skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I have an interview next week for a coffee engineer role which pays around a third of what I currently earn and would involve being on the road four out of five days.

The most poignant tip I can give you: Do not jump straight into drastic career changes as a solution.

You sound dissatisfied with your job or recent jobs, but you’re projecting that dissatisfaction on to the entire career. It is a mistake to assume that all software engineering jobs are going to be as equally uninspiring as your current one. You’ve notified a job that is so completely different from your current work that you assume it must be better, but I assure you it comes with many downsides you haven’t learned about yet. The grass is greener on the other side of the fence because you’re less familiar with it.

I’ve done a lot of career mentoring. Frequently, people come to the mentoring program dissatisfied with their current job and under the belief that they’ll be happier if they abandon it all and do something different. My sample size is small, but for what it’s worth I’ve only seen this work out once: The person hated software from the start, had only gotten into software because they thought it would pay well, and they weren’t able to keep up with basic software tasks. Basically, they chose the wrong job for the wrong reasons and couldn’t do it.

For everyone else, drastic changes usually result in some hard-learned lessons that they miss their old career and the money that came with it.

Taking 1/3 the pay to travel 4/5 the time might sound refreshing to someone who is tired of sitting at a computer right now, but I doubt you’ll be excited about it after 1000 days of grinding through travel delays, missing events at home, layovers, and a retirement account that isn’t growing any more.

Pick a less disruptive and less permanent way to change up your life first. Do manual labor on the weekends. Volunteer somewhere. Take an extended vacation. Landscape your yard. Help your elderly neighbors clean up their yard. Anything to start adding some variety to your life without detailing your career to try it.
I tried the usual route using getImageData() and am getting between 50 ms for a small region and 100 ms for the full 2048 x 2048 canvas on a 8th generation mobile i5 in Chrome. In Firefox it is 50 ms and 150 ms, all on Windows 10. So the overhead alone of getting the image data from the canvas and writing it back can eat up most of the entire 50 ms budget if not exceed it. Or maybe I did it not in the proper way, I am totally not a web developer. There is also certainly some room for improvement in my implementation of the core algorithm. But unless there are more tricks than specifying willReadFrequently, it seem hard to get below 50 ms.
Well, not really a job, but I enjoy volunteering at my local food bank. Career wise I am all in on tech (written 20+ AI books, have 50+ patents) but it is refreshing and personally rewarding to do something useful that is non-tech.

I am in my 70s, but when I was a 25 year old computer programmer I looked into having two part time jobs, one programming and one something like working on a fishing boat. I ended up not going the working in a fishing boat route, settling for working in tech an average of 30 hours a week, and bought a sailboat.
Clearly you’ve never met anyone with NPD. There is nothing they can’t find a way to twist.

It’s really the fundamental issue - a captain who takes direction from his crew (instead of looking at what is happening and forming their own opinions, and leading from there) is not only not a captain, but dangerous to himself and the crew.

It doesn’t mean they don’t listen! Listening is important.

But they have to act on their own judgement, or everyone is screwed.

And then they take the pros and cons after that, including whatever hate or adoration or whatever results.
The most convenient i ve found is wifi file transfer (android)
I can see that. At my medium-sized company the management is taking the position of mostly hiring senior people right now, because we don't have many openings and they feel like they can be picky. I know my company isn't the only one with this mindset. That leaves a lot of arbitrage for people willing to bet on junior staff.
I was thinking this was impractical (the Cape is in the way) but Nantucket is pretty far East so it's not that bad to go around. ~115mi each way, so within range.
I would die from boredom if I chose this job. Have you thought about being a plumber? You'll probably earn the same amount as now, but you'll get more diverse communications with it, and this job will not be replaced by AI within the next 20 years (IMHO, I might be wrong though).
Corporate America doesn't seem to be collapsing. It's just a mild recession and we haven't had one recently.

Also it's hard to make the same kind of analogy with 'corporate leaders' as they are typically employees rather than owners. Employees already loot a much as possible!
> It takes China 6 years to build a reactor, and they build them in parallel.

China have a foot in the nuclear industry, but they are betting on renewables. Also, do you want to have a Chinese reactor in your backyard? Try the nimbyism for that!

> Except when, you know, it's a quiet night

The research is quite clear that designing a renewable energy system to handle nights is economical:

> Much of the resistance towards 100% RE systems in the literature seems to come from the a-priori assumption that an energy system based on solar and wind is impossible since these energy sources are variable. Critics of 100% RE systems like to contrast solar and wind with ’firm’ energy sources like nuclear and fossil fuels (often combined with CCS) that bring their own storage. This is the key point made in some already mentioned reactions, such as those by Clack et al. [225], Trainer [226], Heard et al. [227] Jenkins et al. [228], and Caldeira et al. [275], [276]. However, while it is true that keeping a system with variable sources stable is more complex, a range of strategies can be employed that are often ignored or underutilized in critical studies: oversizing solar and wind capacities; strengthening interconnections [68], [82], [132], [143], [277], [278]; demand response [279], [172], e.g. smart electric vehicles charging using delayed charging or delivering energy back to the electricity grid via vehicle-to-grid [181], [280]– [282]; storage [40]– [43], [46], [83], [140], [142], such as stationary batteries; sector coupling [16], [39], [90]– [92], [97], [132], [216], e.g. optimizing the interaction between electricity, heat, transport, and industry; power-to-X [39], [106], [134], [176], e.g. producing hydrogen at moments when there is abundant energy; et cetera. Using all these strategies effectively to mitigate variability is where much of the cutting-edge development of 100% RE scenarios takes place.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910
I’ve learned recently that you’ll never find long lasting happiness by chasing it. You have everything you need already inside you to find happiness and joy in whatever you’re doing :) Good luck!
Having good commit messages is symptomatic of poorly structured work and poor planning? That's a weird take, to be honest.
the people never grew to realize the reason not to litter is that it improves the quality of your community- it's not to avoid punishment!

It's very frustrating to see people comment about this stuff on a neighborhood subreddit or next door. It's a predictable cycle. Whether it's people littering or whether there's a windy trash day, people complain about trash on the sidewalk and about how it's a sign the city has gone to the dogs. I will suggest they can pick it up if it bothers them so much, let alone out of a sense civic pride, they act like I took their first born! I just don't get it...
You have to use a lot of light to impart 2,000 pounds of explosive's worth of damage to a hardened bunker, though.
This. It, along with diesel, is also the power source for most wheeled veichles in current operation on the planet.

I'm sure EV's is going to take over in most areas given enough time. Until then, it's only logical to run ICE's on green fuels if available. Synthetic fuels made with excess solar/wind certainly sounds like it would fit that description.

Also, we already have infrastructure in place for handling large amounts of petrol and diesel, so storage and handling is a solved problem.
Prescriptivist in the streets, descriptivist in the sheets!
When you say "they're not very scary", without mentioning that it's entirely due to dishonest marketing that "they" (the Russian "hypersonic weapons in Ukraine) are even in the conversation, you contribute to the confusion.
Don't know where you live but $200k as a consultant should be achievable with the right skill set.
Maybe that was true in 2017, but today borrow checker and compiler in general has covered so much of the Rust design space that the "correct programs" it rejects are more like rejecting Duff's Device kind of code. You are more likely to find yourself implementing low-level data structure or device interface where you need raw pointers tightly localized in the unsafe{} scope.
I'm all for "charge more", but these two restriction on a $249 a month plan seem nuts:

- 20 Commands

- “Powered By” Branding

After paying over $100 a month, it's unusual to keep your branding and a limit of 20 commands seems to defeat the purpose of the product.
Well, I am interested if it's some sort of organized religion, and not mere posturing/speculation on forums.
I appreciated having this pointed out to me - it's fairly clear once the point is made, but I'd never really thought about it. Of course most of the time other planets are over on the other side of the sun and very far away, but it's easy to just picture the school-style orbital map where everything is in a line together and closest approach = closest, period.

I dunno, I thought it was neat! A slight paradigm shift in how I think about the solar system.
Show HN: WebVM – Run, Fork, Customize and Deploy Your Linux VM in the Browser
For naming all the machines on my home network, I go with the theme of "kinds knives or blades". I like the symbolism (knives are symbolic of logical thought).

The only problem is that I have a lot of machines, and am running out of names!
Sounds like you're on a great path! Did you buy the land or did you already have it?
just downloaded. this is simple but perfect.
This is about the startup that produced a secure personal server, which pulled the plug last year.

It’s not about the kubernetes package manager, for anyone wondering.
And are you following the same approach with your own kids (if any)?
Isn't the distinguishing feature of a closure that it can capture stuff from the environment?

> Unlike a plain function, a closure allows the function to access those captured variables through the closure's copies of their values or references, even when the function is invoked outside their scope.

> The term closure is often used as a synonym for anonymous function, though strictly, an anonymous function is a function literal without a name, while a closure is an instance of a function, a value, whose non-local variables have been bound either to values or to storage locations (depending on the language; see the lexical environment section below).

My understanding is that your use of 'capture' matches up with the the use of 'bound' in the description above.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closure_(computer_programming)
This isn't related to the current article and sounds like a personal axe you want to grind.
I just can’t get over this kind of language coming from people who earn 300k/y.

The idea that facebook developers are “the working class” engaged in a class struggle to overcome oppression is just.. wow way out there! The struggle exists but it’s not at Meta engineering.

EDIT: I’m not saying layoffs aren’t mean/stupid/preventable. I’m only saying that it’s not oppression or class struggle. I can’t understand that people can write this stuff on HN while living in a country where it’s legal to pay restaurant staff below minimum wage cause hey tips amirite. There’s plenty class struggle in America, let alone the world, but not a whole lot of it at Meta.
First Citizens lays off almost 500 Silicon Valley Bank employees
I know what you mean, but still, I find weird that any company worth 2 cents doesn't have an official compression app. In my experience lots of them use 7zip (free/open source), WinRAR (paid) or even WinZIP (also paid).

But I do know what a pain some IT shops can be.
You definitely should not make claims like 'LLMs can't drive cars'. LLMs have already been shown several times to be able to navigate as agents in different world environments. Obviously, I'm not advocating this is a good idea, and certainly light years away from safe - but as an experiment in silico, I imagine it can be done quite easily (and probably already has).

The reason scientific researchers in this area are using the term 'AGI' so much is that it does fit the definition of AGI ... *For some definition of AGI*. And there lies the problem - no one can really come to a good consensus on a good definition of AGI. This is why many scientists in this area are avoiding the question altogether - the question is loaded, and is misinterpreted by the public if statements are made.

So, for example, if I make the statement here that e.g. GPT-4 has intelligence which is general (AGI), it will likely be met with a rabid response from HN. However, the claim may be more dull than you're expecting. People often conflate AGI with things that are not required, such as agency, etc.

This definition from [journal Intelligence Vol 24, No1, 1997] can be that "some definition" of AGI: must be able to 1) think abstractly, 2) comprehend complex ideas, 3) reason, 4) plan, 5) solve problems, 6) learn quickly from experience.

Many of these GPT-4 can do, if some modifiers are allowed - for example, GPT-4 can learn quickly from experience so long as you aren't starting a 'new' GPT-4 system from scratch every time you want to interact with it. This is probably preferable, since much of the experiences it will have are personal to the individual working with it, and it would be highly undesirable to do the opposite here.
Planning was difficult for the system early on, but it has appeared to learn that it is helpful to lay out a plan early on in a large task, so that appears to be a capability as well, at least on a basic level qualitatively.
There is some good literature on ability to reason (and solve problems in abstract and complex ideas) from Microsoft's group on causal reasoning. In pretty much all tasks of causal reasoning the system can achieve near human performance, and LLMs as a category outperform previous SoTA from more targeted or specific systems made for causal reasoning.

Anyway, I would suggest to anyone that has strong reactions to claims about AGI to realize that they are likely building up the statement to be more than it is. Perhaps similar to 'machine learning' may have been misinterpreted years ago ("A machine can learn?! There is no tomorrow!!"), what is being stated here is often more narrow than you may believe.
You won't get a CEO to lay off 2800 people without offering them a golden parachute. Parachutes comes with strings attached.
Not to be confused with triphobia, which is what Valve Software has.
> You'll probably earn the same amount as now

Sure you will…

https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes472152.htm

https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151252.htm
Not quite what you’re asking for but perhaps in the direction https://openai.com/research/language-models-can-explain-neur...
The code is not garbage, it's just your highfalutin python opinion makes it so you only ever use list comprehensions or return generators.

For loops in python that return non lazy evaluated lists are fine. Python was never suppose to be an efficient language anyways, grading python based off of this criteria is pointless.

It doesn't matter how snobbish you are on language syntax though. I fed it code and regardless of whether you think it's garbage it did what I asked it to do and nothing else.

Would you prefer the AI say, "this code is garbage, here's not only how to make it unit testable but how to improve your garbage code." Actually we can make the output more unpredictable as LLMs do have a non deterministic seed that can increase the creativity of the answer.
Europe rebuilt the entire supply chain of fossil gas from the beginning of the invasion, while at the same time half the French nuclear reactors were out of commission. [1] If having a few expensive months is the worst outcome of the largest war since WW2 in Europe then the system is hugely resilient already.

Those prices were imported to the Nordics, they did not stem from the Nordics.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/business/nuclear-power-fr...
Many managers and senior directors were also laid off.
I think the point is wrong and hilariously melodramatic.
Alright, this comment is helpful. Basically scaling vertically rather than horizontally.
" decides to solve the obvious problems that cause people to pirate" - you mean like giving away everything for free?

Well yeah, something someone else made, but for free, instead of $4.99, that's a 'better product' for consumers ... until there exists non such products to buy.

It's an enduring bit of weird logic at HN, that somehow IP should not exist, 'because mega corps!'

If anti-piracy did not exist within regular countries, then literally zero content that required investment would get made, it's that simple.

If people can trivially access content 'for free' they generally will do that.

For music, it's not so bad, it just so happens most of the best music is cheap to make and niche artists couldn't command a high price anyhow, ergo the long-tail slot on Spotify has some efficiency to it.

But there are innumerable productions which we all enjoy which require investment and without some kind of rights management, those literally disappear.

It's all theoretical until you make something that is 'stolen' and it hits home pretty fast.

Some arguments could definitely be made that the long-tail of piracy is actually beneficial, even to content producers, as it leaks content to areas wherein individuals couldn't afford to buy it, but that's a specific argument.

It's a bit ominous for countries to be blocking other countries etc. but this issue likely has to be looked at somehow. If 'piracy' is below certain thresholds they should just not worry about it, but that may not be the case.
Reminds me of a "data assembler" I wrote in Python that packs up both linear and pointer-based data structures for inclusion in an AVR8 project.
In Dublin, there was some lobbying at the time against building a light rail line (the green Luas line) through some affluent areas on the basis that it would somehow reduce property values (a perennial Irish obsession). In fact, in practice, it increased property values (as you'd expect, really; the already existing heavy rail rapid transport had done the same), and 20 years later the same residents' groups and so on had a fit at the idea that service might be temporarily curtailed as part on an expansion plan...

(However, everything old is new again; there's widespread annoyance at plans to make the bus system actually work properly now...)

People are weird about this stuff.
And if you don't arrest them, not only will they commit crimes, but a new batch of criminals will also commit crimes. This is not a question of enforcement or prevention, this is a question of doing both.
Still, why?
I don’t know much about RFCs. It’s amusing to see this doc cut into “pages”. I wonder if there’s a meta-RFC proposing that this was no longer needed.
Ask HN: Product Managers, how often are you dealing with feature deprecations?
If I had to update my resume with my last two years of experience, I would mainly talk about deprecations. Although not an easy thing to do and effective for cost reductions, I'm still worried that the skills I'm building might not be appreciated enough if I ever decide to change companies.

Is it just me at this company or deprecations are quite common these days?
Russia arresting the Kinzhal developers for treason (read: failure) tells you all you need to know.

Note also that they purposefully forbid videos of air defenses to avoid showing where air defenses are.

At least one Kinzhal was confirmed shot down earlier before the wave of 6 or so.
My bad, I thought it was 2000. I saw the video long time ago.
Unless you can prove it with specifics for each company, this is patently false and a sweeping generalization.

Companies like Meta were all gung ho about remote work in 2021, when they hadn't seen the long term impact of it. The push inside Meta for WFH not being as effective for new employees started coming up in 2023 after the performance evaluations were done and they noticed a trend. You might argue that the data analysis might have been incorrect, but that's another question. The same company is also heavily cutting on office space.

I know people in tech are pro remote but let us not come up with these wild unsubstantiated theories to support what we like.

Remote work might not be as effective for every company on the same level, maybe it is the culture, maybe it is role dependent, but it is simplistically not just about some shadowy real estate moguls.
Nothing like sitting in my lx with my laptop and techstream running while my steering wheel tries to reset its position and crush my laptop.
It seems like you’re trying to get the tail to wag the dog. Ask yourself what your greatest good is, and order your life towards that.
Is there anything stopping me from pointing a laser at the lens in response?
We have a greyhound, and they are closer to cattle than pets at the beginning of their lives. Each dog has a unique combination of numbers tattooed in their ears. Then they are named according to a weird convention where litter-mates share a "first name" while having their own unique "second name". For example, my greyhound was named Del Sol Madison, and she had litter mates with names like Del Sol Martin, Del Sol Maxine, etc. These names are used for identifying the dogs, but they are not trained to respond to them because they aren't pets. Once we got her, we called her Maddie and that's just been her name ever since.
My wife and I live in a suburb of the Sacramento, CA area and have a combined household income of $400k and we have 20% saved for a $700k house (avg price in this area). But the mortgage costs would still be insane. We could either pay $2500/to rent a nice house (3-4bed 2b 2000sqft,we have no kids) or $4000-5000/mo for pretty much the same.

At this point in the housing market, buying makes no sense. I wish people would stop pushing the "American dream" of NEEDING to own a home. Homeownership is not a necessity, it is a luxury.

This American dream philosophy has caused very unfair policies where people who make $60k qualify for housing assistance and can buy houses for 0 down because the govt pays for some of their down payment[0].

If I can't enjoy the luxury of owning a home, why do my tax dollars pay for that luxury for those who earn less? I'm not anti socialism at all, either. I'm just stating that home ownership is a luxury in this day and age. Pay for people to live somewhere, yes. Provide them with mental health care, yes. I don't mind my tax dollars being used for those necessities. Helping with home ownership? In a market that already has fierce competition and low inventory? It's ridiculous.

[0] https://abc7.com/amp/california-housing-finance-agency-down-...