skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While you shouldn’t torture yourself with past choices, you do need to recognize them so you can learn. They were a participant in the past it didn’t only just happen to them.
"We need a new build system that's built on streams"
> Attract bright engineers and waste their potential. Undersell the difficulty of the project to management; oversell the project’s usefulness. Tell management it’s “almost complete” until they scrap it.

People at every level of the organization, from the top-down, have done this since forever. The -10x engineer will choose a language that they're fascinated by, but have no production experience with, and then spend most of the budget building libraries that they assumed already existed in the ecosystem. "Almost complete" becomes "almost ready to start".
Those are all earlier in the pipeline, required for the project to run, and gulp doesn't cache (or, didn't back when we used it), which IMO was the main reason webpack beat it so quickly.
SEEKING WORK | UK/Global – Cambridge/London/Remote

I'm a software engineer with coming up for two decades of programming experience. I've helped startups get started and big companies keep going.

I've organised a couple of jobs through HN now; it's been a good way to find interesting projects, and my clients have been pleased with the work. One said: "Thank you! I've played with it a bit and it looks very impressive! Way better than what I imagined this project could be."

I've worked on a very wide variety of web-based projects, as well as React Native, and other platforms, so I will be able to hit the ground running on most projects. If you're doing something a bit esoteric, that could still suit me – I've done FPGAs, network protocols, more ETL than you can shake a stick at, and devised novel algorithms.

I am productive in every commercial programming language I've tried. In the last 5 years I've done commercial projects in (at least):

Typescript/Javascript (React Native, browser, and Node.js), Ruby, Java, C#, Python, Swift and Go. I'm trying to find someone to pay me to do some Rust (I completed an Advent of Code in it.)

As well as building things, I am also good at talking to people to help figure out what we should be building. I enjoy working with other developers and helping the team learn, but I am also a good lone wolf at getting things done. I'm happiest on fixed-term projects that I can complete on a schedule that suits both of us, and my clients have been very happy with this process too.

For more details my website is https://www.lambdacambridge.com

Email: robin [at] the website above
> I'd be happy if games simply paused rendering when minimised. Some games do this, some don't.

Yes, please.

It drives me nuts to have GPU fans spinning when game is minimized, paused, in the loading screen, turn based and no inputs, etc.
Was this comment automatically generated? What is it supposed to mean?
Yeah, in my experience writing complete tickets forces people to actually think through designs and trade-offs. It also has the nice benefit of exposing their thinking to others in the organization, who can weigh in and go, "Oh, if you're doing that, we have to do this on our project."
>A lot of toxic negativity in that post.

Yeah, or as it's scientifically called: "realism"
The best, most powerful, most private journaling app ever
A very good point. Thank you.
Containers don't just sit there- they are secured, with a combination of lashing rods and twistlocks that connect the bottom of the container to the deck or the container it is resting on. In fact, there are computer programs which tell the crew exactly how this needs to be done. They do sometimes fall off in bad weather, this is due to failure of the lashings.

See here [0]: "The MAIB’s preliminary assessment found that [the ship]’s violent pitching and ploughing into the heavy seas resulted in a rapid loss of speed and heading control, which exposed the deck cargo to green sea forces capable of overwhelming the maximum loading of the container securing arrangements... corrosion to the vessel’s deck cargo securing arrangements may have contributed to the scale of the loss."

Or here [1]: "At 0800, the ship sailed from Xiamen with 6,466 containers on board... At about 1000, the bosun and four deck crew mustered at the forward end of the weather deck and began a post-departure inspection of the deck cargo securing arrangements... they checked that the manual twistlocks, connecting the first tier of containers to the hatch covers, were locked, and ensured that the container lashing rods were correctly tensioned. With over 12,000 twistlocks and 3000 lashings to inspect, the checks continued all day"

[0]:https://www.gov.uk/maib-reports/loss-of-34-containers-overbo...

[1]: https://www.gov.uk/maib-reports/loss-of-cargo-containers-ove...
Nobody that knows what they are talking about is making claims like "system x does not have any security holes". It's all about threat models, probabilities, and ultimately tradeoffs.

Consider a scenario where you need to compute some a function of secret data, but unfortunately that function isn't of the shape that any CC- or FIPS-certified solution (HSM or otherwise) supports out of the box, and ordering one to be built against your specifications would eat through your budget for the next 15-20 years. Your choices roughly are:

- Use a HSM anyway, but only use it to encrypt the data (or its encryption key), and have your application servers decrypt, evaluate the function, return the result and delete the data from memory every time they need to? Then you're arguably just doing fancy encryption at rest.

- Use enclaves. Even though they are much less hardened than a CC certified and audited solution, let's say you assign some probability to the event that somebody compromises them and burns the corresponding 0-day on you. Would you assert that that probability is 1? If not, why not still do it?

And you can still store the actual data encryption keys in a HSM and any higher-level features that it does support! In fact, if you use your HSM in a pretty low-level way (i.e. with an interface like "decrypt data x using key k"), access to the HSM needs to be guarded carefully, and enclaves can be a candidate for that.

- Don't evaluate the function, or possibly don't even store the data in the first place. The only problem with enclaves, in my view, is if they would make people disregard this option due to the misunderstanding that "enclaves are perfectly secure". (This applies to any security technology, but the fancier/more magical a solution looks like or is marketed as, the higher the temptation.)

- Do none of the above, but still store the data and evaluate the function on your systems. This is arguably the norm today in most organizations.
Where Electric Cars Are (Not) Being Considered
"Aaaand that's the container address orchestrator -- it's written in Haskell by that one guy a few years ago."
Angled USB adaptors. I keep my laptop in an edge holder to free up work space. The angle adaptors keep the two USB cables from protruding too much.
There isn’t a Mac emulator, when you run in the simulator on x86 based Macs, it compiled the code to x86 and links against native libraries.

Of course it doesn’t even do that on ARM based Macs.

If you’re not testing on a wide variety of devices for Android or OS’s, how complex is this app?
Please review the HN guidelines for comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I recently pushed back on discussing if an already-completed ticket was really a bug, or a feature to work around a limitation in the browser.

I mean, that ticket was messing so hard the tech debt statistics! Or so that claimed the PM.
> In the UK there is, in summary, a right to a fair process – where _roles_ are eliminated, not _people_. That when there aren't enough roles for the people left, they are selected for layoffs in a fair way with transparency on how choices were made.

So go to court? I highly doubt Google is susceptible to a walk out or a strike.
Well said. I work on engineering stuff but I spend a huge amount of time encouraging people to understand the other parts of the business and their needs.
They don't make the compiler. GCC in very many places substitutes standard library names with intrinsics for the purposes of optimization or static analysis. I'm not aware of it doing so for ssize, but in principle this is a bad idea.
A possible outcome is that it turns out intelligence is orthogonal to feeling/consciousness/qualia, and we start to recognize the latter as the true defining nature of humanity and personhood - and perhaps thereby extend a little more empathy to animals. They (comparatively) lack intelligence, but still experience those biology-rooted feelings. And in that renewed appreciation of animal rights we might hope that superhumanly-intelligent AIs will agree.
If you're making a change without saying what it is or how to test it, and not writing an automated test to cover it then that would be a problem. It might be 1 minute in code, but that doesn't mean it's a 1 minute fix.
Just mount the pole off-center, then you can get around the clearance problem somewhat. I only have one monitor mounted centrally, and my laptop to the side on the second arm. The desk is almost flush to the wall at 2cm (~1 inch) and the monitor and laptop are around 15cm (~6 inches) away from the wall.
People often manage to bring actual weapons onto flights, so it's unsurprising that they frequently fail to catch liquids.
How we debug and mitigate replication lag issues
Transform photos/videos on the fly using query params
> shouldn't we wait until there is something to have a debate about?

The main push for regulation (at least from those worried about existential risk) comes from the fact that in the scenario that AI does get powerful enough to take over the world, it will be too late/useless to have a debate at that point. The only time where it makes sense to have a debate, from that perspective, is before the capabilities are developed. If such capabilities are developed, and we have no idea how to control such a system because we decided not to worry about it, humanity loses.
Because it’s rather expensive and difficult for some random person to do human genome research from home, but anyone with the right knowledge and a laptop can still make significant progress in AI while sitting on their couch at home.
> You’ve never wasted a few minutes on whether a ticket was “critical” or merely “high?” or truly a blocker?

Calling "deciding on how to spend your time" a waste of time seems a misnomer.
Hey! Which mic you have from RODE?
A lot of these look like Goldilocks problems, e.g.

> "Waste 400 hours of engineering on bad architecture: Give zero consideration to how your system design will evolve over time. Alternatively, drive your team obsess over architecture decisions so that they don’t have time to test their hypotheses."

A complex project with many people working on it in different teams calls for modularization and well-defined interfaces, so working out the architecture up-front does matter, and changing it down the line will have huge costs. Staged progession is the answer, probably, which is why you'd want to have a meeting where everyone agrees, "this is the architecture we're going with, now everyone go build the modularized widgets that fit into this architecture, here are the stable interfaces to build to." Screw that up and you end up with tons of wasted effort, but dithering around and never making a decision is no better.

Some of the other stuff relates to the 'build team spirit' corporate mentality which is kind of culturally variable - some people love it and some people hate it. Minimal is better, IMO.

Then there's the 'basic technical proficiency' category of problems, e.g. recompliling the entire collection of source code every time you make a lttle change because the build configuration in the makefiles is incorrect etc. That's probably the easiest category to fix, some people just have holes in their knowledge and those can be filled. Here is where the company jerk is a major liability, though - you want people who can teach others how to improve their workflows without engaging in any condescending / egomaniacal / prima donna behavior.
They almost all show up as a standard USB sound card to the OS, sometimes two on particularly fancy ones allowing you to separately balance chat and game, so you should be fine.
> the quality of the masters

> a modern re-master

Only the best of the best is getting a re-master today. Of course it sounds great. Survivor bias in action.

And to the parent poster's point -- we only remember the good things. We tend to forget all of the alcoholism, abuse, and misery in relationships -- there was no divorce, or it was rare. Car accidents were just as common and your giant chrome landship killed you and the people you hit. Whole lotta institutional biases that were pretty blatant.
It's not 0/1 problem. Obviously being asshole for no reason is bad.

But bending over backwards for bad solutions just coz you "don't want to rock the boat" or "don't want to argue" leads to mediocre product driven by whoever happens to be least polite in the team. Tiny bit off stubborness and assholery on stuff you know is right (as in when nobody can provide actual sensible arguments for other way) can be very helpful.

Also I did worked with "toxic but brilliant" ones and honestly I vastly prefer it over nice useless people. Toxicity can be managed, uselessness can not.
> As others mentioned, in the UK (for now) you eliminate roles, not people - this means you can't just shift a role to another cheaper country.

Of course you can. If you shift a role from the UK office to the Bangalore office you have made that role redundant in the UK and can layoff the employee...
he dun got a big butt
I built myself a small special-purpose keyboard with two parts: the main part is a 5-key board to control music players: play/pause, volume control, next/previous. The second (and more fun) part is a big blue arcade button that locks the screen. I worked for a while for a federally-funded R&D center where we could get in trouble if we left a computer unlocked and having a big blue button that I could slap as I stood up from my desk helped me stay in infosec's good graces. Now that I'm WFH I still enjoy it.
The smart view of that is that regardless of whatever ridiculous arguments for Russian imperialism people want to engage in Russia is not physically capable of conquering the Baltic states.
The GPT architecture can't really produce a 300+ page report right now, because that doesn't even come close to fitting within its window. Of course you can just keep running it and concatenating, but I wouldn't really call that a 300+ page report. It'll either wander off topic completely once it loses the prompt, or be very repetitive because it'll have no idea whatsoever what it said before its window.

I gather that with the current architecture it becomes exponentially more difficult to grow the window, but I'm not sure if that's what a computer scientist would call "exponential" or if it was the common colloquial usage that calls x^2 "exponential growth"; would actually be interested if anyone could clarify that. With the current expense though, any of the common complexity classes beyond O(n log n) isn't very feasible at the moment though.
Actually both GCC and Clang have this feature (so does Circle), and uhh there are plenty of other indispensable features that lock you into those. You need statement expressions and inline assembly to write this kind of software.
"If his former exes asked for a restraining order against him, what incentive or assurance does he have for allowing them to break up with him?"

The problem is Russia. Russia could be a normal country like its neighbors and make money from trading goods while wooing foreign investors, but Putin took the history books he read too seriously and thinks he can pull another round of territorial conquests.

I don't see how other countries joining a defensive pact "mitigates" Russian sovereignty. No one is encroaching on Russia's borders.
>Sundar Pichai previously said he takes "full responsibility" for the decisions which lead to mass layoffs, and has now been accused of hiring sprees for "vanity".

The same way CEOs say "I take personal responsibility for this layoff". Thoughts and prayers.
This is hilarious, good ol' irony
Very comprehensive. Nice article.
I have this same thing except to put my feet on, I can stay nice and warm while the house is at 15C. Nice touch using it as a desk mat as well.
“We can't breathe in business class. Somebody's got mace or something.”

“Nobody knows who stabbed who, and we can't even get up to business class right now 'cause nobody can breathe.”
- Betty Ong, Flight 11

Not necessarily explosive, but tactical chemical attacks have been a known capability for a while, and part of anti-terrorist training long before 2001. Something truly sophisticated from a superpower state would likely escape detection, (and therefore likely implicate such a state,) but the Tokyo Sarin attack by a cult in 1995 involved big bags of liquid.

(This isn’t a justification of any particular security search, just pointing out that liquid agents are not a non-existent threat.)
On what planet does a country have a say over the territories that used to be part of the same defunct empire it was part of?
In my experience AGI is most often used to refer to something that has at least the appearance of having self awareness. I think most people do not envision such an entity as being a slave and would think that immoral. Hence the concern around alignment or built in empathy and cooperation with humanity. The forethought going into that is that such an entity will be a peer and will be treated as such, so it is important that they have our best interests in mind or are at least capable of doing so and being reasoned with.
Invading the Baltics is generally a bad idea since it risks starting WWIII. I think you are overlooking the sovereignty of those former territories. Russia’s sovereignty is only mitigated in so far is it includes the right to stage military interventions in its neighbors.
And a lot of that is marketing, keeping unused capacity in reserve, etc. Microsoft can probably afford a very low price without losing money if they price the compute at-cost. Certainly less than $7/request. 70 teraflop per request, and an $8000 GPU, with $2k of server overhead, $10k in power and cooling costs, $20k total for 312 teraflops of compute, leased for 2 years gives you an at-cost hardware price of $0.00007/request: https://www.google.com/search?q=%2420000*70/(312*3600*24*365...
So even assuming just a 1% utilization rate, you’re still talking less than 1 cent per request.
Remember, inference runs at reduced precision. FP16 (or even just 8 bit) is WAY cheaper than fp64 bit. More than an order of magnitude cheaper. 9.7Tflops vs 312Tflops, factor of 32 improvement.

With sparse matrix and 8-bit precision, you can effectively get over 100x the performance on an A100 than with FP64, plus the memory requirements are more than an order of magnitude less. Factor of 128 improvement in processing speed plus at least a factor of 8-16 or more improvement in tokens per memory, depending on sparsity. (Sparsity and reduced precision do reduce performance for the same number of operations and weights, but the overall effect on performance from reducing precision is beneficial probably at least to 4-bit quantization… You get diminishing or negative returns if you go less than that with current architectures, but in principle we can keep going.)

https://www.nvidia.com/content/dam/en-zz/Solutions/Data-Cent...

I think your compute cost figure is both very old and probably assumes double precision whereas GPT-3 uses at most FP16 at inference and GPT-4 may go beyond that.
Several of you would seem to enjoy a Kotatsu:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kotatsu
Yes, I totally agree. I just wanted to get it out there. Probably a little early, but oh well.
It's completely due to prior to 9/11 you left the hijackers alone and they would land the plane, get arrested or die in a shootout with the police.

Now if you attempt to hijack a plane 100-300 passengers will beat your ASS and stop you before you get anywhere near control of the aircraft.

There will never be another hijacking attack where the pilot loses control of the plane from a threat of a would be hijacker.
And that's how you identify the next round of layoffs
I use AI to communicate and close sales with clients in languages I don't understand. It would be impossible for me to learn all languages, and too expensive and slow to hire professional translators. The AI simply works and has been reliable for years by now.
>The first is roughly why does a company with many billions in the bank need to lay off anyone.

because it's a for-profit company, not a jobs program.
Yeah that was an interesting read. I like the concept of a -10x engineer because they definitely exist (in my mind it is someone whose work moves you farther away from the project goals, rather than closer to them). But a lot of the bullets sounded like stuff bad managers do, not bad engineers.

Off the top of my head these are the most common two "negative engineer" behaviors I have seen

1) Biggest one: an engineer who is not experienced at architecting complex systems, goes and architects one when complexity was not required in the first place. This is the key to never shipping and destroying entire companies.

2) Close runner up: an engineer who writes code that is inscrutable and therefore unmaintainable (always by others, often by themselves as well). This is the key to your product dying a slow death over several years.

There are negative engineers doing this stuff ALL. THE. TIME. EVERYWHERE. Despite unquantifiable volumes of both ink and blood spilled trying to prevent them.
I don’t have any intention of writing a game, but my lay understanding of ECS is that it sort of treats your world as an in-memory columnar database for better cache locality: if you’re updating the positions of a collection of entities, you only need to loop over a collection of contiguous `position` structs—you can get a lot more of these in a cache line than you would if the entire entity was a struct containing a position field among many other fields which are irrelevant to the updatePosition operation. How far off am I?
what universe do you live in where someone making gte 100k working the carnival is poor?
> Is this different than the system mute button next to volume up and down?

A global mute button for the mic, sorry for the confusion. I don't think there's an easy way to get on on mac.
>> Middle class kids can afford one throw.

> Gotta disagree with this. As someone who grew up middle class, I was fortunate, in a lot of ways, to also learn to be prudent with money.

You said you are fortunate, that actually proves rather than disproves the parent comment, no?
> The first is roughly why does a company with many billions in the bank need to lay off anyone.

This shows an utter misunderstanding of how businesses or finances of any kind work and would completely discredit anyone who tried to use it as an argument.
They're distinct, there isn't all that much analysis in ML.
Step 12: have a meeting about it

Step 13: have a blogpost about how inclusive and equitable your company is.
Working in the UK you come to realize, these feedback processes and their denial, are both usually expected and part and parcel of the negotiation dance.
Nah, we would never steal any key.

As this is a project just for fun, totally FREE and people might use it a lot, we don't want to spend a ton of money just for fun.

We have some other projects that ask for the key after the trial, like

https://roadtripnavigator.com/

https://askfamouspeople.com/

and others.

If you want to, check out http://samedayskunkworks.com to view all of our projects that we do just for fun ;)
It really depends though, if you work anywhere for less than two years, they can basically fire you (as a person) for no reason at any time.
It's only after two years of continuous employment that you gain more rights.