skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Apple’s iPod, by comparison, was made far more pocketable thanks to the inclusion of a 1.8-inch Toshiba hard drive. The story behind how Apple came to acquire these hard drives for the original iPod is interesting.

>Jobs had expressed interest in building a portable music player in late 2000 and had tasked Jon Rubinstein with making it happen. The problem, however, was that Jobs wanted a player that was small and sleek like the flash-based music players of the time but that held as many songs as the hard drive-based players at the time (the flash ones would only hold between 10 and 20 songs depending upon how you compressed the music).

>Rubinstein told Jobs that the components necessary to make a small music player with a lot of storage didn’t exist yet. This was in late 2000, according to the story, which is well-documented in Walter Isaacson’s book.

>However in February of 2001, Rubinstein was in Japan meeting with Toshiba when the following scene played out, according to Isaacson (page 384 of "Steve Jobs"):

>At the end of a routine meeting with Toshiba, the engineers mentioned a new product they had in the lab that would be ready by that June. It was a tiny, 1.8-inch drive (the size of a silver dollar) that would hold five gigabytes of storage (about a thousand songs), and they were not sure what to do with it. When the Toshiba engineers showed it to Rubinstein, he knew immediately what it could be used for. A thousand songs in his pocket! Perfect. But he kept a poker face. Jobs was also in Japan, giving the keynote speech at the Tokyo Macworld conference. They met that night at the Hotel Okura, where Jobs was staying. “I know how to do it now,” Rubinstein told him. “All I need is a $10 million check.” Jobs immediately authorized it. So Rubinstein started negotiating with Toshiba to have exclusive rights to every one of the disks it could make, and he began to look around for someone who could lead the development team.

>"Exclusive rights to every one of the disks it could make" is the key takeaway here. Fast forward to later in the year – October 23, 2001, to be exact – and Apple would roll out a $400 pocketable MP3 player that could hold a thousand songs thanks to a hard drive no other company could use for competing products. The scroll wheel was pretty cool, too.

Source: https://techland.time.com/2013/10/23/watch-steve-jobs-unveil...
Is it better for employees?
There are fundamental limits to physics, to space and to time. If the next generation wants cars, single family housing, authentic meat and fish and various other amenities, there needs to be less competition for resources.

As it stands now, technology is not catching up and a smaller percentage of them will have access to those amenities.

We can't just create more oil out of thin air. Progress on batteries is too slow and renewables and electric cars are too expensive. We're already over-fishing and over-farming the earth with our current population. We are missing all of our climate targets, and that's on an earth where most don't live in developed countries yet.

We could replace those needs with technology like VR experiences and processed food for example, but I have a hard time seeing how that will be enough.
Or just do what I do and park far away and walk. No kids, pedestrians or trolleys. Nobody opening their door and slamming it into my car. My fat ass gets exercise.
I said this in another thread on this topic, but this was one of the key reasons I left Amazon in 2021. I knew this was coming.

It was clear from tech survey (company-wide very long survey on all topics) that devs did not want to be in the office. Yet there was an email from leadership that said "We know you all can't wait to be back in the office". This bizarre dichotomy where we know they know we don't want this, but they're saying we do want this.

The stock was reaching new heights every day; things were going great; the was no reason to change back at all. Amazon senior leadership were taking their culture of data-driven-everything and ignoring it because they like it better that way.

Meanwhile the were lots of employers who had "full remote" in the job listings. So I started applying to them and never looked back.

Instead of spending 50 minutes getting to the office this morning, I spent that time playing with my daughter. I'm not giving this up.
You realize it's like a white person saying they've never witnessed a case of anti-black racism. It is the people on the receiving end who notice, and indeed cannot help but notice.
This made me even more happy to have moved to Debian 11 after 14 years of Ubuntu. Snap made me sick, then this. Not that I ever used Flatpack, apt and docker are good enough, but this is too much.
I'm on SO almost everyday. Almost all my visits render useful, fruitful information, across various different languages, for current information/documentation rather than just "7-8 years ago".

I notice that the "gatekeepers" of different language communities span from hostile to friendly, so to tar the entire site of Stack Overflow as being the same smacks of prejudice, rather than fact.

So what language are you doing work in? Anyone who doesn't preface sentences of anger with the language of their worfklow - especially when the questions, answers, feel and brainshare of SO communities are divided by language - is offering an opinion of pure sentiment, rather than rational assessment.
So much this.

For /any/ truly off-grid GPS usage, it's well worth the money to just go and buy a proper GPS unit with no dependency on outside connections other than the GPS signals.

I'm not even talking about hiking on some obscure trail in WhereTheHellistan either. Even just driving down the highway out into the countrysides could leave you miserable if all you have is a phone with spotty or no data signal.

Personally, the Rand McNally GPS unit that cost me a pretty penny has more than paid for itself every time it always just worked while phones just derped worthlessly.
Cinebench/4D does have "hand-optimized" ARM instructions. It would be a disaster for the actual product if it didn't. That's what makes it interesting as a benchmark: that there's a real commercial product behind it and a company interested in making it as efficient as possible for all customer CPUs, not just benchmarking purposes.

Albeit for later releases this is less true since most customers have switched to GPUs...
This reminds me of those "X president is doing great/horribly" bullet lists. It works because with any sufficiently huge system, you can cherry-pick points to reflect your desired viewpoint.

The fact is, the mass exodus from twitter hasn't materialized. It's still the primary medium of discourse for all of the major actors who used it before. Musk has maintained 95% of functionality while drastically reducing costs. When the dust settles, MBA's will be studying this for decades.

Another list idea: compile all of the "twitter will die in a week if you mess with this system" tweets from senior twitter engineers that Musk fired a few months ago.
Having to scan through more than one answer isn't that terrible, better than not having an answer at all.
About halfway through the interview for my first office job I realised the bloke interviewing me had almost knocked me off my bicycle about a year earlier, trying to beat me to the junction because he wouldn't be able to overtake me for a bit after that (maybe 30 seconds?) He actually got out of his car and made the wanker sign at me and I almost certainly said something choice in return. There was no mistake because the junction was right outside the office.

I took the job. Funnily enough, one of my colleagues told me that our boss thought that speed limits in built up zones were annoying and should be at least 50mph. Not a surprise.
Some people have convinced themselves that they are amongst best simply because they are paid a lot, which obviously means that they deserve the pay no matter where they are. So they can just work remotely, because it doesn't change the value they produce, right?

And look I'm all for extracting maximum pay from employers, but it's a bit delusional to not realize that it was mostly because they were in silicon valley/the west coast that the pay was so high. Not because they were literally leagues ahead of everyone else. I'm sure there is a much higher concentration of top talent in SV, but the pay was, at least in part still, inherently due to the location.

The weird part is that it is usually highly paid techies that push so hard for fully (out of state, or even international) remote work. A position which to me is completely against our own self-interests, because it takes for granted salaries that surely won't adjust to international competition because they just...won't?
Pointless snark aside, this is correct. But it is still constrained by geography and it's not all that surprising that employers would like to constrain it a bit more than it is. So this move makes total sense, and pretending that there is no correlation between your location and what you can command in salary is farcical.
When I arrived at the startup I'm at now, we used a "bespoke" backend for interacting with AWS SQS. It was a pile of code that was written that had no value to the function of the startup.

Switched it to an OSS bus and dumped a bunch of bespoke code. I regret not pushing harder for the CTO to avoid even more bespoke code for some of the admin interfaces that we ended up building for internal tooling which probably would have been better in something like NocoDB.

The value of the startup is rarely in the bits and pieces themselves (very few are), but the process or data flow that the startup models with those bits and pieces and some pain point or business value that gets added in doing so.

One thing I have come to appreciate in startups is that it's better to even spend $10,000 to learn fast rather than to wait 3 months to come to the same conclusion. To put it another way: if you could see 3 months into the future for $10,000, would you pay it? Instantly. So if there's a shortcut that can -- with a high degree of certainty -- remove obfuscations of the path to take, you take it.
Nature hides singularities :)
Comment thread from when this came up a couple days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34847550
Except for a brief period when HiSilicon was still making leading edge SOCs, Apple has been the first customer on TSMC’s new process technology, and always with a custom process flavor. This is completely normal.
Could the cosmic web explain dark matter/energy?

Could gravity not being homogenous across universe explain dark matter/energy?

What if law of gravity has other terms that only reduce to the versions we think of as true in the scenarios we've tested...but the other terms are affecting things of supermassive scale?

What if there is some other "force" between things cosmically that we have never seen on the scales we've done stuff...but that we can observe (but misinterpret as dark stuff) on galactic/cosmic scales?

What if quantum correlation produces a "force" among particles that's only apparent on super massive scales? If all particles used to be close together in the big bang, couldn't they have some lingering correlations? Or became correlated with movement of electricity through cosmic web?
Here’s more context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34894943
Would be really great if you could spend 20 minutes reading up on Indian culture before lecturing us on what our issues are.

I'm not saying discrimination doesn't happen. But from what I've seen, it's rarely about caste and usually about other factors (read my other comments in this thread for context)
Because everyone may not be available all the time except standup when all hands are on the deck. Or maybe the discussion is better done face to face. Or maybe the issue happened just before standup and the timings aligned with standup. Or any of the myriad reasons. The example also doesn't preclude raising issues outside of standup.
It does give you recourse if it does happen though and over time it at least gets quieter and more subtle. If we'd applied this same logic to the Civil Rights Act in the 60s we would be much further behind where we've made it to today.
Mastodon is great, but it really isn't a Twitter substitute.https://wordsmith.social/elilla/mastodon-for-twitter-users-i.... Thank goodness for that.
Like any big corporation, your personal experience depends on your luck, because there are so many groups and things to do. However in general the experience is miserable.
Push is big for us too and likely for many developers
Service dogs are more well behaved than the average person.
> the update to the DynamicSource software had been tested over an extended period, the bug was missed because it only presented when many aircraft at the same time were using the system

That only raises further questions!
> I don't know why they'd follow Ubuntu

Official flavor does not mean that canonical is having a separate special team for them. Official distros also include Ubuntu Unity and other community maintained distros.
Over here you aren't allowed to park rear of the vehicle towards sidewalk if it's directly adjacent to parking spot. Sadly the rule isn't enforced and my grandma once got hit on a sidewalk by a food truck backing up to unload.
Is it with virgin olive oil? And yes you might be right, the taste is much stronger with olive oil. It might be just that, but now I realized I never asked my mom why we don't do it!
The M2 Pro chips finally allow 8k displays! That's a pretty significant new feature (at least on Macs, Windows has supported 8k displays for some time already).
> Saying that the launch failed because it had such a long wait time (assuming due to popular demand) has a sort of Yogi Berra quality that I appreciate. He was the one who said, "No one goes there anymore; it's too crowded".

Do we really know what happened? Lack of silicon? high demand? logistic fails?
I agree with your point completely.

I also use a lot of these points when I explain why I use NodeJS and avoid typescript for most of my projects.

The thing is though, it really depends on the project.

Most of my projects are web UI heavy with simple commodity CRUD RESTful APIs sprinkled with business logic.

Time to market tends to be the biggest constraint (I live in startup world), so "good enough" performance and a loose type system are perfect for that.

If I was writing SCADA controllers for a nuclear power plant, my choice of technology would be much different.

The sorts of "rah rah" debates we have on HN about languages frequently don't take the specific project characteristics into account.

Like with everything, it boils down to intelligently selecting the right tool for the job.
I believe there are substantial numbers of patents and/or trade secrets that TSMC hold. Buying ASML alone wouldn't let Apple spin up their own cutting edge IC production, at least not without a decade or more of extra R&D.

Having said that, it would give them more negotiating leverage against TSMC, since then they would be a monopoly equipment supplier as well as a customer.

Either way, I doubt governments would allow such a purchase. It would be denied on national security grounds and on competition grounds.
Well to be fair, you’re never more than a cog in your employer’s machine. That’s the whole point in having employees.
No, arbitration companies are deliberately biased against employees.

Why? Because most of their income comes from the companies who front the fees for it. A company only fronts fees if they're more likely to win.

This isn't theoretical. It's a well known fact among employment law. Do not sign anything that causes disputes to move away from courts toward 3rd party arbitration. It's a sham.

Watch the video below. A lawyer details the whole thing:

https://youtu.be/eRfLr_BH3lM
Google had a "bring your dog to work" option and I saw maybe 3 people use it at my site the entire time I was there (10 years). It's just a silly thing, because dogs (well, my dogs at least) require more interaction and free movement than they can get at an office. And if you bring your dog, now you can't go to the cafeteria for lunch, etc. and have to find someone to attend to them when you go to the bathroom or whatever.

I did it once because my wife and kids were away and I felt bad for my dog alone by herself at home. Neither of us enjoyed it.

I get why employers offer it -- a dog alone for hours by itself sucks. But they'd probably be better off just giving employees discounts on local "Doggy daycare" places.

Anyways now I have two border collies lying on the bed in my (home) office behind me staring at me wondering why I'm not doing something more interesting than shitposting on HN.
> I find it kind of funny that humans are so confident that our models of reality are correct that we truly think it's more likely there's just hidden "stuff" than there's just something hugely wrong with our idea of what the universe really is.

> Obviously, I don't have an explanation myself, and I understand that we can only work with the evidence we have, but I think it's a sign we need to radically rework our basic assumptions about reality, and not just look for our missing keys...

Looking for missing keys is fine. This is how models are validated or invalidated. For example, Neptune's location was predicted in the 19th century before it was observed due to discrepencies in Uranus' observed orbit and what was modeled.

There are alternative theories that could replace dark matter/dark energy (e.g. MOND for dark matter, inhomologous cosmologies for dark energy).
> So 0 risk for the company, all the risk goes to the employees

The employees made bank from the deal. And the company could have made a different deal from the start and kept it rather than offering that compensation package.

If the stock compensation was meant to be a guaranteed salary then it would have been offered that way.

If the company is now having a hard time hiring they can sweeten the deal. And of course the employees can go elsewhere anytime they like to get a better deal.
We’ll the distinction is permanent to statistics if we don’t know whom was interviewed.

If you interviewed a child, and they said someone they played video games online with was a “friend” then that’s the box they go into even if you and I would say that guy is a dangerous stranger.

I think that’s what the OP was trying to say. We should be wary about statistics that say nearly all predation is done by known friends and family. Thus we should rightfully be worried about the online interactions children have, and not simply brush it aside as paranoia.
Yeah I thought this rung a bell.

Here [1] is a BBC article from 2019 that refers to a 2014 study where they hung zebra-print coats on horses to observe the effect of flies landing on them.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191031-the-truth-behind...
Yes. Looking at https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/standard-atmosphere-d_604..., the atmosphere is about 9% as dense at 60,000ft compared to sea level. While you get some drag advantages, you're going to have serious trouble with both lift and thrust using conventional "low-cost drone" tech up there.

Quadrotors are right out for a number of reasons, but a purpose-built fixed wing might be possible although likely not for under $1000. You'll need massive wings and some kind of propulsion system (likely hydrocarbon-based) that can suck in a huge amount of the thin atmosphere to try to get what little oxygen is available. The prevailing winds at altitude can be moving quite fast, so you'll need an airframe that can handle those forces as well as a propulsion system that can generate enough thrust to overcome those headwinds.
Why would you think that puts upward rather than downward pressure on wages?
Yeah, it seems that the highly paid Silicon Valley developers have effectively convinced executives that their jobs can be done remotely.
We need to produce less children, so that trend is perfectly good, isn't it?

And the younger the woman the better, isn't that an obvious?

What about friendship between men, this is your personal choice. I have more than one really close friend and I can not see myself without that kind of relationship.
I agree with Amazon and most employees should be happy about it. Here's why.

1. Any org at Amazon is very big. Without seeing others in the office it's extremely difficult to understand what other groups are doing if everyone is fully remote. It doesn't matter if your immediate coworkers are distributed. Remote work is great for much smaller companies where it's easy for them to prevent silos within the company.

2. Three times a week means you still have the flexibility during the week. Many of these people don't realize that fully remote means they can be easily replaced. The in-person requirement gives them some job stability if they are in a region with good opportunities. I see it with startups, so many of them look for cheap engineers elsewhere. Many hire contractors in Europe. If you bring unique skills you'd be fine. But most don't add more value than an engineer in Ukraine with decent English besides a better time zone. Do you think you'll get paid $200K more just because you're in the same time zone? Hell no.
> In October, Jassy said Amazon would leave it up to individual managers to decide how often workers would be required to come into the office, which marked a sharp reversal from its earlier goal of returning to an “office-centric culture.” [1]

Risk management perhaps, but if your leaderships says it will be up to your manager and your entire org up to L8 (base SDE is L4) is working remotely then it seems like a reasonable assumption.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/07/andy-jassy-says-he-wont-forc...
I’ll never forget the article (WashPo, I think) about their corp culture from a few years back that said seeing someone crying at their desk was normal, expected, and unremarked upon.
Dark matter is the name for unexplained mass that doesn't interact like typical matter. The existence of such mass is needed because there are galaxies that don't match what is predicted by general relativity. So either general relativity is wrong on the particular predications or there is extra matter.

The universe is expanding. However, not only is it expanding, but the expansion is accelerating. It isn't clear what is driving this, and source of the acceleration was given the name dark energy.

The "dark" in these names are part we don't know what these things are yet and part we can't see them yet with our current observational methods.

> I find it kind of funny that humans are so confident that our models of reality are correct

I don't think this is the case. If you have another model that replaces general relativity, I think people would be very interested in it. People have tried several times to explain the observations that led to dark matter by modifying various forms of gravity. They all work less well than general relativity. So the search continues: keep adjust the models but also don't be afraid that there are new things in the universe that we didn't previously know about. There are several experimental approaches that are searching for ways to directly detect dark matter.
What’s the next best smartphone or non-smartphone based option to try and navigate if you get lost and don’t have something like a satellite phone or satellite enabled smartphone like those new iPhones?

Offline maps with a solar powered charger or power-pack?
You can unfollow them and I think that will keep them out of your feed. I’m on a job hunt so I have to be active on LI right now. I consider the future, where I can ignore it again, a motivator to get a new gig.
MacOS has seemingly gotten worse over the years not better. Features removed. Interface has been changed for the worse. The drive to unify the desktop experience with iOS. I could go on.