributed system, and it is good at that. But in terms of protecting users for some use cases it could be worse than an auto-increment id because cross-user attacks are still possible (they will take many, many more attempts though) and it leaks information about time.
On a related note, you can hear sounds that displace your eardrums on the order of an atomic diameter. At least that is something I heard years ago, a quick search turned up this StackExchange question [1] so there may be some truth to this, I did however not read the answers too carefully. They actually seems to suggest that the threshold is even quite a bit smaller which makes me somewhat cautious of the claim, but then again you are essentially integrating over really many atoms in your eardrum getting displaced together.

[1] https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/147826/how-much-...
No more docker devcontainer inside another docker devcontainer !
Yea, there are a few extensions for PG, in C and Go that give a ulid_create() function that can be used as column default, just like serial.
Stop Trying to Ask Smart Questions
My anecdotal experience is consistent with [CMU's]
research: I don’t know anyone 10x faster than their
peers in solving well-defined programming problems.

But this data highlights why the debate continues:
highly productive developers (10x or otherwise) are
problem-solving at a much higher level. Their
productivity won’t be apparent from a narrow test,
any more than the overall skill of a world-class
football player would be apparent from (say) how
fast they could run the 100m dash.

I've been anywhere from a 0.1x to a 10x programmer. Possibly even 0.01x to 100x we you count the years-long impact that architecture decisions can have.

It wasn't my IQ, talent, or my work ethic that changed.

Rather it was the opportunity.

Note the example cited in the article. This was essentially a greenfield development opportunity for the author, and he implemented an extremely clever and effective solution. He had both the ability and the opportunity. 10x, indeed!

The problem is that those opportunities are hard to come by. Most "software engineering" is just "hey, fix this bug in a big old tech-debt-ridden codebase" or "hey, implement a new feature in this big old tech-debt-ridden codebase."

You can take the most talented and motivated developer in the world and they won't be 10x in a situation like that.
The point is that the tool is opinionated and demands that this be the case for projects that work with it. Not that the author believes all .cc / .h files work that way.

Your use case would be served by C23's #embed [1]. The same thing has been proposed for C++ but repeatedly kicked down the road because the standardisation committee wanted to make it more general even though no one had any demand for that so they didn't know what it would look like. (C++ standardisation in a nutshell.)

[1] https://thephd.dev/finally-embed-in-c23
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34451051
They're shortsighted fools.
I think they actually might be trying to show that both Democrats and Republicans in New Mexico are in agreement on the issue, in an attempt to show that it is -not- political. I could be mistaken, but that's been my impression from other media in New Mexico.

There has been an increase of self-defense related shootings in New Mexico, and although the state has usually acknowledged some form of castle doctrine in your own home that isn't typically tempered by any duty to retreat. Gun violence, and crime in general, is fairly high in New Mexico, and is likely responsible for the increase of self-defense cases, but nevertheless, that state has been filing charges, or at least mulling them over in traditional self-defense instances.

Here's one from earlier this year: https://www.kob.com/new-mexico/suspect-killed-in-double-home...

I can't find the specific article I read back when this happened, but they all said something about the DA was debating on whether to file charges or not.

It may seem like Alec Baldwin may be a victim of this crackdown, and perhaps he is being used politically as a show of force in their effort to curb gun crime, but I think as the producer of this film, he would've been charged before the crackdown, and likely would faces charges in most states.
I think the noise is suppressed not merely because it's harder to see, but mainly because neural networks tend to hallucinate given such an input. In other words, there's fine tuning between losing weak signals and hallucinations.
In general I agree that these companies retract from the forefront and maybe aren't the innovative powerhouses that they once were, however both IBM and GE do fine as businesses and will probably be around for a long time. And I think it's important we have a bit of both in the world.

The new startups produce innovation and cutting-edge tech, but we need these huge monoliths for capital-intensive projects. Google has been a driving force in laying sub-sea internet cables across Africa and South America for a good chunk of time now, enabling billions of people to come online. I don't think a small company could achieve that since it costs billions of dollars to do.
biological op-amps
"To be sure, most people who got successful don't really understand how they got there."

IMHO: Wrong. "People that win the super bowl didn't just show up. It was intentional."
1) Nope, as evidenced by the fact that we just had one existing root CA booted out due to apparent links to spyware (Trustcor) and a second CA applying with links to spyware (BJCA.cn) that may or may not make it in.

2) As I've said, CA's should be above reproach. A CA involved in any way with spyware has a clear conflict of interest that can (and has) resulted in major security problems for users (e.g. MitM interception).

Also a lot of this gets worse the more you look:

Asking HOW we are supposed to review these documents and confirm that the auditor is indeed a valid auditor, for example results in, well, no answer. Examples:

https://groups.google.com/a/mozilla.org/g/dev-security-polic...

https://groups.google.com/a/mozilla.org/g/dev-security-polic...
My view - adults are generally boring. Something about busy schedules and responsibility ;)

Go to a concert. Buy some overpriced beer - the party happens. (my experience with rock concerts only)

I've never enjoyed parties at people's house (too few people, too intimate) - but very large groups I enjoy. All of my neighbors are the opposite (prefer intimate at home gatherings) which I always skip.
Git security audit reveals critical overflow bugs