skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is market virtue signaling. Some ascribe it to "copycat" behavior but I don't think the accurately captures the intent.

Sundar is telling the market "we're cutting costs". Even the most generous estimates of what these employees cost mean Google could have them do nothing and still make a healthy profit. Obviously they were doing something though so some value is being lost while costs are being cut.

Remember that every time you hear "we're laying you off because of a recession" or "cheap labor in the developing world took your job" remember that it's all propaganda. In all cases, a capitalist simply decided to eliminate your job and possibly give it to someone else who is ostensibly cheaper.

It's also worth noting that Sundar is financially incentivized to boost the share price [1]. There's not much semantic difference between "I take full responsibility" and "I want to maximize my own (already ridiculously large) pay packet".

[1]:https://www.businesstoday.in/technology/story/google-ceo-sun...
I’m talking about the base image overhead. Honestly, I hadn't tried it on this tool. As an example, if the container was using Ubuntu as a base, you might fetch a big base image. If it’s using scratch, no problem. So, it depends on how it’s built and I didn’t dig in.

Edit: I’ve gone back and looked at the dockerfile. The base image is Ubuntu, so the docker image is heavy. I fetched the indicated image from Dockerhub and it's 228.13 MB. Most of the command line tools in my toolbox are measured in K not in hundreds of MB.
as a 1-2 (depending on proj). I try to bring them up and try to help them. But some people either do not gel into the group or they are hopeless. But I hold out the eternal flame I can help them be better!
It doesn't need a motive in the sense that we normally think of a motive. That's the whole point of the paperclip maximizer story. Another thought experiment I can think of off the cuff is an AI Nigerian Prince. Say you set up a ChatGPT equivalent along with some supporting infra such as a bank account, rented servers, email, texting service, etc. You give it the goal of increasing the number in the account and some instructions to come up with novel email and text scams plus a giant list of emails and maybe some other instructions to try to get more email addresses to add to the list. It sets to work churning out new ideas for scams, contacting people on the list, chatting with them, fooling some small fraction into depositing money or providing email addresses of friends and family. How far could such a setup go? It would eventually get shut down if there were enough fraud reports since it has a "home address" in the form of a single bank account or servers. Could a bright individual come up with a way to have it convince other banks to create new accounts for it or purchase other hosting services? Could all the necessary setup for the model and its attendant scripts be automated in such a way that the system could set up another copy of itself once it acquired hosting? People are able to keep scams like this going even with direct opposition from authorities. If the model can operate in other languages it could obtain hosting in multiple countries. The bank accounts would be the main chokepoint but there's always Bitcoin ;)
The way this is going to go is that people will build a lot of specialized models, and we'll have a central executive model which will probably evolve from a LLM, which maps query -> response, except the response space will include performing tasks and constructing (potentially multimedia) structured data. The central executive will dispatch to other models and knit the results together.

These models are memoryless. In order to have memory, you either need to either be able to provide them as context to the query, or provide a mechanism for users to have custom weights applied to models. Providing context to a query is just a matter of increasing token limits and fine tuning the model on "query + context" data so it uses the context correctly. Allowing users to have custom weights for models is much more computationally expensive, to the point that I don't think this method can be reasonably scaled as a service. I think the only way custom weights per user can work is if the central executive calls fine tuned helper models on the client machine.
I don't disagree. I'm all for our species surviving. But let's not delude ourselves, like the initial comment did, that we are doing this for the good of the planet. It's for us. This is valid, sure. But it's not the good of the ecosystem or any such thing.
Of all of the minorities in the world, even of the subset that may compete with you on for a position, you just CAN'T fathom that some of them may be better than you? That in even competition, this person, who just happens to be a (gender, racial, sexual orientation, ability, religous) minority is better than you at the position you're chose to apply for?

Framing your competition as diversity hires (and contemplating the outsized concern that they have on your life) says more about than you think. You're the bottom of the barrel at what you do. "Diversity hires" don't compete at a high level.

I for one know that if my competition wins, whether they are a minority or not, they do it on skill. I've elevated myself out of the concerns of competing with diversity hires, because I'm great at what I do. Level up.
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.
As others have said, only if upgradable -- you're going to want to add more RAM at some point .

And stay tf away from browsers.
It's interesting that no one on a tech board mentioned that a drone can now do this 24 hours a day, for basically free, and it would take a very short time to write an AI that watches an object crossing two markers on the road and puts time stamps on them.

I am actually glad this isn't there, even though I don't speed, but it's ironic to see people talking about cost.

Example articles below. There are at least 10s of systems that can do this from different cheap airborne carriers and watch a huge swath of land (36 square miles from one host), track movement, and record it all at high resolution 24/7:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_Stare

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARGUS-IS
HN comments on this seem to get more cynical over time.
For those affected the tech layoffs may be crushing (though by many comments here on HN lots of people are fully comfortable with transactional relations with an employer).

An interesting question is whether this round of layoffs signals some sort of paradigm shift in the broader tech world, a "disruption event" amidst a "bad economy" that would indeed be a motivation for alternative business models, startups etc to pull up their sleeves, hunker down, survive the dinosaur extinction and emerge standing on the other side?

I don't think so. This is just "management-by-public-markets-stock-price", which is in turn management by collective madness
For this, I highly recommend The Most Dangerous Writing App: https://www.squibler.io/dangerous-writing-prompt-app

It deletes all your work if you don't keep typing. Good motivator.
Photographer Whose Metadata Was Deleted by Client Loses Lawsuit
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/state/minimum-wage/tipped

I'm not sure what "de facto $0 wage" means.
My reading is that some hold a belief that the distribution of developer productivity/skill is not a Normal Distribution. Yes, in a normal distribution some on the right will be 10x those on the left. But as I read it, the “10x” advocates propose there is some sort of Guru Spike on the right hand side that’s specific enough to the realm of development to create a meme from it. I harbour skepticism that it’s anything but a normal distribution.
If you can find a quote for that, I'd be surprised.

As I remember it, the Fed kept saying things were fine until faced with at a hard, cold 8.5% inflation rate.
> that could have been spent at the beach

As a procrastinator myself, this is actually a self-poisoning attitude that I've worked on removing, in the spirit of being kind to myself. (Procrastination tends to get worse when you have self-hate spirals.)

It's so easy to look back on wasted hours and think "I could have been doing anything better than that." I use to have days at work where I didn't accomplish much, and say to myself "I'm a horrible father because I could have spent today with my kids."

It's true that procrastination eats away hours of our lives, but there's no reality where most of us would have been able to say "I know I'll procrastinate the next three days, I'll take a beach vacation with those hours instead, and then do the job promptly the next day."

This kind of (common) thinking is no better than any other kinds of regrets in life, staying awake and thinking "what if I had asked that person out in high school?" etc etc.
The imaginary part of it is that you think that's what I mean by a 10x developer.

It's like insisting that surgeons are terrible people and pointing to Jeffrey Dahlmer because he also cut up people.
I don't even _know_ anyone who has seen these movies.
Right now it only has grooves in the database. Going to add more sounds soon
For relational purists, e.g. Joe Celko, this approach is pretty much mandatory. However as others have stated in reply it's very difficult to find a genuinely immutable identifying attribute in many domains, including human beings.
Nope, pretty sure Google is not the one being milked here.
Get the 8GB one and order the extra RAM separately.
I live on the east coast and my siblings live on the west coast of the USA. We mostly do video calls.

One time, must be at least 5 years ago, I was waiting for a bus in Flushing, NY and watched a woman doing one-handed sign language (eg. Not talking) on a video call walking down Main Street.

My future is amazing
The big difference is that the Mechanic has to manually do that for every single customer, where a software 10xer identifies a crazy hard bug once and fixes it for all 10000 customers at once.

And that is where the finances come in. Why pay a 10x mechanic 300k/year if he is only going to generate 40k more in revenue than someone who would work for 90k/year. Where a 10x SRE/Cloud Operations person could actually save you 300k/year
That kind of sucks, and I'm surprised a prosecutor is willing to risk their career.

However, this article has very strange wording in it, "Mr. Baldwin, [played] former President Donald J. Trump on "Saturday Night Live"", but later, "Ms. Reeb, the special prosecutor, who is also a Republican"; is NYT trying to accuse the prosecutor of making this political?
And I dunno about you, but at least around here, tickets have been closer to $15-20 for a while.

I haven't seen any movies in theaters since before the start of the pandemic.
This is a very interesting post, thank you for writing it. I'm still quite a few years away from 50 but I have been feeling like this since I graduated. The days after graduation felt like the party would keep going but I quickly noticed that my friends were becoming less and less available.

I think this happened because:

1. They got married and therefore priorities changed.

2. They got kids and responsibilities increased.

3. They got older and interests changed.

4. Most of us moved to different cities and/or countries.

But I think the party can, indeed, keep going (with a little effort). There is a reply here that recommends joining different activity groups and I think that is the right thing to do. In school, you didn't have to work hard to meet new people and make new friends because the community is large and full of interesting people you can relate to.

Outside school, the best way to mimic that kind of life is at places like work, Church, sports clubs, etc. [finances permitting :)]
The kids should clean the damned school. https://www.good.is/amp/japan-children-clean-schools-2639606...
Welcome to the Era of Internet Blackouts
It has begun after E. Musk fired lot of people. He showed that TT can work with less people. Now that covid is far away, everyone is cutting.
To my other comment, let me add that this follow up video by Duane specifically addresses your scenario: the concerned parents of a missing girl unwisely spoke to the cops, without knowing they were suspects in the case (because the cops regularly suspect this, "9 out of 10 times, the caller is the one who committed the crime" as one cop put it).

In this case, the cops suspected the father. After they found the body of the daughter, which had drowned, they didn't tell the father (because he was a suspect but they didn't want to be forced to read him his rights) and claimed to be still looking for her in order to continue incriminating her father, who thought he was aiding the investigation but was actually being interrogated as the prime suspect. His mistake: volunteering to talk to the cops without a lawyer.

Watch it here, I've picked the right timestamp for you: https://youtu.be/-FENubmZGj8?t=1202

By volunteering to talk to the police, you may also end up providing information that -- according to the cops -- "only the killer could have known". Oops! Even worse, if the interview wasn't taped (and in some cases, even if it was!) the cops can claim, either mistakenly or on purpose, that you provided self-incriminating evidence even if you didn't. Duane provides examples of how, even if your answers are taped but the cops' questions aren't, seemingly innocent answers can get you in trouble. Example: "I swear I've never touched a gun in my life" (cops: "we didn't mention the murder weapon, how did he know it was a gun? We didn't ask this. Suspicious!").
How is that possible? Or by "never run into any issues" you mean the machine wasn't completely unusable while it continuously was swapping everything everything to disk?

As I sit here and type with one citrix session and two chrome tabs open, I'm using 16.91gb of heap.
Coinbase Account Take over Statistics
A full tank over the course of a year or five.
Meh. Saying this is a new "era" and the old ways are over is nonsense. We're entering what is likely a mild recessionary period with less flowing capital. It's a market correction. The "era" will last maybe 2 years. Then the upward trajectory will hit again and tech workers will get drone shuttles to work or something by 2030.
I call those -1x developers. Knew 2 of them, in both cases entirety of the code they done ended up being replaced for bug/bad design reasons.

I think the peak was implementing cracklib based password strength checker that... just returned that password is strong if cracklib was not installed, and didn't tell ops to install it on servers or add any check that would alert if it is not installed.

> Those 10x developers are causing the maintenance costs to go up by 10x. If you believe the numbers around 10% to build, and 90% to maintain, then that means one of those developers will make your project cost almost 9x as much over the life of the software.

On flip side, developer making right architectural and maintenance decisions might just be 10x in grand scale of project, even if they don't write code all that much better or faster than coworkers
>work force participation is down

This can't be used as an indicator for a variety of reasons. In short, a decline in the the labor force participation rate can be good or bad, depending on the reason people are dropping out of the workforce. If a dual-income family now has the option to earn enough to support the family on one income, then having one person drop out is a sign of economic health. Basically, we don't want the entire nation to be forced to look for work.

Some people are suggesting that workers are dropping out because they can't find jobs. If anyone truly believes that given our current unemployment numbers, then they are just plain gullible.
There are still traffic ticket cameras in some parts of the US(Washington DC), but in many places they are challenged legally: e.g. https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2020/04/08/ask-2-wh...
RFC 9330: Low Latency, Low Loss, and Scalable Throughput (L4S) Architecture
After years of work in the IETF, the main documents on the L4S low latency architecture for the Internet were published as RFCs today.
In this economy, the only companies that are not laying off people are the groceries store. They have nearly doubled their profits since last year
I think my coworkers mostly think of me as a 10x programmer, and I think this is due to a few factors:

- I am familiar with almost all the code at our business and can pretty much jump in anywhere and start working. Most developers try and get themselves comfortable with some small piece and become the master of that piece, but I've pretty actively avoided that. Early it was to keep myself from getting pigeon-holed, but by now I've seen so many different things that I recognize a lot of patterns most people don't, so I can pretty comfortably work on whatever and be productive quickly.

- I leave lots of comments whenever I'm not sure of something so the next person won't be afraid to throw my code away, especially when I'm working outside of my usual area (which nowadays is pretty much all the time). So there are little bits of my thought process spread all throughout our organization.

- I moonlight on side projects regularly and gain experience with other toolchains that way. Because of that I often come up with solutions that are outside the usual ideas that others would normally gravitate towards.

- Once I've got a solution in my head I can really slam some code out.

- In most of my life I'm fairly disorganized, but VERY organized when it comes to structuring my work. I think this catches people off guard.

- I'm routinely the guy who gets tagged to work on struggling projects, and those projects typically have a lot of the same obvious problems to fix. So it looks like I'm being very productive (and relatively speaking, I am), but I'm doing things that are basically routine habit for me that the team in question obviously has not been doing. So it looks like magic.

I don't think any of those things make me special or more able than anybody else. I think it's just a product of the choices I made early in my career to gain as much exposure as I have.
I think its harder to do then it seems. There is still a massive race for talent.
I want to see the SWOT analysis for this firing decision.
Consider balance. If one spec is too low, the rest of the system might as well be configured with fewer resources.

RAM is also not all the same. 8GB DDR4+ paired with NVMe will perform better than 32GB DDR2 with a mechanical hard drive. This is part of why I'd take an M1 MacBook Air over a 16GB Intel Mac.

If your storage is slow / high latency, then swap will be slow. If RAM is low and swap is happening often, then the system will be difficult to use. zswap/zram can help, as well as adjusting swappiness if you run into issues.

I'm using a 4GB Chromebook and a 4GB Raspi 4 for a lot of work lately, and I'm enjoying the constraints.
I honestly don't know, and would be very interested to see studies digging into this.
Thanks for the great feedback, I really appreciate it!

1. I'll definitely add some good examples, I think that will help with getting better sounds.
2. Working on improving the UI right now
3. Going to add this in the next push as well. For now reach out at jonathanmir115@gmail.com
Not sure if amusing but referring to someone as "it" makes it seem like an insult. I realize (per the bottom of the wiki article) that those are the chosen pronouns but still.
I started as a python programmer and was very used to package managers. I believed in them, I championed them. When I switched to C++ for work I was very disheartened that there wasn't a standard.

Conan obviously has promise, I haven't spent much time with it, most of my experience with C++ package managers is with nuget and vcpkg. However, my attitude toward package managers is changing.

I increasingly like _not_ using package managers because it makes me (and my company) way way way less likely to bloat our software with unnecessary third party dependencies.

I wrote this in another thread: I never believed you should write something yourself if you can find a package for it. My boss told me I should write it all myself, I could probably write it to be faster. I encountered a case where I needed to compare version numbers in python. For the heck of it I wrote the simplest, quickest, most naive solution I could come up with and then timed it against the most recommended version comparison package in python. I blew it away by 20x throughput.

I don't believe in package managers anymore. Obviously I'll keep using pip and sqlalchemy in Python, but I'll happily spend the 20-30 minutes it takes adding something like nlohmann-json or md4c to my project over worrying about maintaining a package manager for c++ these days. Precisely because it makes me think twice about adding another dependency.
So tired of this myth.

Restaurant-workers/servers/bartenders make $2.15/hr plus tips. If that amount < minimum wage, the employer has to make up the difference. If they don't, they're breaking the law and any server with two brain cells to rub together can and should report them.

Unless you're a really crappy server, you make more than minimum wage. Most bartenders make well more than minimum wage.

If you want to change the TIPPING industry, that's a horse of a different color.
Still there is pressure to bow to big money investors to continue having access to investment capital.
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.

For a brief moment they almost had it with .NET Native and C++/CX, and then, first they killed C++/CX in name of C++/WinRT (with VS tooling just like in the good old ATL days), and with UWP's deprecation, CsWinRT also fails quite short of the .NET Native experience in regards to COM.

How a OS development team that is so invested into COM APIs, fails to produce tooling better than the competition for 25 years escapes me.
2012 Google? Sure, pretty good chance you're getting world class talent.

2023? Lmao not even close. Anyone with a heartbeat and memorized leets can receive an offer, and the offers aren't even particular competitive.
They're framing it that way because framing it that way is a strategy to maximize profits.
There are Photon-counting Cameras but they can not be used when there are allot of photons. As an example; the max nr of photons per second and pixel from one of the commercial ones is 10^7 photons/s/pixel.
That's my point. Larry and Sergey own 3% of Google each, but have long retired from making any decisions at Google. Sundar only owns .01% of Google and gets compensated in bonuses, so he tunes his strategy on maximizing his bonus.
The myth of the myth of the myth of the 10x programmers.

This is just argument by assertion. You would still hope someone would demonstrate the existence of 10x programmers. A lot of these one-off anecdotes in the comments are closer to 1.3x to be honest.
>I'm not seeing a clear solution for this culture of toying with thousands of peoples' lives for a quick buck

A bit over-dramatic, no? Nothing to say about the employees who left their companies for Google to "make a quick buck"?

Business expand and contract. Should Google be considered a retirement home? The people who took these jobs are smart men and women who will go on to work at other companies. This isn't new.
We used to go out for drinks after work every week. Now lots of people WFH so people aren't around. The other thing is lots of the young people in the team now dont drink, which is a big change for me.