skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A few years ago, a recruiter reached out to me about a role at a company that sold a data analysis product which included geospatial mapping, and they needed an API developer. They had a Python API, but it was complicated and difficult to use and no one liked it. They wanted something simpler and easier for outside developers to work with.

I wrote them a cover letter that began:

- - -

When I design an API, I start with the apps. An API has no value on its own; its value comes from what you can build with it.

There may be an existing app that needs a new API feature, but I like to write a self-contained sample app for quick iteration on the API design and to include in the SDK.

An API also needs full test coverage, of course, but that comes after this initial step. Instead of test driven development, you might call it app driven development.

An SDK developer is also in a customer support role: they should write solid reference documentation and tutorials and sample apps, and interact directly with the users of the SDK. It’s not a job for someone who likes to just sit quietly and code.

One of my hobbies has always been to assist other developers in various online forums. Most recently this has been on Stack Overflow where I’ve posted over 600 quality answers. Previously I was known for my advice on the original jQuery mailing list and Windows programming forums.

- - -

I went on to list some of the APIs I've built.

The cover letter must have resonated with them, because they brought me in for interviews the next day, and made an offer the day after that.

This looked like my dream job! I love building APIs, working with the developers who use those APIs, and especially anything to do with geospatial data.

The team that hired me had been a startup that was acquired by a larger company in another state.

Things looked great at first. I was writing sample apps and imagining what APIs would make it easy to develop those apps.

And then a team of Architects from the larger company swooped in and decided that they should be the ones to design the new API.

They liked to design with UML charts of boxes and arrows, and thought the API should reflect the inner workings of their system.

I thought the API should be simple and easy to use for outside Python developers, and I tried to put myself in the shoes of those developers to understand what would make their jobs easier.

At one point my manager asked, "can't you just implement what the Architects have specified?"

I gave it my best, but by that time I was demoralized and unproductive. The company wanted me to do the exact opposite of what I was good at and what they hired me for.

I was fired after three months.
> It's like saying it would be good if there were two competing projects writing something akin to the Linux kernel.

It isn't even that. ffmpeg and libav were two competing forks of the exact same project, not two distinct projects working to implement the same thing.
But nobody is popping into an airport for a quick sandwich and then leaving the airport. The cost to the average passenger is the same.

At the end of the day you're just arguing that there should be a carbon tax on flights
For Intel, it seems that per their chart under "What is the maximum amount of graphics memory or video memory my computer can use?" and discussion under "Will adding more physical memory increase my graphics memory amount?" at https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000..., iGPUs included with 5th gen/Broadwell processors were their first to do so in 2014.
Most SUVs on the market now are unibody design without a locking differential so they are not even designed to be taken off-road. But they are still much handier in an adverse weather on-road. E.g. I drove by quite a few drowned cars in a flash flood.
> If Red Hat tried to force people to pay too much, everyone would switch to the freely distributed versions (AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, etc.).

Not if they need a long term supported and certified OS with various compliance checkmarks associated with it.
Following your example, we should make wages transparent. So that way the 3x engineers know they're being correctly compensated by management, right?
Has anyone made a zachlike using this language yet?

Edit: maybe code.golf is what I’m looking for…
I understand there is no amount of proof that would change your mind. Go spend a few days working a one of your friends farms. Partake in horn cutting, as well as culling the newborn calves.

Keep telling youself that you don't exploit these animals. You seem to be good at convincing yourself.
Most people are distributing diff files like this https://github.com/lm-sys/FastChat#vicuna-weights

Ie. Here’s a diff. Go find your own copy of the llama model and apply this patch.

…and hoping that’s good enough to get away with; even though you can’t really argue it’s not distributing a derivative work in part.

Distribution of the actual model (eg. Running it in your browser) seems to usually result in “and then Meta slaps you with a takedown notice”.
Would be interesting to see some transformations like sqrt(pagerank) weight to get the chains more like 10-12 steps instead of 60.
Thanks! Here’s the direct link to the pricing page: https://base.report/pricing There should be a link to it in the footer as well. On the desktop, there should also be a link in the navbar.
Yeah, but the question is whether such requirements apply to software beyond operating systems.
Sigstore protects Apt archives: apt-verify and apt-sigstore
Microsoft product positioning on Power* seems extremely weird from the outside, which I chalk up to internal division politics.

It's like they can't decide if they want to give it away to grab market share or make money off it.

And pricing updates reflect whichever group wins the last debate.
It's not that simple. Look up "product-led growth". It's why Figma made Adobe eat $20b.
What is the “pollution” by WebGPU that he was referring to?
Then, nine seconds later, Mr. Pichai apparently attempted (unsuccessfully) to delete this incriminating message.

lol
I think "cleaning it all up" will remain a perpetual todo item for all digital collectors.
It's been all downhill since Kilobaud and Transactor. 8 bits oughta be enough for anybody! (Well, ok, 16-bit addressing was good.) Whenever it was that the 'desktop metaphor' showed up. ('Magic Desk'? srsly?) And computers and synthesizers became 'workstations'.
Would it have been better if they had these conversations in person and never left a breadcrumb trail?

Not saying what they did is ethical but why would anyone have an expectation of forthrightness here?
Helen Keller managed to do pretty well without sight or hearing.
Do what mobile OS do and make the app ask for permissions just before it needs to do something special.
Make it impossible to ask for root. Sandbox apps.

Linux distributions package applications (including binary ones) for their users, why can't macOS or Windows do this? Run automatic safety checks on them before deploying updates to users. The Windows Store and Apple's App Store (on macOS) are kind of like that, but they only have applications that developers chose to put there. I don't see Linux distributions asking developers for permission to package their application (there are proprietary packages on Arch and NixOS), so I don't see why Apple couldn't do the same.

Certificates are a bureaucratic half-solution.
This is the real kicker... how do you positively incentivize reporting the scheme instead of participating in it? Generally speaking the upside of participating is quite a bit larger than the upside of reporting. The downside of participating can be made pretty harsh by the government, but there can be negative downsides to reporting as well (e.g. physical harm)
The answer is simple:

If you fly a lot, you’re probably a business traveler spending “someone else’s money” and you’re going to get reimbursed.

If you fly a little like most people, you’re probably in “vacation mode” and aren’t really thinking as carefully about money.

If you’re a really frequent traveler, you might even have airport lounge access and taking advantage of free “well liquor” and food.

Of course the whole captive audience thing is true. But as my southern momma would say “we got food at home”. Eat before you leave home if you are concerned.
> This is unfortunately non-trivial to quantitatively evaluate the performance against ChatGPT :-(

Compare using the loss function?
Between the sheer number of people getting axed in layoffs and the amount of, "Yeah I actually only do like 2 hours of work a day," boasts, it doesn't sound so farfetched. They're surely not doing something so technical and important that they deserve that versus, say, the person dealing with screaming, irate customers in a pharmacy for 8 hours (also, you can't sit, no sitting allowed, it looks lazy).
Why? Wouldn't they go out of business?
Because millions of people use the platform regularly.

Why would they _not_ publish alerts on a communication channel that millions of people demonstrably check frequently?

This is a genuine question: do you get this information from their VHF band reporting? or check their website regularly? or their RSS feeds? moreover even if you do, do you think those are likely to more frequently used/checked (or even available) by people than twitter, Facebook, etc?
I'm also very amused that you thought these goats were not inseminated! You poor naive soul.

And that the links you sent me disproved all your claims. It's hard to believe you are this delusional.

Les francais!
I don't see it that way. They were bribed with venture debt and mortgages to ignore the tail risk of uninsured deposits. Probably many VCs would have made the same decision in retrospect.
> It’s crazy that a country made up of seemingly smart people favor this. How did Germany evolve to be so anti-nuclear? Given the alternatives nuclear seems the way to go.

Well Germany isn't a country of smart people. Was maybe, now it's just a country for crackpot bureaucrats and corrupt politicians.
Labor does not get treated like a product or service provides by a business. People have rights and comprise a nation/government. Businessses don't.

If Labour is treated like a business the it's time to change society and government. Businesses must adopt to labour needs ans laws.
If this were the case it should be easy for the vendor to say that $9 of that 15 is based on rent.
Certainly. Every cache (including a semantic cache like GPTCache) needs an eviction policy to prevent the size of the cache from exploding. A single line is the smallest unit a cache can hold - for a semantic cache, that means a single pair of unstructured data such as text/text or text/image.
I agree and disagree. The USA and the US Dollar aren't going to evaporate any time soon. People have been predicting that ever since we left the gold standard. The USA may not be a unilateral superpower anymore, but it's still the largest military and has only recently been knocked off its place as the largest economy. The supremacy of the USA and US Dollar aren't going away anytime soon, even if it is in decline.

De-dollarization has been attempted for decades. It's not a new thing. Governments around the world have tried to switch away from the dollar only to be squashed in the name of democracy. You only need to look at Gadaffi with his Gold Dinar and pan-African currency push and how that turned out. Only large governments with real militaries like Russia and China can openly defy the Petrodollar, and even then only between themselves and with great ire from the US State Department.

That being said, the continued proxy wars are wearing down the US Military and the US Government's ability to get backing for war. Even if the USA wins the current Ukranian proxy war, it no longer has the political will to declare war on BRICS directly. We are likely going to throw people into the meat grinder until both parties are exhausted. What I see as the final compromise is a new UN CBDC used for international settlements, which will still be a US win since the UN is a US puppet currently.
When I read things like this I see why Mark Cuban tried to make his CyberDust thing for execs happen.
No totally. Not an ml guy by long shot. My understanding is llms are foundational models which iiuc are "base" models representing all human knowledge until some point in time. Now I'd argue that you don't have to count all of evolution but just the point from when you were born. I'd say the all the sensory experiences + knowledge input from the day a brain is activated (DOB) would be in the order of PBytes if not more?
I took up bird photography about 3 years ago. I have 400,000+ RAW photos in Lightroom on over a dozen 2 TB SSDs. It's not so much hoarding as it just takes effort to go through and decide what to keep and what to delete. I shoot bursts so it adds up really fast. I could probably get by with 10-20% of the storage if I could just keep up with the pruning.
Those are almost certainly capacitors. They look like metallized plastic film capacitors, though they could be strange-looking communist electrolytic or something else.

Film capacitors are non-polarized, and are available with high voltage ratings. I don't have a great understanding of how old analog telephones work, but I expect that they are being used as DC blocking capacitors on the pair of telephone lines. I think telephone lines provide ~50V DC to power the handsets. Telephone lines are also vulnerable to various higher voltage electrical faults like lightning strikes. So those capacitors would block any DC voltage, while allowing the AC signal to pass through. They need a relatively high capacitance in order to let low frequency sounds through.
I did eventually throw out my floppy discs and a couple of years ago I finally scrapped my windows 98 PC after transferring files off the hard drive.

I still have data going back to around 95 though, and I like that. Pictures and chat logs from way back when I first met my wife. Old games I played as a teen. Some of the code I wrote way back when I was first learning and some of my first open source contributions.

I did lose a lot along the way, though. Sometimes I wish I could still see some of that earliest stuff. And things that have been lost on the ephemeral 'net - old BBS discussions, usenet topics, my teenage livejournal, etc. that I didn't copy and save.

The tough part is that it gets hard to manage.

While I do pull forward the most important stuff each time I get a new PC, a lot of the rest is sitting in old backup formats from various backup software that I might not even be able to restore anymore. It's always nice when I think of something I used to have and can go dig it out of one of those backups, but I don't know that I will always be able to.

And it can be really hard to find something. I've tried various organizational schemes over the years, but that just means that some things are organized one way and some are organized another, and it's even more difficult to find things. I suppose I should go through and re-organize everything into one consistent standard structure, but that's what I've always done before and it just becomes like the XKCD about adding yet another standard.

Anyway, the digital clutter still works well enough for me. It's sort of a cozy old home filled with sentimental things instead of a sterile empty monastic cell.
I don’t use it on mobile devices so not sure. Instead I use a cloud server which joins the tinc mesh and and also runs wireguard service which then acts as a router.
Protocols with @runtime_checkable fit your description!
Not really. A boarding pass is required for airside access.
Love your comments on F1 drivers! Do you know any? Do you know the G forces they encounter during hiur long races? I've always heard they were extreme examples of human fitness compared to the average human.
TIL; thanks
Which regulations would you like to get rid of or change?
In 1990, Moore's Law was still in full swing and every year brought drastic changes to the personal computing landscape. These days, we aren't seeing a lot of entirely new classes of applications driving local data storage needs. We've long since passed the point where text and audio data could add up to enough disk usage to worry about. Video data volume is largely stagnant, because optical discs are basically dead and local storage lost to streaming (in spite of the lower bit rates for streaming). Photos can add up to something on the order of a terabyte if you're prolific and don't use cloud storage for that.

But video games are by far the most common and easy way to burn through hundreds of GB of storage in a consumer PC. Except not every PC user is in to AAA gaming, and all of that storage capacity usage can be freed up quickly and easily when free space starts running low—again aided by cloud storage and fast internet speeds, because games can be re-downloaded with relatively little inconvenience.

Probably the biggest new class of computer applications with heavy data storage needs to crop up in recent years is generative AI. But models like Stable Diffusion are relatively small compared to mainstream consumer storage capacities, and bigger models like GPT-3 and newer are exceed local compute and memory capacity by a far wider margin than they exceed local storage capacity, so they're stuck in the cloud for now.

There are real reasons to expect consumer storage capacity needs to grow more slowly than they did in the 1990s, and there's real evidence that they have been growing more slowly in recent years. Just pointing at a trend from several decades ago without even trying to think through whether it's still relevant is not a useful observation or insight.
So you're saying they should judge the cost of providing twitter the information and users, and if it's not worth it, they should stop using it?

It seems to be that's what they've done. So I'm not sure what your problem is? Why should the government be paying twitter to provide a service to twitter?
You are allowed to bring food in your carryon just not liquids.

And isn’t the “waiting two hours an exaggeration”?

I flew out of MCO (Orlando) around spring break and while it was hectic, it wasn’t that bad just looking at the line. Of course I fly enough that having Clear and TSA pre-check makes sense.

I flew out of Atlanta - the busiest airport in the US for years and it didn’t take me that long to get through TSA even without PreCheck
At least in US airports, not only must all the liquids, gels, and aerosols be within 100ml containers, but these 100ml containers must all themselves be contained in a single clear zip-top plastic bag per passenger of no more than 1 liter in volume.

So, technically, TSA is not being maximally strict in enforcing their rules when they allow any sandwich containing even tiny amounts of liquids like olive oil or gels like mayonnaise to enter outside the single 1 liter bag per person that also contains their shampoo and toothpaste. No, I don’t expect TSA ever to enforce this maximally strict interpretation, but that is how the rule is worded.

By contrast, some foreign airports that mention the 100ml rule make no mention of the single 1 liter (using the non-US spelling of liter) maximum enclosing container volume per passenger, let alone the requirements for the enclosing container to be a clear, zip-top, plastic bag. So this particular absurd pedantry about an absurdly worded rule that’s designed for TSA to keep you guessing on each screening about with how much leniency they choose to grace you that time does not apply to most foreign airports.
I am really hoping we'll get something like AMD infinity fabric up and running with GPUs accessing system memory or something like that soon.

Then there is also moore's law :)
Just because the documents were leaked doesn't mean they have been declassified. Which is why no one is sharing the documents.
> If that were true there would have been no reason to stonewall. Just release the three prices and the names of the vendors used

I think you’ll find that the list includes things like “Airport stand A”, “Airport stand B” and “Airport stand C”
> For something truly brilliant to be created, you need someone with a vision and freedom to implement it. It's extremely rare for something brilliant to come from committee or top-down designed by managers delegating work to a bunch of teams. It's one of the reasons even open-source struggles with design - you need one or a tiny team of aligned brilliant people to work together, and you need to give them freedom to do it. Not constrain them with meetings, micromanaging the product and letting everyone express their opinion. That's how you get a terrible, bland, uninspiring design.

Not to overly critique but the iPhone and iPod were 'top down' and Zune, etc were the way you're describing. So Apple pulled it off
In my anecdotal experience Indianapolis International Airport (IND) is the best in terms of reasonable food pricing / affordability as well as comfortability in waiting area / seats and newness of the facility.

https://www.insideindianabusiness.com/articles/indy-airport-...

Even though IND doesn't nearly have the traffic like 3 NYC airports, it's still 24/7 airport and the self-served Farm Fridge food kiosk was super great in terms of prepackaged meals and pricing (half of the selections were under $10 - I flew to IND last month.) The Soda machine also charges $2 / bottle of Coca-Cola like other non-airport retailers instead of price gauging.
I feel sorry for people who play chess -- especially those who devote their lives to it.
> Why pay someone who produces less, or can bear a lower wage, the same as someone who produces more or can't?

If it turns out that any companies are trying to do the things the article alleged --- exploitative (e.g., using intimate data to determine the minimum they can offer each individual gig worker, while they have them over a barrel) and bad-faith (e.g., blocking an individual worker from gigs when they're about to hit a bonus threshold) -- the corpus of HN comments tells us that there will always be a tech worker with logic and values aligned with making it happen.

> Emotional reasoning abounds.

Many of us would do well to be more logical in our thinking, and many of us would do well to discover more "emotional" values based wanting to lift up everyone rather than dominate them.
Apparently, with PyPI, the one with the higher version number takes precedence.
Regardless of the merits of the case, this is a really funny exploration into how bad Google's chat products are.
Ah yeah, completely agree on AI being transformative. It's brand new and my productivity has already improved dramatically! I'm glad I was helpful, good luck!
The issue isn’t that the employer measures and rewards work output, which is not controversial itself (although some _methods_ of measuring are).

The issue is that they use everything they know about you to determine the lowest possible price you’re willing to accept, on an individual basis with droves of data that exist because of as-tech.
I wouldn’t consider this to be “misusing” a graphics API in the same sense that tensor operations on top of WebGL are. WebGPU intentionally provides compute shaders with the goal of enabling non-graphical pipelines.

> [WebGPU use cases include] Executing machine learning models efficiently on the GPU. It is possible to do general-purpose GPU (GPGPU) computation in WebGL, but it is sub-optimal and much more difficult.

https://gpuweb.github.io/gpuweb/explainer/
Red Hat early on invested in understanding the needs of the different industry verticals they were trying to sell into and made sure their products could meet things such as compliance and audit requirements of differing sectors. They developed guides on how to deploy their products in a manner which met those requirements and their professional services engineers understood not just Red Hat products but the specific needs of differing sectors. This is how I saw them winning enterprise customers over larger established players in the early 2000s. Even today most opensource businesses don't do this to the extent Red Hat was in the early 2000s.