skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I've also had situations where the whims of higher-ups were misunderstood by my direct manager and direct communication unraveled the mistery

I'd guess this is more likely to happen with non-technical managers. Not sure, but that's a guess

> What does small-ish mean?

My current company (~300) is by far the largest I've worked at. Next-largest was about 100

> had a rather flat hierarchy

Yeah, that tends to be true in my experience and probably contributes to this

> Managers if anything were contributors and their managerial role was aggregating feedback for the executives so they don't get every IC knocking at their door

Most of my managers have had a tremendous amount of professional humility, which I think is key. The main jobs they've covered (in different portions at different companies, and sometimes with some IC thrown in too) were:

- People-manager: make sure people are unblocked, happy, not burning out, working on things that play to their strengths, feeling good about their career and work and not on the verge of leaving. Really a support-role

- Shield: go to the stakeholder meetings, field requests made toward the team, manage the jira tickets. Then take all that and digest it, bring it to the team to discuss capacity and direction, and then take the results back to the outside stakeholders and use managerial authority to push back if needed

- Product expert: stay in the headspace of the user, features, experiments, overall goals/roadmap, and represent those priorities to the ICs. This one's a fine line- it's easy for them to go off into the clouds and pass things down one-directionally. But when it's collaborative, and we're discussing things as a group with different individual focuses, it works fantastically

At my current company we actually have two managers per team- one of the first kind, one of the third kind. This can work really well

The most important component for all of these to work well is for the manager to see themselves as a team member, not a boss. These teams (when they worked well) did not operate on a hierarchy unless a tie had to be broken. Normally, we were all just collaborators with different specialties, who brought our different perspectives to the table and advocated for what we saw to be important. I can't emphasize enough how well this works when you can get everybody in that frame of mind
> To use the language of antitrust, these companies are a cartel that is using its monopsony power to drive down demand for labor.

Except there is absolutely no reason to believe this at all. Author is just making stuff up. If they were doing that, it would be to cut wages; layoffs are not part of it.
Its highly unlikely that Carl Sagan would think of the visionaries behind the fediverse as clowns but I can accept there are diverse value systems out there.
> even if it was just a 5% chance

It would be more motivating for me if in the 95% event that Apple rejects it from the app store, a PR disaster can be launched against Apple for it, and instructions are published to install it on a jailbroken phone.
The phrase "net worth" claims another victim's mind.
Why wouldn't Google build that into Chrome (and Mozilla into Firefox and Apple into Safari) if users want it?

ChatGPT is not special.

Any of these companies can develop LLMs that are on par with ChatGPT.
Living on Mars would warp the human body
If you want a flatter org structure, it seems like it would be easier to achieve this if manager/IC roles were distinct. If a manager is also writing code, then they won't have the time to manage as many other employees, and the total number of managers/layers would need to increase.
I used to agree with you, because if you look at the system as a whole, centralizing generation is more efficient. But I am currently paying 2/3 of my per kWh rate just for distribution. PGE (the northern california utility) is some combination of negligent, corrupt, and standard fare profit seeking, that I simply don't trust them to pass on the efficiency savings to me.
Reminds me of that anti-drug commercial from the 80's.

>"Who taught you how to do this?"

>"You, dad! I learned it from watching you!"
I would love it if this nukes the SEO industry and the internet goes back to forums and community groups.

The best info is almost always locked up in these places.
Web frameworks do, but the web platform, i.e. browsers don't. The basic abstraction of browsers is still the DOM, which follows the same basic idea of desktop UI toolkits: A tree of elements which you can modify imperatively, combined with event handlers. Only, it's far less sophisticated than the data models of UI toolkits and still optimized for the web's original use case, which were text documents.

A lot of the bloat and complexity of web frameworks comes from the issue that they basically have to implement a modern, functional UI toolkit on top of an ancient, imperative one.
> hostile to other workers

It's also hostile to the practitioner if they last long enough at the same company.

I end up reinventing my "clever" (until I forget the context at least) hacks more often than I care to admit and I'm not actively trying to sabotage my company.
What are you talking about? Everybody should read Mein Kempf just so you can understand how populism works.

As for Creationism? It absolutely should be taught in science class to help students distinguish between what is science and what is pseudoscience. You may as well make sure they understand what a scientific theory is while you're at it.

I'd throw in the Satanic Bible too as it actually defines what humanism is. That's useful info for anybody living in a modern democratic society not founded on a religion.

Throw in some Camus and Nietzche and these kids will have the knowledge they need to take on this world head first!

But, those kind of people don't make for docile laborers who are content to work to fulfill the dreams of others. So we make sure they don't have access to these kinds of books.
Chrome got popular because IE grew to be terrible and Firefox became bloated and slow over time. Opera was a decent alternative but their alternative renderer couldn't keep up.

If Apple keeps their browser compatible, I doubt they have much to fear. Linking users to the app store because your site doesn't work is a great way to drive them away from your website, I doubt there will be much push for installing Chrome.

Currently, Chrome for iOS has a slither of the market share that Safari has. Most people don't even know you can install another browser at all. Unless Apple makes/keeps their browser uncompetitive, they won't lose a serious amount of market share.
Sadly, they're probably headed into a worse situation, where they lose most of that 90% of their funding since their browser marketshare is at an all time low of 3-4%. Renegotiation is this year.
Old hardware isn't the only low-powered hardware.
This reads half as a marketing piece by a Dell worried that XPS13 sales are dropping - or is it just me?
Three separate organizations (HHMI, Whitehead, MIT) investigated and concluded he did. He also resigned from MIT rather than having tenure revoked, which also seems like he knew there was at least some merit to the claims.

Now, it's possible that one of the lawsuits will reveal some information which discredits those investigations but that's a pretty relatively low probability. Occam's razor suggests that the successful guy in a position of authority took advantage of that stature like so many before him.
Until someone figures out superconduction at room temperature, there will always be transmission losses, which you don't get when you generate and store the power at the point of consumption.
I did that experiment a while back. I think (but it's hard to tell) that I perceived the quality falling for me in that case.

Much of the problem with Google is that it's trying to make a guess about what I /really/ want, when what I really want is to find sites that contain certain words or phrases. Tracking me is irrelevant to that task, and if my online behavior affects the search results I get, that can't improve things.

I don't want a search engine to find me answers. I want it to search for web pages.

I like DDG because it (mostly) does what I want a search engine to do.

I'm not really bashing Google here, it's just that Google is a tool that accomplishes something different than what I need accomplished.
Post IPO Aussie buy now, pay later company Openpay collapses
Not supporting Unicode is a feature for me. I have absolutely no use for Unicode, but it is a constant source of security vulnerabilities.
"Managers are an organisational necessity past a certain scale." That sounds like a dubious claim, I'm sure there are exotic ways to run an organisation that doesn't need managers.

For example, Pirate ships ran with a Battle Commander, Accountant and Crew.
To make things more confusing, both the iOS photos app and Google Photos automatically find faces in your photos and the other photos containing them and let you easily tag each face with the correct name. The technology to do this already exists.
Australia has exactly this rule.

One influence in the setting of this rule was that payment card processors had been throwing their weight around requiring that merchants not pass on cost, which was fairly clearly an abuse of their position of power. (For most in-person business, which was largely what was being dealt with at the time, cash is essentially costless, and so for some small businesses being forced to swallow payment card fees was genuinely an unreasonable burden.)
> I would definitely fact check search results as much as AI, especially the info snippets that appear at the top of Google's SERPs.

Yes, so would I. And I also double check things like Google Maps -- a tool I find very helpful but don't trust blindly. But... do most people think to take a close look at Google Maps to make sure it makes sense, and trust their own judgement if they disagree with the map? Will most people fact check confident LLM outputs?
How do you utilize your personal computing power?
Last year, I built a computer with 64GB of RAM and the latest and greatest desktop i9 processor. When working off my laptop, I can definitely appreciate that my desktop is a more capable development machine since compilations and my IDE project indexes happen almost instantaneously (and boy can I open a lot of browser tabs), but I still feel like I'm under-utilizing my machine.

What processes do you run that make you appreciate all the processing power and memory available to us nowadays? I'm already aware of things like folding@home and I'm not a gamer, so I'm more interested in the "personal" side of personal computation.
They definitely aren't vacuous memorizers. GP's description of them as "bullshit generators" is correct. They generate plausible-sounding text that (when it includes facts) is often counterfactual.
Too little motivation?
You are using backwards-looking inflation figures and comparing against forward yields. If you believe that the Feb 2024 price level will be 6.5% inflated compared to Feb 2023, then please go ahead and take that 4.5% loan. The rest of the market believes that inflation will continue to fall and infinite money has ended.

Basically, if you borrow at 4.5% today with the assumption that it is effectively a negative real rate, you will be pretty disappointed in a year.
The two big features of Java - that helped it take over from C++ - were GC and the JVM ("write once, run anywhere!"). Object Pascal didn't have either of those things...Object Pascal was essentially Pascal-With-Classes, in the same was that C++ was C-With-Classes.
He had a straight 512ST and added manually a FPU. He bought some board to do that.
I remember, in the days without Internet, only 5 TV channels which weren't always fun, and sub-freezing temperatures in winter (leading to less desire to go outside with friends then), pass-times like "invent your own language" by making up words were much more common.
^ This. Searches these days are full of sponsored ads. When you get to the bottom of the search results page you click more and it takes you to a new search, when you actually meant to click "2" (or page 3, 4 etc) in the tiny font at the _very_ bottom of the page.
> You may not have heard the news, Florida took that power away from school boards. That may be why you're getting downvoted.

That doesn't affect my overall point, though. I'm not "banning a book" if I refuse to purchase it or dispose if it after I've purchased it, likewise it's not a ban if some level of government does the same thing. If someone wants to read that book, they can buy it or borrow it from someone who chooses to lend it out. The "book ban" language is just tendentious outrage framing.

I mean, I would be surprised if literal pornography is available to be checked out from any school library in the US, even though it's frequently consumed by high-school aged kids, and no one can reasonable claim that's "banned."
LLMs will do the opposite. The internet will get flooded with machine-generated bullshit.
I think your argument is advocating that the 'person who probably wrote half the damn code' should get a lot more, right? What should that person have gotten, exactly?

Either they did not negotiate for a better package with compensation and equity early on OR sadly, they joined too late. If they wanted a lot more equity (and therefore risk but also potential for a high return like Musk or Bezos or whatever), then they would have needed to join super early, or better yet, have been a co-founder to a Musk or a Bezos or whatever.

But they weren't, so no, they don't get anywhere near the sharing in the big reward, just a small or tiny slice.
Now youtube trying to catch up with Tiktok is ruining their users experience with their 'Shorts' feature. My opinion at least. I wish I could hide shorts and never see them again...
The rise of webtech-for-"apps" is the only reason I can't still work on a 4GB laptop and feel like that's a luxurious amount of memory (8 feels cramped now, in fact), so wasteful software drives e-waste and higher resource use in computer manufacturing, too.
If you have 400k LOC why are you even considering rewriting it? It would take way less time to learn Rust then to rewrite something like that.
The advertising will probably be more insidious, but no less profitable. My guess is that the hidden pre-prompt will end up including something like:

>You are a generative model designed to provide reasonably correct information, with a preference for providing flattering portrayals of your advertising partners. Your advertising partners are ranked according to a token system...
There was indeed a bit of (at least apparent) threat involved. No colonialism or imperialism though - Japan has never been a colony of anyone as long as Japan as a nation has existed (which is, officially, since around 660BC [0]

[0] https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/japans-nat... (which should probably be taken as seriously (or not) as the foundation of Rome in 753 BC)
its really difficult to do any kind of analysis without relational queries. The standard way you do this is to have an app datastore in DDB, and an ETL job that pipes your data into some data warehouse env.
> GCP and Azure currently lose money for Google and Microsoft

100% not true for Microsoft. Just listen to the most recent earnings call or read the analyst reports.

Eg https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/microsoft-nasdaq:msft:-cloud...
“In fiscal Q2, Microsoft Cloud’s gross profit margin even expanded by about 2% year-over-year to 72%. When you have a business with such high margins growing at 20%+, profitability is set to expand considerably even if revenues in other segments fail to rebound”
It's the Xerox Parc story all over again.
The original street pass feature of the Nintendo 3DS would let you “passively” play some games with other 3DS players you encountered in real life (even and especially when your 3DS isn’t even opened). That way you would check your 3DS later and see the players you bumped into during your trip.
I think OP is suggesting to have a similar thing for Mastodon. Users would keep the Mastodon app running and other users you meet along the way would be added to a list. (I’m not specifically fond of the idea, but just try to bring in some clarity and context here.)
The largest 'smart businesses' on the planet colluded to suppress wages.
I like all these "cool" devices, love the idea, even got myself nreal air, but ... these are overpriced gadgets, I mean not worth the money that you have to pay for them as these do nothing well: not a good AR, not a good screen, not a convenient device, expensive.
Could you just, stop styling shit and let your application look like the rest of the damned computer does?

FFS, in 1995 styling was something the user did to applications, now it is a way for developers to mangle the fucking GUI so they can look 'unique' and 'on brand'.

Fuck this entire goddamned industry.
OpenSearch K-NN plugin supports FAISS and it's disk based:

https://opensearch.org/docs/latest/search-plugins/knn/index/
That would be different.

On Android Chrome, I cannot install any adblockers.

On Android Chromium forks, I can.

I imagine this could work the same way. But at some point your OSS AGI will be significantly behind the corporate-offered versions, and perhaps you will wonder if you should dump your 'friend' for the sleeker, wittier, upgraded model.
No, it's exactly the opposite. Giving control of technology like this to only megacorporations and superpowers is a nakedly terrible outcome and advocates for it should be given zero traction.
My favorite part was the section that was bullet point after bullet point of horrible advice.

The 19th and early/mid 20th century lenses used in this blog post are just not relevant to todays tech worker. The labor theory of value simply doesn't apply in the world of power law distributions we are now in.
Okay, so what are skills if not capital assets?
Bing has been a real competitor to Google Search for several years in terms of results quality and features. Google retained their dominant market share largely due to inertia, and ties to unrelated products.
Google is the new Xerox.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlBjNmXvqIM
I'm not sure I understand. If long form content makes more money, how can TikTok afford to pay creators to attract them away from YouTube?
>...or if I wasn't able to tell what is from what isn't.

That's exactly my assertion, that the average person has no idea how the bulk of their opinions and behaviors have been suggested to them by a handful of media conglomerates and other powerful organizations.
Give them a budget and agree on a set of accountabilities. The same model as buying a managed software consulting project.
And with a different CC, I think.
To be safe is it better to use a neighbor's address?
Step 1: Read every Dilbert comic

Step 2: Realize that what you requested is impossible for sufficiently large organizations

Step 3: Negotiate a golden parachute for yourself. Don't hate the player, hate the game
> Don't build Data and make him a slave. That's not going to work out.

This is inevitable once we get to AGI. And I don't think it will take that much time, AGI can help with that, after all.
Ah, I was actually trying to express precisely what you're saying here, and don't immediately see the difference between the views we're laying out.
Not to be confused with "Deno"[1] the javascript runtime

[1] https://deno.land/
If your employer knowingly and willfully doubles your pay without changing the contract, are you stealing from them? I think not, and it's just the other side of the coin.
I wasn't in Japan, but I did something similar in the US for about 6 months before the pandemic cut our (planned 12 month) trip short.

It was far from perfect, but it was super rewarding! Your experience will vary wildly based on what's available in your van, but you can make just about anything work.
> Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri were thought to be good at launch

In my own experience, Alexa and Google's query pucks were improving for a short time, and then got considerably worse, losing features every month until they basically stopped understanding or responding to anything but the simplest requests.

A couple months after released, they expanded android auto with the same abilities, so I could "ok google" in my car and ask for the answer to just about any question, or to adjust the temp in my house, or ask it to play just about any obscure album / artist. It improved over about 6 months and then began to devolve from there. It's not even possible to ask for "[popular artist] radio" anymore in the car nor can I run voice queries at all that aren't map-specific.

Not sure what happened there, but in my mind they failed miserably. I still like Android auto, but my google and alexa pucks are all in a pile in some cabinet around here somewhere.
HOT's Tasking Manager is a platform for coordinating the work of mappers. Only authorized organizations can create projects, but anybody can contribute.

In this case, Yer Cizenler (yercizenler.org) is coordinating with representatives of
local organizations and consultants from IFRC (The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies) for the collection of road and building datasets.

The goal of this tasks is to complete missing data on the map, for example adding building and roads like in this case. Data is then available on OpenStreetMap for different uses. Some examples are:

* View the map on openstreetmap.org
* View the map on OsmAnd or other similar software
* Download spatial data using Overpass or HOT's Export Tool (https://export.hotosm.org)
* etc, etc

The output of people doing those tasks can be seen querying the changes on the map. There's a tool that is currently unmaintained but you can use it to get some additional stats about the contributions:

https://galaxy.hotosm.org/mapathon-report/summary

If you put a date range like "6 February, 2023 12:00 AM" to "6 February, 2023 11:45 PM" and a Tasking Manager project's id (example: 14218) you'll see something like:

Total Unique Contributors: 507

Features Created:

- building: 48962
- source: 34317
- highway: 7770
- highway_km: 924
- surface: 508
- name: 474
I think this is a good article with a reasonable complaint, that goes out of its way to not be an old man yelling at clouds, so I just want to call that out.

That said, I think the argument goes like this: "Developing GUIs with HTML/JS is hard, but is better than any other alternatives. A better solution would be to come up with a new standard that is better than anything else, and have all the vendors agree to implement it."

As such, it comes up against the "now you have n+1 standards" problem, which should be a red flag. It feels it would indeed require a magic wand to work. So, it's a non-starter for me.

And I did not agree with his complaint that it's hard to learn to make GUIs in HTML/JS/CSS. As evidence: I'm pretty dumb, and I can do it really well. As further evidence, millions of other people aren't much smarter than me, and they can also do it. I think HTML/JS is popular because it's actually pretty easy to pick up.

Yes, you can complicate it if you want to. One way to do this is to adopt a lot of complicated dependencies. But, that's not an issue with the underlying technology, it's an issue with the accessories. And if you suffer from having to rewrite your application because the framework changes underneath you, that's the framework's issue, too.

Anyway, I also hope somebody waves a magic wand and makes everything easier, but in the meantime I'm super happy that I can throw together an Electron app — albeit a pretty bad one — in just a few marginal hours.
I knew some people at a university lab which had developed exactly this — back in the 90s or 00s. I think the problems it had are mostly solved since then (lightweight compute/fast digital radio/etc).

Presumably the university eventually sold the patents off and they're sitting in some dusty corporate vault now, but maybe they'll expire soon.
Most of the reporting chains for ICs were ~8 steps away from Zuck, from what I recall.