skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm addicted to ChatGPT the way I imagine young people are addicted to Ticktock. It's fun asking questions and getting well written, cogent answers. It's like having your own librarian assistant. In either case, ChatGPT or a human librarian assistant, I don't take their answers as the last word. But for casual research, ChatGPT is a lot of fun and I notice that I'm not using Google nearly as much. ChatGPT is a huge time-saver when you only use for casual surfing. An example of the kinds of questions I ask:

What is the original definition of "karma" and not the one commonly used in Western societies?

The original definition of karma in Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, and other Indian religions is the sum of a person's actions in this and previous states of existence, viewed as deciding their fate in future existences. The concept of karma is closely associated with the idea of rebirth or reincarnation. It is believed that a person's actions in one life will determine the nature of their existence in the next life, and that this process will continue until the individual reaches spiritual liberation or enlightenment. In this sense, karma is seen as a kind of cosmic justice system, in which good actions are rewarded and bad actions are punished.
# What's opinionated about Zero to Nix

Zero to Nix is opinionated because it advocates learning and using flakes and treating channels as deprecated. Zero to Nix also deviates from official recommendations in that it recommends installing Nix using Nix Installer rather than the official Nix installation script.

https://zero-to-nix.com/about#whats-opinionated-about-zero-t...
That is certainly...one opinion. You don't know what those people have been through, they could have had abusive parents for example and don't talk to them anymore. If the parents don't take care of the child well when raising them, I consider it more than fair to not take care of them in old age (or even simply once the child leaves the nest, so to speak). Taking care of one's parents is not an immutable law of nature (indeed, many if not most organisms simply breed and leave their children), nor should it be. That you implicitly "make a mental note to not be friends with that person" is quite telling indeed.
Thanks for sharing this story, I laughed out loud trying to visualize the notion of someone staring at a semingly blank screen doing that in order to read the "secret text". Brilliant.
"Society doesn't ___ anymore" statements are nearly universally bullshit.
A custom-designed IDE SSD for old PCs
It doesn't seem like an uncorrelated observation that "construction worker" is one of the most undesirable occupations, alongside "janitor" and "line cook". If it's a terrible career, only the people lacking options will choose it.

Housing, healthcare and education are the three sectors infamously outpacing inflation in the modern economy. In the latter two, workers usually have at least a decent, if not good, career prospect. Construction, meanwhile, is considered a gig for noncitizens who can't be hired in the regular economy — notwithstanding the special subsets like electricians and plumbers.

Part of this likely has to do with the incredible amount of unemployment risk faced by a construction worker; construction volumes may plummet in any region at any time, forcing workers to move hundreds of kilometers away or change jobs entirely. Worse, these fluctuations are often correlated among regions, practically guaranteeing that many builders will be out of a job in downturns. Education and healthcare, at least, suffer almost none of this, despite other stressors.

One mitigation may be a sort of "Keynesian public housing" apparatus: while the populist thing to do is to call for public housing when prices are at their highest, this just puts more strain on a squeezed construction market. But if the state picks up the slack during downturns by specifically building small, affordable-type (if not explicitly subsidized) units, it may maintain employment volumes and (long-run) prevent lower-class pain during housing booms, while the units built will not directly compete with the sort of large & luxurious housing built by the private sector.
Not to diminish anyone's appreciation for OpenAI's increasingly performance-art level Orwellian name but I have found myself believing that their preference would still be to secure funding that would allow them to live up to the implied openness if it was ever an option. Sam Altman has stated over and over again that they tried to solicit interest / investment from public sources like governments before resorting to private capital. Maybe I just want to believe that their hearts are in the right place but that is the impression my advanced youtube and wikipedia research has left me with.
Great observation.

If it wasn't prescient, it was incredible dumb luck.
> And second, the authors describe the curious fact that producers located in more-productive areas do not grow at expected rates. Indeed, rather than construction inputs flowing to areas where they are more productive, the activity share of these areas either stagnates or even falls. The authors suggest that this problem with allocative efficiency may accentuate the aggregate productivity problem for the industry.

This is a nice way to say "NIMBYs have made sure building anything in areas where there are jobs is a herculean task"
Amazon was likely to build out their own shipping network anyways. Their MO in all other spaces is to observe others doing it, then undercut by vertically integrating.

Over expanding to fullfil a single large customer who isn't actually reliant on you is a good way to end up bankrupt. Seems like FedEx made the right move here.
Have you ever seen some of the heavy hitters, programing game engines for open source? These guys do that, cause they want to recover some sanity after programing crap for companies all day. Sorry to say it, but great works will never flourish in some monpolistic mega cooperation with tribal infighting.
HBO max doesn't even have every HBO show, they dropped west world from the platform.
What year was your house built? I really hope this is not a risk on things built after 2000 (or 1980?)
I don't know, but it does seem like they've reached Peak Ad. The Rick Beato videos get interrupted at least four times with ads.
I would pay for chatgpt right now if it would mean I didn't have the outages
Show HN: Made a Game Like Wordle. Feedback welcome!
Finally got around to hosting a game I made around the holidays. Hope you like it!
The music industry really doesn't have a choice in this though. If Spotify and Apple music die out, then it's back to sailing the high seas again, and they get nothing. A Plex-like music streaming app will be born, with an idiot-proof way of downloading music from torrents, and they're fucked.
If I pay someone to do nothing, who is at fault? The person who shows up ready to work everyday or the person who made a bad hiring decision and doesn't have the work for that person? I'm not arguing against layoffs, I'm arguing that the people making the hiring mistakes are not accountable. If I as a CFO give the green light to increase the company's workforce by 10% and two years later make a full reverse, that CFO/Board should be let go too or since they're all about taking "personal responsibility" should step down.

Most companies employ a board of narcissists that only care about themselves and their wallet and they get paid the most so I'm not sure your analogy is hitting with me.
It's not construction worker productivity so much as building codes complexity has increased 40%.
And those people become lazy because they put A LOT into the company those first 1-3 years. And after they coast a bit, they usual come back strong because 1. They are intimately familiar with the corporate culture and the internal software paradigm and 2. They have emotional investment. It's like getting divorced in your early 40s because things are not the same as a few years before, and not getting to the good part of a relationship.
In this time-period there has been a large-scale introduction of undocumented workers into the construction labor force. They are a quarter of some construction labor categories. Perhaps using undocumented subcontractors may play a role in lower productivity growth (cheap, unstable, and relatively unskilled labor) or maybe just distorting the statistics.

https://www.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/...
My own anecdote was about polycarbonate printing.

But I would be very scientifically comfortable that ANY plastic brought at or above its glass transition state is going to outgas toxic materials. And that includes PLA, ABS, HIPS, polycarbonate, PETG, PET, ASA, and more. And printing is usually quite a bit above tg. Higher temp = more nastiness.

That's why my 3d printers are in my workshop, separated from our house. And they are also enclosed printers, so I'm less worried of particulate exposure. But again, anybody starting off early in 3d printing knew this was a definite threat and a concern.
Datadog already does this, how does this compare? Genuinely interested.
> My (admittedly biased) opinion is that the best way to deliver value to a business is to spent a lot of time and energy figuring out what your customers actually want, which is usually just a few key things, and then take the time to build those features the right way (less time pressure because the surface area is smaller).

I'm of the exact opposite opinion, but we agree on almost everything, funnily enough!

I think the best way to deliver value is to quickly write small, fast, rock-solid but relatively un-featured prototypes and see in which direction production feedback indicates you should evolve those.

The above is based on two things:

1. You can't know what your customers want because not even your customers know what they want. They only know what they don't want once they see it. You can spend a lot of time an money on research but the MVP is cheaper and a stronger signal.

2. The same idea you put out there: most things are bad market fits and should be sunset fairly quickly. By building small things, you optimise for this case. By also making them reliable, you don't make it too painful to evolve them later on. (Easier to add features to quality software than add quality to featureful software.)

This, of course, also leads to less maintenance and higher pace of innovation down the road!
Can you give an example of inferior material?
> Not Europe. I pay with my Apple watch everywhere.

Maybe everywhere that accepts Apple Pay, but given how low credit card penetration is in Europe overall (relatively), it's almost impossible to avoid falling back on cash at some points unless you're very limited in the places you patronize.

UPI adoption is massive (and not just in India). The ubiquity of it is a huge benefit to the consumer - simply the knowledge that you can reliably depend on using it even for a random street vendor is a huge paradigm shift, compared to the status quo of knowing that it might be an option, or might not, depending on who you're talking to.
Traditionally you might also use NIX_PATH for secondary sources of packages and modules, like the Emacs overlay, NUR, or the Nix-Darwin repo.

But yeah if you pin all of your package sources and set your Nixpkgs config locally, you get all the benefits aside from the Nix evaluator's 'pure' mode, which gets some evaluation speedups due to caching.
Forget about maps and navigation, I just wish all the people obliviously using their phones in public had the spatial awareness to realize they exist in a shared space and take up physical volume. Think sidewalks, roads, etc.
As a solution to class mobility, you do. And as a route to increases in high-paying low-skill labour.

My comment about "service jobs" is kinda evidenced with your own remark: the existence of high-value manufacturing jobs. The high-value here is always in the cognitive dimension, rather than the physical.
Disney also will probably make more money on its four biggest movie releases this year than Netflix makes in all.

Avatar 2- a movie that came from its Fox acquisition has already made over $2 Billion
100%

People regurgitate “they overhired during COVID and now they’re making the prudent decision to cut costs”

The first part of the sentence implies poor decision making by weak leaders, so they lose the benefit of the doubt they’re capable of prudent decisions.

You can’t have it both ways - they made a stupid copycat decision to overhire but now layoffs are smart and thoughtful.

Occam’s razor - they made stupid copycat decisions both times because in both cases execs act with a herd mentality.

I can’t tell you the number of times the “leaders” of big tech companies I’ve worked at cited decisions by researching “peer companies”. Management wants to self identify as leaders but their decision making is literally based on following the same decisions of other companies. They think “if company A is doing it, it must be smart “ the only problem is that the peer companies they’re copying are themselves copying others.

All of these big tech companies have been overtaken by professional politicians incapable of leading , with perhaps Apple as the lone exception.

This is a golden time to launch a startup as the big companies are putting their lunch money on the table and cowering in fear.
I have no data to back this observation up, but everyone (especially in the media, but also in corporate life) is attacking "worker productivity" lately. Everyone's got a reason, but when you dig into them they all stink.
Python 2 is NOT simple. Why does str + unicode return unicode (Python 3 clearly separates bytes and str)? Why is there int vs. long (Python 3 dropped long)? Why can an inner function not assign to a variable of an outer function (Python 3 allows nonlocal)? Why does print have special syntax (>>, trailing comma) and is not a function? Why range() vs. xrange() (Python 3 makes all of them lazy)? Why redundant operators like <> vs. != (Python 3 eliminated the former)? Why class Foo vs. class Foo(object) (Python 3 eliminated the former)? Why multiple syntaxes for catching an exception?
I live in an area where the plumbing is soldered copper and the wiring is all in steel conduit. PEX, ProPress, Sharkbites, Romex... it's all just a little scary to me.
Sadly blowing raspberries no longer works for debugging new fangled flat panel displays. On account of the ball bearings.
Do Swedish companies pay a lot into health care? Can you recover the cost of the IT equipment already paid for since these are existing employees?
What’s the definition of a booming economy? Florida’s GDP per capita is much closer to Vermont than California; the real GDP growth rate for Florida, while high, is also lower than California. [1]. Though of course with a large population the overall GDP for Florida is high.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_terr...
There's another way to look at it, though.

Without unions, employees are disposable. Companies hire them when money is plentiful and throw them away when it's convenient. It clearly benefits the employers and investors to operate that way.

With a union, employees aren't so dispensable, and companies have to take a longer term view when hiring because they can't get rid of employees on a whim. Despite being more stable for everybody, it's extra difficulty for the company and it balances out their power over employees.
> However going by this news seems like Amazon has more or less given up on their payments ambitions. Could be also due to recent layoffs. This is a big news. Maybe Amazon wants to focus on being good at few things instead of running hundreds of experiments.

This does seem very un-amazon from my outside perspective. In the past I've always had the impression that amazon are very happy to shovel money in to an area if they think it'll improve their margin and/or protect them from reliance on third parties. This seems exactly the opposite of that! Stripe must be spending a shit load of cash with AWS and offering amazon a pretty attractive rate for processing.

I wonder if GCP has been fishing for stripe's business?
We leave on person on "support duty" outside of the sprint. One of my friend working at Amazon in a team of 8 did the same with 2 persons out of the sprint (one being "on call" and dealing with support & operational issues, the other one working on "improvements" voted by the dev team, like better tooling, better monitoring...)

On my side, working in a small team of 5, we just leave one person out of the sprint to work on support requests, bug fixes and if time allow improvements. Large handling of technical debt (ex: transitioning from VueJS 2 to 3, good luck expressing this as a "product increment" in a sprint goal and good luck if you don't tackle it ... ) are part of sprint work.

Overtime, I realized that Scrum is a framework, not a fixed set of rules, and as per Agile, the goal is to maximize business value. So if we are swamped by support requests and our systems are not operating properly, it's the role of the person on "support duty" to warn the rest of the team and ask for help. Sure it may impact some velocity metrics and we may not hit our sprint goal that week, but why would that matter? There is no point writing more code and building more features if what we have is not working properly and not satisfying to users.

The main issue i have seen with this system is that the developer on support duty may not have the right skills to perform all the work that is needed. Scrum relies on the assumption that anyone can do anything, and that's definitely a flaw when working on a larger codebase with a mixed of frontend, backend and devops with more junior developers. It does force us to train everybody and learn to delegate so that everybody can be exposed to all parts of the system but this takes many months / years.

We also learnt to define smaller Scrum goals. It's better to achieve a small goal and then decide what to do next than to always feel like we are running behind. The sequence of "two weeks" sprints is often seen as a "fixed" schedule with deadline to hold at all costs, but that's stupid. The core idea of Agile is to follow an incremental approach following the path of max business value delivery, and periodically reflect about how things are going. If the amount of support requests and operational issues is such that there is no more resources available for new feature development, then it's time to prioritize tackling some technical debt and improve monitoring and automation to prevent the most common issues
> I didn't notice I was doing it until someone asked me why I was shaking my head at the microwave.

Congrats, you became the human owl.
Purely an anecdote, but when I cook something with my induction range or even air fryer or oven my air purifier goes from 1 to 9 or even 12 (1-12 scale). And it is somewhat outside the kitchen.

So yeah, there is probably lot going on. From simple water vapor to those by products that come with browning.
Adding water to something (dampening mass) is less effective than adding something solid to it (damping mass). One of my favorite little pet peeve typos...
I’m moving locations a lot myself too. I’ve found deel / remote is not great because it tethers you to the country you started in.

For my situation setting up my own us llc and contracting/consulting through it means I can move around. Also the us llc onboards cleanly for any companies using gusto and for others I send a W9 that they know how to handle.
> The money's a very small part of the problem. Failing schools have huge piles of money thrown at them all the time, and it doesn't help like one might think it would if that were the main problem.

I disagree. When poorer areas have worse student:teacher ratios while paying teachers less, and giving them the most challenging students, it is absolutely about the money.

Even if teachers are willing to take on a bigger challenge, we're also asking them to take a pay cut to do so which isn't reasonable.
I do not see why it “should” be more cost effective. Moving big, costly things requires big, costly equipment and expertise. And losses can be higher in the event of a failure.
I agree with you 100% on that. I just disagree that Disney is well positioned to take part in consolidation. They might be able to pull off some content licensing like Netflix used to do. But right now, the only thing holding Disney afloat is the parks. And they've certainly upset some fans to make that statement true.
Personally I'm skeptical of Google's ability to get this done from a business perspective (notwithstanding the deep AI tech chops they have). The fact they called Larry and Sergey back to "deal with AI competition"[1] smacks of desperation. Very unclear whether Larry and Sergey have much to offer here and if they do, why they wouldn't have given that info to Google before.

Seems like aeons ago now but anyone remember Galactica, Meta's derisory attempt to do this just a month or so before ChatGPT came out and ate everyone's lunch? [2]

[1] https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/video/google-calls-larry-page-s...

[2] https://www.spiceworks.com/tech/artificial-intelligence/news...
I agree with sibling comments saying Scrum isn’t optimal for interrupt-dominated work like SRE. Kanban or Scrumban are good candidates.

Even for normal dev teams with customer-facing products (and therefore no zero support load) I have found a need to carve out some time for support work from the Scrum team velocity.

As others have suggested, having a dedicated engineer as primary support contact works well. You can figure out what the 95th %ile support burden is and remove that from the velocity. If you have a quiet week of support, the expectation is you spend the support budget on tools and docs, maybe improve automation on some existing scripts, knock out lower-priority incident remediation WIBNIs, etc.

If you have a >95%ile bad week, then the support engineer does less sprint work or the rest of the team pitches in as needed. But most of the time support doesn’t impact your velocity with this approach.
Left, Up, Down, Right? But yeah those icons are more harmful than leaving them out. They should just be arrows...
AMD did not lie about some particular feature of Bulldozer.

They lied by claiming that Bulldozer should be faster than Sandy Bridge, while knowing that it is completely impossible for their claims to be true.

Even without running any benchmark, it was trivial to predict that at similar clock frequencies the "8-core" Bulldozer must be slower than the 4-core Sandy Bridge.

For multi-threaded performance, the complete Bulldozer had between 50% and 100% of the number of arithmetic units of Sandy Bridge, so in the best case it could match but not exceed Sandy Bridge.

For single-threaded integer performance, one Bulldozer "core" had between 25% and 50% of the number of arithmetic units of Sandy Bridge, so in the best case it could be only half as fast as Sandy Bridge.

The only chance for Bulldozer to beat Sandy Bridge as in the AMD claims would have been a very high clock frequency, in the 5 to 7 GHz range.

However, AMD never made the false claim that Bulldozer will beat Sandy Bridge by having a much higher clock frequency. They claimed that they will beat Intel by having more "cores", which implied more arithmetic units, while knowing very well that they had decided to remove a large part of the arithmetic units from their cores, at the same time when Intel was adding arithmetic units to their cores, instead of removing them.
I moved when Rogan hosted Roger Waters, who kept saying anti-semitic things with no push back at all.

Spotify aligning themselves with content, any content, made them a publisher and not a software company. That's their biggest mistake.