skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
About 6 months ago my manager, who happens to prefer RTO told me how if I only visit office sometime, I should not expect to have a desk. I was amused, but I did not ask if that means I can just stay home then.

Clearly management class figured out a fun little plan. Announce RTO so that people can 'self-select' thus reducing headcount ( lower cost ), introduce hybrid ( so that you can claim you are flexible in posting even if you offer 1 remote day out of 5 and save real estate at the same time ), sell non-performing real estate ( lower cost ) and cramming employees into rotating cubicles ( efficiency ).

What does it all translate to? Bonuses.

I am not exactly a revolutionary type, but its now or never if you are on a particular side of the fence. Whatever window is there to establish a normal, it is closing now.
The Quest Pro already has eye tracking and even the Quest 2 has good hand tracking now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Io7_NyTmXv0

But yes, they really do need to improve the resolution, It seems that the resolution was kept similar to that of the Quest 2 due to using the same SOC, which couldn't power a display with a very high resolution.
I've seen plenty of places where there are two charging spots per charging cable. In which case it makes sense to unplug a car that's in the spot and full.
There are actually huge numbers of studies on the impact of modern offices and collaboration.

They show universally worse outcomes, worse morale, and worse health.

They also force people into hours of additional uncompensated labour each week.
Yup! I wrote a whole paper and constrained text generation studio about this which has gotten some positive attention:

https://github.com/Hellisotherpeople/Constrained-Text-Genera...

https://replicate.com/blog/turn-your-llm-into-a-poet
Google floor plans were ridiculously dense. I don’t have hard numbers on my fingertips but I recall that the sf business press systematically underestimated the number of employees in San Francisco based on industry average floor space per employee that was far too high. They constantly moved us from one floor to another always with smaller desks.

As for question B, Moffett Place alone was 1.9 million square feet, so shedding 1.4 million square feet is not that big of a deal. It’s about what the press reported them acquiring in 2019.
I have never found a logging tool that I like more than grep (or ripgrep, I suppose, combined with maybe some awk). In principle there's a lot that could be improved on grep/awk, but somehow all the tools that I've had to use thus far come with implementations that are so bad and constrained that grep still wins. It's almost like the people writing these things have never used it themselves.
It's not a meta exclusive. Not sure why there's so many comments assuming that it is, it's one google search away.
Most existing headsets have support for adding just the lenses. One example https://vroptician.com/
Fortunately, it seems that major providers don't support attestation. If no one provides attestation capabilities, no one would request it, not even someone as anti-user as a bank.
It isn't exactly "innovative". I expected google to be on the cutting edge.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wUOUmeulNs
What do you mean by phonetic representation? Sound files?
People are excited because like Lightning vs. Micro USB the proprietary connector doesn’t suck shit.
'Folks' can't just will the economics of a building a nuclear plant into favourability. maybe if the US had a much different (e.g. China) style of government where a half trillion could be invested into nationalisation of energy production and complete overhaul of the grid. Otherwise anyone with capital would have to be crazy to put $10 billion into a nuclear project that won't be online for a decade and already won't be able to compete per kWh with renewables, when you could instead spread the investment out across a bunch of wind and solar projects that will be online in a couple years. Maybe things will change once renewables have saturated demand and we've hit hard limits regarding storage.
I agree. Research is ideal for remote work, since you are effectively your own manager and by definition there is no specific vision that needs to be worked toward - you are discovering that vision yourself. It's the literal ivory tower. In my experience if you give non-R&D engineers and small teams total autonomy they will all end up building great solutions to problems that are slightly different than the problem you actually needed solved.

> I think figuring out the best way to use a team of 20, 100, 1000 engineers to accomplish business goals is just an incredibly hard problem...

Agreed, don't mean to downplay how difficult good management is. I think the key thing I've realized is that in a remote environment, bad management is so much more obvious and detrimental to the employee and organization. In office, if your manager doesn't communicate vision/objectives well you can always tap the shoulder of the guy next to you, or discretely pick your skip's brain in the break room. The rest of the organization can pick up the slack. But that's much harder remotely.
I would be very happy if all of these services finally shut down instead of continuing to eat everything thanks to infinite funding
You’ll note that the US can’t build subways or high speed rail either. Large construction projects tend to be disasters in the US, it’s not just nuclear plants.
They have insanely low latency. Every VR has noticeable latency but so far everyone who have tried vision pro says it’s unnoticeable. That’s a huge leap forward. And this is in a device that doesn’t feel like a center block on your head.
Wow frankly I do not think the failure to renew an archived forums cert is as big of a deal as this article makes it out to be
Less.

It's a red flag when your power generation system needs more security than Fort Knox.
Relax, nobody uses Facebook products at work.
No, their first step is to create an environment where mass layoffs are a thing, so people are afraid of them and the ability to freely move to another company is limited, that way you have no negotiating power.

Then they make your life miserable. This makes you quit (which is free for them), or tells them that they’re free to shit on you some more.
This is just another form of layoffs, I think. The problem is that many other execs will follow. It's bizarre how this is purely about making life worse for the engineers without any rational reason.
Apple solved first the multitouch accuracy problem. People forget how bad other touchscreen vendors were in 2008. It took other companies at least 4 years to come close to the accuracy of the iPhone displays and keyboard. By that time Apple had already cornered the developer market.
It's not strange at all. At least the Reddit CEO heard and understood perfectly well what the Apollo dev said in that call and there's a recording to prove that.

Your first sentence misrepresents what the Apollo dev said. Actually, it's the exact same misrepresentation that the Reddit CEO knowingly made in public.

First off, it's abundantly clear that the Apollo dev wasn't actually demanding money. It was a pointed statement that revealed the CEO wasn't being honest about the costs.

The CEO, in contradiction with publicly available data, claimed that Apollo was costing Reddit $20 million per year in lost opportunity. So the dev jokingly offered to sell Apollo for half that price. Then Reddit would be able to recoup the cost in half a year and gain an additional $20 million yearly. What a great deal, right? Except they both knew that the $20 million price tag was complete bogus.
I would assume the importance of in-person versus remote also depends on the role.

More team work versus individual work?
my guess is that they planed to grow previously, and built/leased bunch of offices, but growth didn't happen, and they cut many jobs, so now they shrink office space.
This was circa 2016-2017, so it's gonna take some digging. I'll see what I can do.
I am a mathematician, and I always ignore requests to submit papers using a certain LaTeX template, or using any other journal-specific formatting. Judging by the papers I get to review, so do most other mathematicians.

Once (for a Springer journal) I got called out by their editorial staff, and told I had to follow their dumb rules. So I did. But I would never do this preemptively.

Publishers charge thousands of dollars for a subscription to a single journal. If they want their papers formatted in a certain way, then they can employ staff to do that work themselves. If any for-profit journal tries to insist that authors do lots of reformatting work before even submitting, I will never submit to or review for them again.
From sam.gov:

https://sam.gov/opp/57075abba039462f8ed76c2641de3394/view

"The contract requirements are geographically spread over the State of Alabama in the following counties: Clarke, Monroe, Wilcox, Dallas, Autauga, Lowndes, Montgomery and Elmore along the R.R. “Bob” Woodruff Lake, William “Bill” Dannelly Reservoir and Claiborne Lake. Alabama River Lakes consists of approximately 1,092 miles of shoreline, 39,452 acres of water and 68,006 acres of land. Facilities include 6 Class A campgrounds, 38-day use/land water access areas, 9 Multi-purpose Areas, 3 Visitor Centers/museum, 9 maintained but undeveloped Natural Resource areas, 2 Contractor maintenance Compounds, along with a Resource Management Office and other associated operational facilities. Provide services for maintenance, repair, minor construction (as defined in AR-420-1 and DA PAM 420-11) including all planning, supervision, administration, labor, equipment, materials, supplies, and replacement or repair parts that is required for performance of this contract.

The contract scope of work will include, but is not limited to, some or all of the following types of work: maintenance and repair of buildings, facilities, offices, water and electrical systems, concrete structures, maintenance facilities, operational areas, roadways, vehicles, boat docks, bathhouses, washhouses, toilets, gatehouses, security fences, sanitary disposal systems, launching ramps, playground equipment, bulletin boards, game courts, playgrounds, telephone lines, picnic sites, campsites, and other related facilities."
I think there is probably a non trivial gap in terms of how comfortable it is to wear a VR helmet vs a pair of glasses
Freeing up your hands for comfort and intuitiveness.
Why Judaism? – By Antonio García Martínez
>4GW of solar plus 6-12GWh

It will use a lot of land and I'm not sure if anyone ever did 6GWh storage, not even mentioning 12 GWh. The Li-ion battery technology that is currently being used for storage is very expensive and will last maybe 15 years at best before becoming chemical waste, while the nuke is normally planned to last 60+ years.

And that is just to match 1GW of nuke. Now, if you want 100GW, you multiply that by 100. Now solar isn't looking all that advantageous or even technologically feasible (with storage factored in) to me.
No one wants the Vision Pro.

All the progress of mankind has culminated to this one point in time where we can create entirely new realities before our eyes in stunning fidelity.

And what do we use this technology for? Going to work. Talking to people about work. Sitting in the dark watching pictures and videos by yourself.
Do you have any suggestions on where to find these?
Company I work for did this. Our CFO said he never wants to deal with real estate again. I will follow this man to the depths of hell and back.
because Single-Page-Applications

they want the back button work with app internal state changes
Good catch!

Fixed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36253249
So maybe 1000-2000 staff worth of space? A lot, but maybe not alot for G.
it's almost like there should be a union or something
Well of course it shouldn't. One should be able to draw whatever they wish. I'm really not comfortable saying there is a particular thing that someone just can't draw with a pencil.

Furthermore, I'd gladly donate bath time photos of myself as a prepubescent child if it means that some unlucky soul who has the misfortune of being born a pedophile can enjoy something he or she might consider sexually gratifying. Something that will keep him or her content instead of seeking non-consenting children IRL. We should all be feeding people like this synthesized (or donated) sexual material. The idea of withholding it for some messed up reason only serves to put innocent children at risk.
https://archive.is/Brfcl
On the contrary, I think the passthrough will be one of the defining differences to other headsets for the time being. Not having anything to hold in your hand while you go ahead and do non-VR things in your real environment adds a layer of convenience that's hard to appreciate from product videos. The improved passthrough, as bad as it still is, is one of my favorite additions on the Quest Pro.
Arch was definitely a less enjoyable experience for me than Redhat derived distros for similar reasons, but might just be my preference.
> The lesson I think we should learn from this is: What works on the computer doesn’t work in the real world,

This seems to dovetail with Rickover’s “Paper Reactor” memo, that was referenced here, recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36080015
StarCoderPlus: Fine-tuned version of StarCoder on the Falcon model's dataset
They don't have to do that, though - founders still retain control so could ignore shareholders.
I agree with you, and I'm SHOCKED at how little work there actually is in phonetics within the NLP community. Consider that most of the phonetic tools that I am using to enforce rhyming or similar syntactic constrained in constrained text generation studio (https://github.com/Hellisotherpeople/Constrained-Text-Genera...) were built circa 2014, such as the CMU rhyming dictionary. In most cases, I could not find better modern implementations of these tools.

I did learn an awful lot about phonetic representations and matching algorithms. Things like "soundex" and "double metaphone" now make sense to me and are fascinating to read about.
At this point they should launch a competitor for Reddit as well.
Is it just resolution or an optics issue? Having to readjust all the time to read is a problem
It's "boring" in the sense that it's been around for a while and has proven itself to be fairly stable and reliable, is not going away any time soon, is no longer changing at a very rapid pace, has some good books written about it. Rust is also fast becoming "boring" in this sense (maybe it already is; I don't keep up that closely).

This is opposed to Rust from 5 years ago, or e.g. Zig today.

That's how I typically use "boring technology" anyway.
The same could be said about NPM, or pip, or crates. The security model is "they will probably find the backdoor before it affects me", and it's unreasonably effective.
Things weren’t like this for a long time after it was already public. I used to work there more than 5 years after ipo and their office environment (especially in zurich) was really good
Dutch scientist's mission to grow fruit without plants
Tech writer to Senior PE. Something’s amiss if we’re hiring non engineers and they become PEs.
This sounds like https://stripe.com/atlas

The shutting down part is interesting and I'm not sure how/if Atlas handles that.
I think a lot of that was just the Steve Jobs’s presence and presentation style.

It’s pretty bananas they’ve crammed an M2 into a headset with all the cameras, sensors, ML engines, and high res displays. The M2 chip alone (I have an M1 Pro) is still blowing my mind with the low wattage performance.

But much like the first iPhone, it is yet to be seen if it will stick. I do think it’s far more capable than existing VR headsets.
My paper, titled "Most Language Models can be Poets too: An AI Writing Assistant and Constrained Text Generation Studio", is cited in that gwern article!

https://paperswithcode.com/paper/most-language-models-can-be...
Yeah, it’s pretty clear that it’s available on all major VR platforms including PlayStation.

They made it clear when they bought it that it will not become exclusive.

> Beat Games will continue to ship content and updates for Beat Saber across all currently supported platforms, now with even more support from Facebook.

https://www.meta.com/blog/quest/welcoming-beat-games-to-face...

I guess it’s easier to just guess and hope you’re right but it literally took seconds to find.
I've yet to see a charger with a card reader or that accepts currency. I suspect it's because there would be too many transactions of small value that the payment processing fees are more than the electricity. Which gets you into the yucky mess of I owed chargepoint $0.11, and they charged me $20 and are going to hold onto the rest of my money forever.
Isn't that an impersonation risk? Anyone can register under my email?
> The Wii lost its novelty pretty quickly.

It really didn’t. Ring Fit Adventure, a successor to the Wii Fit titles, sold 15 million copies for the Switch. Nintendo Switch Sports sold almost 9 million. Those are solid numbers. The kind of motion control the Wii used is still used for those titles, and they’re still popular.
It works so much better when it does but it’s not fully hashed it and a lot of stuff doesn’t quite work interface wise
how was i3?
These are "glitch tokens" and well known.
One way to brick if it’s an Apple product is to do an MDM wipe and not disable the activation lock. It would be kind of shitty to just turn the laptops into e waste by not disabling the lock but this is Cisco that the OP mentioned so I could absolutely see that as a reality. After you wipe there’s literally no reason to not unlock the device except spite (if the device is stolen, you obviously don’t want people to be able to sell or use it again so it makes perfect sense not to unlock it). But if it was legitimately used as an employee device then the employer gains nothing but forcing the employee to deal with junk by not unbricking the device
a lot of people want vision pro as a monitor free solution. Or even a secondary monitor
Oculus wands would make a barely more compelling experience of a butterfly landing on your finger.

When Apple’s ready they’ll release haptic gloves that smash that experience out of the park.
So I’ll finally be able to play Civ as a tabletop game?
Did Twitter fail?
Do you write a blog? Your experience resonates with mine.
3 times a week in way worse than zero.

Are we all going to just drive somewhere, sit at a desk and not talk to our co-workers cause they actually in some other office, then drive home?
Is google actually hot desking or is that a extrapolation on them cutting office space.
I've heard the term used for many years in the context of laying out on-screen user interfaces. It's specifically referring to how much screen area is being utilized for a certain feature or area. As in "This 2-axis positioning widget is neat but it's taking up a lot of screen real-estate we could be using to surface other features."
It is very hard for me to imagine anything more satisfying than taking MDMA. I do not need to experiment with other orifices, orally works just fine.
I'm definitely siding with Zuck on this one. I've been waiting for the Quest 3 to get out to buy it, and I'm not really interested in that Apple headset. For anyone interested, Lex just released a podcast episode with him.
" By contrast, every demo that they showed was a person sitting on a couch by themself."

Wait, I thought an Oculus does the same thing too. Its a blindfold on your face, and it doesnt matter if they are alone or in a crowd.

Mark has got to be terrified. The power of Apple is the tight and efficient integration of hardware and software.

Regarding battery power, I woukd not rule out versions that stream the video and outsource the computing to a mac or a standalone box, like Apple TV.

Regarding the experience, Apples seem to be far more coherent and natural rather than Oculususs. Imagine watching a movie, and mid way, trying to fumble around to get and orient the controllers. Absurd.

FB should be in panic mode. The 10 billion over 10 years is now a high risk spend.
Most of the shitty behavior of LLMs on syntactic and lexical tasks are due to the tokenizer and not due to the LLM itself. Having even tiny changes in tokenization has massive downstream effects on LLM behavior.
From 2012, to 2016, to 2020, google bled an incredible amount of key talent

I think that was kinda known in the valley, but not sure any media really covered it

Honestly a lot of the blame goes to Larry Page for turning the company toward G+, pushing top people toward Gundotra, the product failing quite badly, and Larry stepping back as CEO

My view of Eric Schmidt is pretty neutral, but it was a little weird how Larry pushed him aside and ushered Sundar in, then formed Alphabet, etc

This was very chaotic and people got used to neglecting things like search quality and spam in that time
> on top of the worst way of working which is in-office.

It's funny how both sides of this debate present their opinions as fact
It's not the back button, but these two otherwise useful APIs used in a malicious way together:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/befo...

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Location/hr...
I tried joining, and the sign-up button kept buffering for an hour, and then I gave up hope for joining.
> Value as a toy/trinket is obvious.

It’s hard to accept that you can only see this as a toy or trinket. No serious observer is characterizing it that way even if they are uncertain about its future.

I’m not saying apple is infallible. I’m saying it’s silly for people who have so little experience by comparison to be confidently dismissive. It’s obvious that Apple is less fallible than random commentators. I’m not saying they can’t fail, only that if you don’t don’t see the value, that should make you curious about why you don’t see it and why Apple does.
Ew. Fat shaming is not a good look.

You don’t know them. You don’t know the reasons for their weight. They very well could be using the device daily to exercise for all you know and it could be an issue with his metabolism. Or another medical condition. Or a side effect of drugs. Or literally hundreds of other reasons.
Reality Labs is going to burn at least $16 bn in '23 and '24. Meta can't really spend much more money on this business. I think investors will mandate clarity on how the spending is bucketed and see a mix shift to HW rather than Metaverse SW.

Financially, RL is the worst business on earth. No other business has lost this much money in such a short period of time.
Holo lens one was a piece of crap. So yeah low bar