skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's the project I mentioned:

https://www.bondalti.com/en/multimedia/news/bondalti-fosters...
As universities are medieval institutions, it's apt that they run their education programs like a gauntlet.
Taking the UK as an example, there are strict laws and processes that need to be followed to implement redundancies: https://www.gov.uk/redundancy-your-rights
<< Protecting D&D's inclusive play experience. As I said above, content more clearly associated with D&D (like the classes, spells, and monsters) is what falls under the OGL. You'll see that OGL 1.2 lets us act when offensive or hurtful content is published using the covered D&D stuff. We want an inclusive, safe play experience for everyone. This is deeply important to us, and OGL 1.0a didn't give us any ability to ensure it

I am genuinely uncertain what that means. There are actual races in D&D ( and I assume in a fictional world that large, actual racism exists as well ), but how are spells offensive and hurtful ( beyond the obvious literal meaning of blowing stuff up ).

I will admit that I am watching this particular saga with a weird sense of bemusement.

actual license pdf link:

https://www.dndbeyond.com/attachments/39j2li89/OGL1.2_DraftF...
Yeah, I also wonder how much of the current layoffs are "we need to fire people as to look good on paper for the market"
At this point it’s more likely that most of Linux will be rewritten in rust than GCC improving to add safety.
Big tech companies have a "Get out of jail free (in the press)" layoff card right now, and they're taking full advantage of that, despite not needing to at all.
>less likely
Before both world wars there were many who thought that war between modern powers could never happen because it was 'too dreadful'. That is, the leaders involved would avoid war. Well, we're witnesses latelu to that leaders do choose war.
It's still quite a defective system because Recruiters are so ruthless since so much money is made in commission. What this causes is the creation of fiefdoms and Recruiters trying to convince organisations or individuals to be exclusive with them, like it gives us any benefit.

The truth is that the noise that Recruiters generate means that most of the time, we only deal with a handful at a time, which means it can be pot luck whether your recruiter places you in our role.

Highly recommend that people do their own searching and apply direct, where possible, to the roles they want to do. I place a lot of kudos in a direct application compared to the Recruiter pitch about their latest "high quality candidate".
I don't follow. RSUs being worth less than they used to be means employees are cheaper. You gave out $X a couple of years ago and when it finally vests it's worth 0.6*$X or similar, that's a direct drop in employee compensation.

Are you reasoning that employees paid in RSU are not amused by this and are likely to leave if not "made whole" somehow? Seems like waiting for people to quit would get headcount down fairly quickly if so.
You smash a proton into it and knock a light atom nucleus off. Works every time about 2% of the time.

For the stuff that doesn't end up as gold you can just keep hitting it with neutrons until it's heavy enough to try again.
Milquetoast Google CEO Sundar Pichai finally does something after 7 years at the helm
I always find these comments a bit silly. Saying something is "my fault" is not the same as saying they intend to die on their own sword.
To make it even more explictly how much it took for UNIX world to catch up with ANSI/ISO C89, while coding on HP-UX 11 back in 1999 - 2001, I still had to write K&R C as the aC compiler installed on the system wasn't fully compliant.
“Please don’t show up on campus and make trouble for security”
Swiss though, so the evil twin of German :P
In Google I/O 2017 they announced a "pivot to AI".

https://www.engadget.com/2017-05-20-at-i-o-2017-google-doubl...

Google Assistant, Tensorflow, Google Lens, Cloud TPU, Google Goggles, auto mail responses etc.

A lot of interesting stuff but nothing that has made the popular press like chatGPT, dall-e etc.
Since 2015, Google have rolled out RankBrain, BERT and MUM which are machine learning enhancements of their search algorithm and allow Google to understand the meaning of the terms you search for and provide matches based on that.
> The market was extremely quiet last week, but it seemed to pick up quite a bit this week.

Are you just counting your inbound messages? Because there's no way you can personally tell what's happening on the market on a week-to-week basis.
The CI rejects your change for failing the lint.
I finished my PhD with more than one year delay from the "normal" time because I also spent basically 2 years playing video games and not doing shit. Today I'm an associate professor with a nice job and good salary... so yeah, you can survive it! :)

But seriously though, let me try to give you a couple of advices: first of all, the idea that you need to work on a project that gets you excited to get up from the bed in the morning is wrong and dangerous. Work is work and PhD is also work, just a bit different from the rest. So yeah you project is still work, so forget about being excited to get up in the morning. Trust me, you will survive even if you are not excited to get up in the morning! It's just work.

Second thing, you made a mistake, which was to involve a million people in your project before you started. You built too much pressure for the results, and that pressure made you scared and killed your motivation to work on it. It's normal to sell the fish before you catch it in academia, but to do that in a healthy and efficient way you need lots of experience (like, decades of it, and being a professor with a stable career so you can take the punch and still stand up). Now that you're back to basics, it'll be easier. Start by making it worth it to you. Work for a few hours a day, like maybe two or three, then go do something you like after that. Soon you will realize that doing the stuff you like after you work a few hours is MUCH more enjoyable than procrastinating (it really, objectively, is). So you'll train your brain to get the reward from the work: hey, if I work for two hours, I can then do X or Y which will be awesome. (Do not plan to work 8 hours a day. You won't).

Third, remember that you (as in, you, a person, a living being) are more important than all of this. It's just work; it doesn't deserve all the attention it gets. So what if there are a few people disappointed with you here and there? You are also disappointed with some people and that doesn't make them go home and cry in the dark. In all probability, there will always be a few people disappointed with you for the rest of your life. Actually, the list will probably grow. :)

Good luck!
Disney’s troubles show how technology has changed the business of culture
I am a bit confused about the problem. Most of the comments are about getting past a writing block, but my (possibly incorrect) interpretation was that the sticking point is in doing the research work that would be reported on in the thesis.

I infer this partly because of the discussion of bringing undergraduate students and other graduate students into the research team. Obviously, such a team has nothing to do with writing. And, at one point, the author talks of dismissing the others, with an intention of carrying on, alone. These things gave me the idea that the block is not in writing, but rather in completing the pre-writing work. So, the wonderful writing advice -- and I mean that, what I see here is well-informed and heartfelt -- might not be the main thing the author needs.

The thesis advisor seems like a very good person, being patient, encouraging, and supportive. I don't think too many advisors would go out of their way to employ others to help in a thesis project. A more common approach is to simply cut off funding for the postgraduate student after a certain time, or if insufficient progress were being made. Given these things, it seems to me that the advisor has been a good help to the author.

So, what to do? At the most basic, the choices are (a) to carry on or (b) to leave the program. Both choices can be good ones. And making a choice can be the sort of self-empowering step that leads to very good things in life. So, my advice is to make a choice. It can be time-limited, if that helps, e.g. "I'll give this another month, and if I'm not happy, I'll leave." Please note the word happy here. That is very important. Life is short. Life also proceeds in a directed fashion -- you can't go back and change something that happened years ago. Make your future be good for you. Hope for -- no, expect -- that you will be happy, and productive, and that you will use all the experiences of your life to find ways to make others happy, and productive.

This is all very vague, I admit. But I've seen many students get into a rut that is really quite corrosive to the soul. Making a choice, knowing that it's your choice, can be quite freeing. There are many paths in life, many ways to contribute to this world. Don't underestimate your ability to find the path that's right for you.
it means we will do what law requires. Which is quite a low bar to clear :)
Just yet another reason to eradicate this cancerous, disgusting business model. It seems like the majority of the evils of tech in the past decade can be attributed to it.
Ah, I get your point that it's about what's changed through time

Though I'd add to that that the common awareness--an acceptance of speaking publicly about and solidarity in not standing for--sexual assault, is something that has grown dramatically in the past decade for women. In the past many of these things would be covered in shame and swept under the rug but now the issues are more visible and many younger women are taking more active roles in fighting back against abuse. Many young men are working hard to be good allies in this as well.

It's something we can't know but I also wonder how widespread a fear of false allegation truly is. In my experience I've only heard it raised by men who have otherwise displayed misogynistic tendencies and, in the face of other perceived dangers, confidence to the point of arrogance. It's always struck me, ironically, as a false flag fear that is used to stir up distrust in the stories of women and to create a societal backdrop where sexual assault is easier to carry out. Obviously I can't share statistics or research on this point, but it's been my personal experience and it's a feeling I'd like to share with this community.
What's "VC salary"? First time heard this and didn't find meaninging result from Google, nor does ChatGPT.
The Rezwan Razack’s Museum of Indian Paper Money
After so long, I decided to think of it differently: it's a learning company. You can eventually fix the problem you're responsible for by chopping off a part of it, convince people you can do better, and then move on. (Don't try at home!!!) :)

Now the question for all these learning companies would be: how do they prevent this from happening again? What did they learn and what are they going to do differently? I would seriously like to know.

The way I see it: right now everyone is kind of "rebalancing" their resources, but what's next? How do you prevent over-provisioning of resources (without under-provisioning)? How do you say which (internal) project is worth throwing money at and which one not?

Another question I would have is: will they stop hiring for 2023-2024? Couldn't they offer these people an alternative role internally? Maybe not all the 10000, but maybe 2000 could stay and be in the same role in other teams? Or did they do it already and those 10000 are really people that can't be placed at all internally? (Like we don't want full remote, and we're shutting down that particular office, in which case I can even understand...)
Two things to note here.

First, it does not "overstate" the annualized returns. It just brings a particular view of them, which is the "expected annual return" vs the "compoundable annual return". Both are perfectly equivalent and represent different ways to look at annual returns. I would expect most practitioners to expect the former.

Second, this debate is completely irrevant here, as all charts show cumulative returns based on a $1 investment.
Excellent points have been raised in both the article and the comments (especially the reliance on a single advisor; that's trouble).

But one thing that no one is addressing, is the fact that a much of the reproducibility crisis is caused by bad methodologies. Why are PhDs still misapplying statistical tools meant for normal distributions, by using them for power law distributions? That's endemic in the social sciences (see: economics, psychology). Why aren't universities giving all PhD students a proper background in stats & probability?
At some EU countries mass layoffs at large companies follow their own process, usually with some union involved, etc.
Honestly, even today I would trust a system running MS-DOS far further than anything running Windows. The number of gas pumps I’ve seen blue screened and kiosks running Windows Update…

The only thing a more modern computer buys you is added complexity and more to go wrong. More RAM than your process needs? More to corrupt. What percentage of crud/resident processes on a “modern” is even related to the task we are assigning this machine? Less than 1%? It’s absurd. It’s like buying a Swiss Army knife with a million attachments to build a house. You can, but you shouldn’t.
Thanks, now I understand how they reached the number but not why it's so convoluted. I only took one stats course in college.

So it's

P(bomb exploding in a century) = 1 - P(bomb not exploding in a century) = 1 - (P(bomb not exploding in a year)) ^ 100 = 1 - (1 - P(bomb exploding in a year)) ^ 100

Why is it not something simpler, like P(bomb exploding in a year) ^ 100 ?
does it matter? it can already write computer code and will form now on only get better.
> Control systems often last decades, longer than most employees.
...
> I've recently worked on a control system that is at least 30 years old.

I've met many people who are much more than 30 years old :) And I've worked in places where people retired only after ~40+ years. And replacements are relatively easy to find, depending on the nature of the work.

I think there is a reasonable debate to be had about what should be automated and what should be kept in human hands. I think we as a civilization need to sort out what the costs and opportunities are in light of the failure modes of both alternatives.
This is a short-term downward adjustment to what is a long running trend of increasing demand for software professionals across every industry.

I feel private companies who don't have the play the quarterly announcement game can come out stronger given conviction in what they are doing and a strong balance sheet.
Yes, you have that right. By mapping memory to the page at index zero (the page a 'null' pointer would point to), an attacker can leverage a null dereference to achieve much more interesting/dangerous outcomes than just a crash.
As a "crypto skeptic", no it's not a paradise. People buying this were still fooled and lost money, people who built this are having their work erased. You can disapprove of a technological/social trend and still feel empathy for the people who are negatively affected.
I swear all these companies are just using the fact that everyone else is firing as an excuse to get rid of such a large part of their workforce.
No but it must have been another chat group. JsNz or devnz.. Haven't met in person. I've got you as a 1st on linked in and I don't tend to connect unless I have spoken with.
I'm not sure if you'd call it a pivot, but Google Brain was initially an X project that was started well before the deep learning craze took off. They hired Geoff Hinton in 2013. Investment in AI has been going on for a long time at Google, probably before Facebook/FAIR got seriously involved, but probably not Microsoft (MSR has been going for ~30 years and Chris Bishop started the Cambridge lab in '97 and they've long been known as a good ML group).

It's not like Google wasn't using ML before that either. Search, recommender systems for ads, anti-spam, translate. Deep learning just turned out to be a lot better than the tools we used to use.
I wonder what they'll sunset next? Anyone got any hunches?
Your landing page is crazy. Full screen image of awkward looking people talking without audio working (tried a few things, can't get it to make a sound).

Is the product a mobile phone application that you give access to your bank and it displays the same information your bank statement does but sorted into categories?
Bloomberg says it's 6% of the global workforce: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-20/google-cu...
Ahahahaah
I've noticed a small uptick in the number of messages, but I attributed that to being in my current role for about 18 months so I'm coming up to the point where other people start to look for a new job.
Please feel free to voluntarily limit turmoil on the work floor today
Choosing a Postgres primary key
If everyone's doing it then you might as well do it too.
I honestly don't understand the point of people avoiding smartphones on principle. I'm not sure if it's a contrarian way of thinking, a way to stand out or what. Why not just dumb down a smartphone?

I have a Pixel 5 because it's the smallest form factor Android smartphone available. I never installed any entertainment (games, social media, video streaming) apps on it. Those that came pre-installed (ie. YouTube), I uninstalled or disabled.

After this, I disabled notifications for everything besides calls and messages (SMS, Signal, email). I cleaned my emails so only genuine stuff ever pops up, and I make it a point to not check my phone, except for set times throughout the day, unless I'm being bombarded by messages or calls (as would happen in an emergency).

The phone that is left sits in my pocket 99% of the day, but still has the tools that I may need (Maps, Uber) should my forward planning be thwarted by unexpected occurrences (lost my pre-planned route to a new place, a cancelled bus/train). My daily smartphone use is maybe 10 minutes. Some people have commented that they didn't think I had one, because I'm barely holding it.

I don't understand the need to get rid of tools which could help in an emergency or unexpected circumstances. I anecdotally had a friend who uses a dumbphone because he wanted to simplify things, and he ended up pestering the people he was around to check their maps or to look something up. In the end he went back to a smartphone.

You can do this with any smartphone, cheap or expensive. I did it with a Pixel 5 just because I liked the form factor of something that can easily slip into my running bag, pockets etc. Plus, as a bonus, the low usage of the device should keep it going for a couple of years until my next dumb smartphone.
Chased by pukekos
CEOs are fired for mismanagement. This is good management.
> Are we going to up the degree requirements for everything? High school to college diploma, bachelor's to master's, master's to doctorate, doctorate to ???

I suspect this has already happened.

In 1940, 25% of the population were high school graduates and 4% had college degrees.

Today, 30% of the population have college degrees, and ~4% of the population have PhD, MD, JD etc.

So a college degree doesn't indicate what it once did.
To be honest, I feel like Google and Meta both had far too many employees.

"Too many cooks spoil the meal." "The Mythical Man-Month" etc.

There was a crazy push for hiring and growth, which diluted the quality and increased the communications bottlenecks. A 10% cut won't do it, though. Over-hiring is hard to recover from. Google would need to cut 75-90% of its workforce to be at all efficient.

If it did that, it would be left with a ton of code with no one who understands it, a horrible reputation, and zero morale.

The only way I can think of to manage this is to build out an elite smaller unit, with a smaller codebase, with less technical debt, and then to spin out the deadweight.
Ideally, layoffs should happen when employee count is above the amount which maximizes company value. It should never be a response to stock price changes, makes no sense.
So instead those users will just leave or use the web UI with a browser-based blocker.
No, but I have seen it being ingested and turned into some horrendous XML on a weekly basis.
Amazon, Microsoft, and now Alphabet. Is this because Twitter showed an example where you can lay off most of the non-core workforce and the tech will still go on?
> it is not conscious

Obviously. Whatever you want to call it, it needs to stop consistently vomiting up false statements before it's fully useful.
I’ve been getting into Corecursive

https://corecursive.com/
> People saying it is deferred PIPs or house cleaning are deluded. At Meta and Amazon I know some senior people who were laid off.

Not sure what you are implying. Senior people don't automatically perform better, it's only natural some get PIP'd.
I believe they're referring to startups who use VC capital to attract people away from other tech firms at very high cost to themselves.

Really it's what all the big companies are doing, but at least some of them can claim solvency.
> It seems like all of the FAANGs have made severe strategic cockups

I’m becoming more and more convinced that they’re preparing for a global recession.

I posed such an Ask HN a while ago, before the Microsoft layoffs, where the general takeaway was that there’s no indication for a recession.

However, after the 10+12K layoffs by the giants, and constant news about smaller layoffs by smaller companies (in the 100s per announcement), I think the situation becomes at once clearer and bleaker.

We shall survive.
Yes! My project, euporie [1], is a TUI application for running and editing Jupyter notebooks in the terminal. It's interface similar to Jupyter Notebooks / Lab.

It sounds like exactly what you are after.

[1] https://github.com/joouha/euporie
Perhaps you are from a top institution, so, naturally, you'll get a lot of high-quality applications; which in turn influences your perspective. But in the grand scheme of things, the total number of PhD students must be very limited. There's certainly more demand than supply for such training.

If there's an over supply of overqualified postdocs, maybe they could help train new PhDs?
> In a Lisa emulator running Lisa Workshop, Apple's UCSD Pascal/Clascal-based development system for the Lisa.

Here is one: https://lisa.sunder.net/, and on github: https://github.com/rayarachelian/lisaem
Android Baseline Profile
You was always both singular and plural, but in the singular form it was the formal second person pronoun, whereas thou was the second person singular informal pronoun; it's the same as the difference between du/Sie in German, tu/vous in French, or je/u in Dutch. This is why the King James bible uses thou: it's intended to feel more accessible to its readers with a friendly tone.
A large salary that is subsidized by VC funding.
I trust they will reform everything (to suit our new corporate overlord).

I dont trust them to actually improve it.
I guess it just means they will follow the law in each country.

In the case of Germany I believe the minimum notice period is one month (unless on probation, 2 weeks), but it is common to get 3 months. So they will pay for 3 months.
Amazon runs a news story in local paper about how smile is benefitting $list_of_local_charities

The email they sent to me was they are going to take the money from my local charity and instead give it to ex Prime Minister Gordon Brown
He doesn't say it's going to be a punishment or a reward :). I'd bet on the latter. Lower operational cost! Increased stock value! Beefy bonus! Sundar takes all...
Mostly schadenfreude; people are enjoying the widespread fraud in crypto and its promise of absurd returns from simply emitting vast quantities of CO2 gradually collapsing.