skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's probably inevitable that software development becomes another trade, or at least becomes less of a career hack — a fairly simple way to make an outsized amount of money given the rareness of the skill required. I don't know about the timeline for this happening, but I think it has to happen sooner or later.

I think it would be a mistake to switch to trucking right now, as despite delays with no end in sight, it does feel like some substantial use of automated driving in the commercial driving industry is coming eventually. I would expect that to reduce the market value of drivers. If someone wanted to become a truck driver, I'd say he'd better do it for the love rather than the money. Even though both careers are going to get shaken up, it's still a lot easier to make six figures in software for now.

In general, I roll my eyes when politicians suggest that people who lose their jobs due to industries shifting out from under them can just go learn new skills and get back on track. I haven't seen that happen. It feels like a pat on the back as you're shoving them out the door.
Sure in my experience talking face to face is much much easier than remotely. Maybe I dont have the right tools or maybe not enough experience but I definitely do not like it.
>i) Effective immediately, we will be moving laptop refreshes from three years to four years. ii) We will be moving to Microsoft Teams for the sole purpose of video conferencing, saving significant cost and simplifying cross-company and customer conversations

Layoffs and having to use teams? Talk about a morale hit
Reana: Reproducible research data analysis platform
thanks, this is great

i wonder how many people from that subculture are still alive today
> a) that was never considered "crazy"

The very premise of stealing a Soviet submarine wreck off the ocean floor with nobody noticing is pants-on-head insane. The USN thought the CIA was being moronic to even consider this plan. The USN's idea was a lot saner; to simply use submersibles to extract intelligence-relevant materials from the wreck underwater, not lift and take the entire wreck. No surface ships needed, much less an expensive purpose-built attention-drawing surface ship.
4 out of the last 5 market bottoms occurred about 1 month after "tech layoff" search frequency peaked.
The "plebs" have generally found a single scientific study which agreed with their preconceived notions, have ignored any data or argument which disagrees with them, and used that as a hammer against the scientific establishment--which is not actually the practice of science. It does reinforce your ego that you know more than the "liars, fraudsters and careerists" though.
In my experience the UK Christmas tradition has a fairly strong "family get-together" component to it...
This is very well written, and probably one of my favorite takes on the whole ChatGPT thing. This sentence in particular:

> Indeed, a useful criterion for gauging a large-language model’s quality might be the willingness of a company to use the text that it generates as training material for a new model.

It seems obvious that future GPTs should not be trained on the current GPT's output, just as future DALL-Es should not be trained on current DALL-E outputs, because the recursive feedback loop would just yield nonsense. But, a recursive feedback loop is exactly what superhuman models like AlphaZero use. Further, AlphaZero is even trained on its own output even during the phase where it performs worse than humans.

There are, obviously, a whole bunch of reasons for this. The "rules" for whether text is "right" or not are way fuzzier than the "rules" for whether a move in Go is right or not. But, it's not implausible that some future model will simply have a superhuman learning rate and a superhuman ability to distinguish "right" from "wrong" - this paragraph will look downright prophetic then.
Yes, the amount of effort it takes to care for someone with dementia and/or mobility issues is huge. You end up needing a full time care giver to either keep them from wandering away or taking them to the bathroom and feeding them 5-10 times a day. Doing that in a humane fashion is quite challenging... and at some point you realize it's largely for their surviving relatives.

In the old days we just let them wander off or wallow in bed until they died.
The nice thing about masonry is it's a skillset that never ages out. Not as long as entropy exists.
The worst part of this is that everyone at GitHub is now forced to use Microsoft Teams.
This is right. The dot-com crash was an absolute crash. Not "we're laying off 5-15% of our company." It was a lot of "This media darling that had an IPO after 2 years of operations no longer exists."

In my social group of about 30 folks, I think at ~25 of us all experienced months of unemployment, at the least.
> I'm not comfortable with the ambiguity around something that is effectively an open door to my entire system.

But the back door is written in Rust, so it's a secure, well-built backdoor, a backdoor you can trust.
The recent layoffs are part of a business cycle that we're currently going through. Sooner or later the pendulum will swing the other way and tech companies will be hiring for high growth rate again. I guess this is the first experience of a business cycle for a lot of people in the tech sector, hence the collective "surprised Pikachu face" as the kids would say.
Enigmail functionality is now built-in, it's quite nice!
Here's the flip side: I was hiring (at a stealth vc-funded startup).

I reached out to every designer and coder laid off from Twitter and Amazon (one of my investors sent me a spreadsheet that those laid off folks added their contact info to).

I didn't receive a single interested response to my reach outs. Now granted, I'm sure they were bombarded with lots of startup offers and being picky what company/stage they were responding to, or were still in grief mode and not ready to start looking, or maybe (probably!) my reach-out finesse was lacking.

But I'm just pointing out that their are definitely companies like mine who are hiring and it's not all doom and gloom for laid off folks.

I ended up hiring via ads on LinkedIn and job posts on eng message boards.

Being real for a minute: There is definitely a perspective among hiring companies that regular lay offs are sometimes packaged alongside bottom performers, but I think that is something they would just do diligence on during an interview process.
That's because say Page, Plant and John Paul Jones were there when they wrote and recorded 'Stairway to Heaven'. It's not like they felt something uniquely great about that piece of music, more likely they felt exactly the same as they did after writing and recording the other 300+ songs they recorded in their life.

They probably think we are idiots for elevating it so much, and demand a premium to play it for the 3000th time, and also demand a premium for talking about and put up the act of having to sell to people the illusion that they also thought that something metaphysical was happening in the studio.

Kids think 'doing it for the content' is something new, while it has always been around. People have 'done stuff for the content' for ages in order to buy nice cars, real estate, planes etc.

I'm almost sure that what we feel when we hear 'Stairway to Heaven' is approximately the same enthusiasm they feel when they dump 20M on a private island in the Bahamas or access some new designer drug that is only availible for the wealthy.

You can only unlock that type of enthusiasm if you are not involved in the creation and the promotion of the the thing being commercialised.
For anyone else who likes 1997-Windows-style software and can tolerate shareware, try Becky! Internet Mail: http://www.rimarts.co.jp/becky.htm
Newsom structures things like this a lot, and the more ambitious part almost never happens. I think this is mostly about running for president and creating a talking point, call me cynical but I don't think anyone expects Ca to directly run drug manufacturing.
Go hang out with some older tradies.

It absolutely wrecks you body. You can make a decent living, but it isn't the easy money that a lot of people think. A lot of the older tradies I know made sure that their kids went to college if that tells you anything
I can second the latter one since living in a tiny apartment here costs 20k a year before utilities, and that's a lot of money when my family doesn't have a 10x developer making 100k
You can do quite a bit of tracking with CSS by conditionally loading third party resources. Tracking pixels, loading different images on hover, active, focus, etc can effectively track users

For example some controlled frameworks can even have CSS only keylogging https://css-tricks.com/css-keylogger/

The correct solution is enable a strict Content Security Policy (CSP) - so even when a user compromises your website with XSS/CSS they cannot extract any data they obtain. Note: this website has not configured a Content Security Policy :(
It never was, we just got smarter over time.
I was laid off in november, in vc. Looking for PM/Ops roles. Applied to a ton of stuff where I was a great fit, no answer or immediate rejection lol. I'm 8 years out of school and am not applying for roles that are unrealistic.

I think the entire hiring/search process is so broken. Different applications, formats. Don't get me started on having to fill out sections in a form that are just resume sections (work experience, schools etc.).

Going across big VC firm portfolio openings also super fragmented. It's opened my eyes to how awful the process of hiring is from both sides.

Doing consulting/contract work, advisory, and side projects as I hang on cofounder matching and apply to jobs on workatastartup, wellfound, and linkedin. Pretty dismal job search process.
Damn too, actually. Reading the piece, I've been thinkking this publication really dserves to be subscribed to!

Amazing write up. ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the internet.
Largest ever collection of Vermeer paintings unveiled in blockbuster show
Fearless CORS: a design philosophy for CORS middleware libraries
Something strong has to drive it. Hopefully that's economic pressures and not guillotines, but it may come to that.
It's no different than trying to start a local ISP anywhere.
This is sweeping a lot of problems under the rug. Many US governments are so disfunctional that it's unclear that they could succeed at European-style public housing.

An analogy: just because Japan has a very good high-speed rail network doesn't imply that a new one will succeed in the US. In California it's an open question whether it's going to succeed in the end. You can't assume the US way of doing things like that will do as good a job as other countries on some things, because the culture and politics are very different, and sometimes that means we screw it up.
There might be a bit of a convenience angle since these other competitors are often extremely busy, which can reduce their convenience. If you had one machine where 3 sides could be used simultaneously by different customers, that would improve throughput. You could also have a dedicated side for just plain old coffee (no steamed milk drinks).

Because labor costs would be far lower than these competitors, prices could be very competitive and you could offer monthly passes and other loyalty programs.

I would consider office buildings where there is no onsite cafe. They would be relatively secure there and you could make them look really high end, for example having visible copper components like those high end Starbucks percolators that some cafes have. This might be important in selling the "quality" benefit over what people can get for free (or cheaper) in their office kitchen upstairs.
Lower salaries really are just paying employees to look for new jobs on the company's dime. If my pay was lowered 10%, I'd be looking immediately.

At one of the companies I worked at, the strategy was the opposite. Lower employee salaries in the hopes that people would quit.
In the USA a big proportion of health care costs is hospital administrators. Also, the cost of administrating all the different private insurance plans.
I wonder how much of the NHS budget is eaten up by administrators and how much that cost has increased with all privatization by stealth under the Tories?

The bulk of the budget should go to front line workers not administrators.
Maybe the techcorrection back to the already lucrative prepandemic days.
You would think so, but no. Not one ecommerce search [1] is giving you accurate results for searches like that, because they think that they're losing sales, if they don't highlight other products that you'd be "likely" to also purchase.

1. with the possible exception of really niche stores like digi-key or other electronics components stores where it's really important you get exactly what you're looking for
> I'm kinda worried AI will get a scam/shitty product connotation.

Which has happened before. The original semantic/heuristic AI, most notably expert systems, over-promised and ultimately under-delivered. This led directly to the so-called "AI winter" which lasted more than two decades and didn't end until quite recently. It's a very real concern, especially among people who want to push the technology forward and not just profit from it.
This looks like an effective piece for a project I have. It would be significantly more effective if it was published on crates.io and could be instantiated within Rust, and was able to operate in memory (or have a filesystem passed to it, so that can be simulated)

I found this issue which tracks crates.io publication: https://github.com/meilisearch/meilisearch/issues/3367

Would be nice to see that made a priority. Having a powerful search engine that can be embedded in a larger application and made portable (like being able to deploy to WASM) would be extremely novel and valuable. Given Rust is already in use, I think it may not necessarily demand too much effort. When search becomes a focus for what I’m working on, perhaps I will make that happen if not already done yet.

Thanks for making this available to people.
The highest priority IMHO is security.

Given how a targeted email can reach someone wherever they are (and spam can conceal mass exploits), frequent security updates are the wrong mindset.

The mindset of one necessary security update should be, OMG, we messed up badly, we need to fix and mitigate, and immediately figure out how never to need another security update, ever again.

Web browsers, OTOH, are hopeless for security right now, due to monstrously big-moat standards. But email MUAs (with addressbook, calendar, and maybe chat) are a much-much simpler problem, also high-value, and maybe the place to set a good example.

If someone objects "but we will always have constant stream of security vulns, because we need these 1,000 libraries, many of which are hopeless"... maybe that's not true. Implementing email is conceptually very easy, and you don't need all that much more than conceptual to get all the benefit that users actually want from email.

(Even incoming HTML multipart content-types, which are often a nightmare of BS generated by some MS program, can be transformed to a vastly simpler and cleaned-up form, enabling a very simple and secure rendering/editing engine, with zero baggage from hopeless browser engines.)
The problem with that take was always that communicable diseases do not care what you believe when they kill you and spread
OP here. I'd love feedback on this and what folks want to read about robotics in the future.
I spent a WEEK without IPv4 to understand IPv6 transition mechanisms
Yup and unfortunately a feature that Wayland decided wasn't worth preserving.
I know its not equivalent, but a really simple human can learn to drive and self driving cars haven't mastered that. I don't think its the case that a really simple human can learn to code. since that is harder than self driving, and ML still cant self drive, I am not worried yet.
It seems more or less consistent with the usual anti-loli stuff I have seen. The only thing that really stands out is that they themselves did not redistribute the artwork that they think is CP as an example, so the writer of this one might actually be more serious than the usual twitterati.
Where are you based that you aren't familiar with the DEI movement? What do you do? I mean no offense and am just curious.

> if it is different from other systems or movements that promote equality.

DEI promotes equity, not equality. As Kamala Harris said, equity means "we all end up at the same place". It is a pipe dream that people will achieve equity in all regards. This mindset is applied unevenly to areas where DEI proponents want to hold back the high achievers. There is no push for height equity in the NBA.
Ask HN: Are you seeing the effects of an economic slowdown where you live?
If you want to respond, please include your country/city so that we can get a good global picture.

I'll start: I'm not seeing any effects from the economic slowdown. I live in the SF Bay Area and despite all of the layoffs we are seeing, I don't see it being reflected in the economy at all. In fact real estate prices are stable or slightly going up in my neighborhood.
I am absolutely certain this is to suppress wages and employee rights. It is a coordinated effort across the industry and should be immediately investigated.
GitHub has been remote first forever tho. Microsoft buying them can’t change that without fundamentally breaking the teams.
> More and more software does not necessarily require more and more developers to write it.

It has so far. We might have expected the massive gains in developer productivity over the last 70 years to have resulted in the demand for new developers slowing down at some point, but it hasn't. In a very typical way, more supply just gets eaten up by more demand - if at any point we can afford to have fewer developers, we'll just end up writing even more software with the excess capacity.

It's hard to imagine a point of diminishing returns on software, since it's so useful in basically every walk of life.
I disagree, I run a small tech company that has a group that's been experimenting with stable diffusion and we noticed that an extreme version of the Pareto Principle applies here as well where you can get ~90% of the benefits for like 5% of the cost, combined with the fact that computing power is continuously getting cheaper.

Based on that groups success, they've recently proposed a mini project inspired by GPT that I am considering funding; the data its trained on is all publicly available for free, and most it comes from Common Crawl. I suspect that it will also yield similar results, where you can tailor your own version of GPT and get reasonably good models for a fraction of the price as well. We're no where close to the scale of Big Tech giants, but I've noticed for the better part of 15 years that small companies can actually derive a great deal of the benefits that larger companies have for a fraction of the cost if they play it smart and keep things tight.
Anyone made redundant by LLM who is not in a protected class will be fired, otherwise top management violates legal duty to maximize shareholder value.
I've asked if this practice is OK or normal in the past. People really don't like it, and I think we're trending away from it.
> Yes, hooking one up to our long-standing record-of-everything-in-the-world (google’s knowledge graph) is going to be powerful.

This hasn't happened yet and, while I may just lack imagination, despite having a fairly solid understanding of how the latest round of AI works I can't see how it can be done successfully. Until it is in fact done and my lack of imagination is demonstrated, your "going to be powerful" is a speculation about the future, not an observation about the present, and deserves the level of respect usually accorded to such speculations.
The house does have a pretty good view of the sky.

I'm not sure what the answer is in general. It's probably not realistic to expect universal wired broadband in very rural areas. Conventional satellite is by all accounts pretty bad. And cellular isn't really an option absent a good 5G signal.

But, other than a vacation cottage, lack of usable Internet isn't really an option either if you're going to be working from somewhere.
A friend of mine had a project that would get it's rotating ip addresses by connecting to wifi of the parade of Google busses that dropped off and picked up in front of his office.
Wunderkind British explorer’s life demonstrates ice-hard resolve
Does This Fisherman Have the Right to Be in a Billionaire’s Backyard?
Flipping can work but it can be much harder to be reasonably profitable without insane appreciation.

Your best bet is fixers - houses with obvious major issues that everyone is scared of but you know you can fix reasonably cheaply. This can mean buying a $500k house with major foundation damage for $100k because everyone is scared - but you know a whole foundation replacement will only run you $200k.

https://johntreed.com/products/fixers
The first rule about scrape-club is you don't talk about scrape-club :)
https://archive.is/bUYOT
But if it has a lithium battery, don't charge it all the way. The sweet spot for storage is somewhere around 60%.
That's exactly how airline tickets work. You can't board a plane if the ticketed name don't match your ID name in full.
Posted about 25 minutes earlier:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34726735
And because OpenAI exploits labour markets in places like Kenya that have weaker labour protection laws and lower minimum wages than in developed countries.

They had to pay someone to label data and filter the worst "content" humanity has to offer. Otherwise it would've ended up like numerous other attempts at exposing "AI" to the Internet.

So it also has a huge human cost that OpenAI is not properly accounting for (and another reason why dreaming up potential use-cases for the technology as if it will be miniaturized and become a commodity in the near future takes some wilful ignorance).
Which is the other than GitHub?
I listened to the Vox The Weeds podcast interviewing the same author and was frustrated that his many explanations seemed disconnected. Since old insulin patents have expired, is it that you are allowed to buy generic insulin but there are no manufacturers, or that you not allowed to buy generic insulin because recent advancements are so good that doctors won’t prescribe the old stuff anymore? And no one will make generic insulin because the brand-name companies will undercut them and there are so many kinds you need to make, but basically a $100 million donation to the world by California will fix all that?
But what's wrong with Teams? It works well enough for me in Firefox on Linux. But OK, I only joined customer-initiated meetings, and was never presenting, only watching and talking, so maybe never used some important but non-working feature.
dont have high DPI but I enabled the setting

you can scale tasks up/down with ctrl+scroll

UI text scale can be adjusted in the options file - dont have a slider for it
But to be fair if a company can continue to operate or even grow while laying off employees, were these employees necessary in the first place ? I mean, should profit be given to employees, or owners ? Should company sacrifice their profit buffer to give it to employees they dont need ? Do they have a social responsibility to employees ?

I m european so we see work in a way more controlled, mutualized way were companies are expected by the state to provide for the citizens, but the success of the american model is that they disagree with us and are way more liberal with all of it. Should they change to copy us ?