skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I feel like this is a bad take: I’m not sure what your experience with graphql is but your comments about Netflix strike me as naive. I think there is a simplified version of Netflix that doesn’t do eg recommendation or history or different contracts in different countries and so on, which is maybe just a few api calls, but I don’t think that’s what Netflix is. And are they actually reinventing the wheel here? I thought graphql was a Facebook thing. Maybe you meant to say that they are rewriting systems pointlessly but it (also) feels like a bit of a generic criticism that is easy to apply to companies for which in-house systems make sense.

(Edit: it’s not even like this is a graphql vs rest change as Netflix have had graphql for years and they have a custom api system that seems a lot more like graphql than it does rest)

I’m curious what you think the best advantages of graphql are, particularly for a larger company like Netflix?

I would guess:

- reduces coordination/contention between different frontend/backend teams (eg there are many clients – desktop, mobile, various smart devices – but maybe other front ends too like something customer support might use).

- cuts down on ‘boilerplate’ api work. For example, maybe you have some property X of each item Y in your catalog, but which you don’t get on the request for the catalog, and that you want to display this now (maybe it’s some new experimental feature you need to thread through from some database table to the front end). You need to choose between adding X to the catalog (potential version woes…) or managing a bunch of requests for X for each Y (risks being slow or bad in a few ways), or add some non-restful api endpoint that takes a list of Ys and gives you their X properties. With graphql you need to teach the backend how to get X of Y but the frontend only needs to change the query.

- it potentially lets you apply access controls in a more straightforward way. If someone is from the US, maybe there are some shows they can’t see. In that case we probably want to hide all records in results about shows they can’t see. (Alternative example: various properties of other people’s accounts). If you have many separate api endpoints, it feels easier to me to accidentally screw up on one of them.

I’m not really very familiar with graphql but the middle option is the most compelling one for some of the things I work on (which are nothing like Netflix). One assumes that some people from Netflix had reasons for graphql and I’m interested in what they were rather than some imagined Venn diagram with the current api in the ‘not invented here’ area and graphql in the intersection of ‘invented here’ and ‘not yet a thing we have’. I’d also be curious to see how well it works out for them over time – perhaps they’ll regret it but maybe not for the reasons you oppose graphql; if there are organisational problems (like some team becoming a big new bottleneck or some teams being unhappy about it being ‘forced on them’), they can be hard to write about.
>"is for people to more directly leverage their leaders."

I just couldn't parse this until I read the rest of the article. I think that the author is saying "Ask for help from your boss when you are stuck."

This is good advice, if you are personally empowered. If you can afford for your boss to go batshit crazy and crap on everything and everyone including you - then just go for it. If you can't afford for that to happen then you need to exercise this advice with caution. When you are in a really bad spot then the first thing you need to do is work up an escape plan - then you can go to your boss.

As an example, if you are debt free and have a good credit history go and get a credit card and get a high limit. Then if you are fired you will have some funds to work with. It's not ideal, but if you are fired you won't have the card and you may find things much more difficult. A better escape plan is to be a fair way along in the hiring process somewhere else.
I tried for a long time but I finally gave in. I'm weak!
I had a similar conversation with my newly hired manager recently. She was saying, "But you're so capable! I could sew your career going so many directions!"

I told her I like what I do, and I love how little it demands of me. I have no desire whatsoever to devote more of my time and energy to work for the sake of more money or career "advancement." I'm perfectly content with the idea of continuing to do the same work for the same pay, as long as it keeps pace with inflation.

There is nothing I want or need that I don't have or couldn't get as things are. My desires are right-sized for my role. And I'm not even a 6-figure earner. I just also don't want things that require it, like living in a major city or traveling.

Don't try to force me forward into a role or life you think I should want just because I could have it. I already have what I want, and I wouldn't trade contentment for any of that stuff other people have.
> Turn on, (to a new thing) tune in, (to one's own style), drop out — TFL
Furniture storage is for commercially zoned property, not for homes that someone could be living in.
I think I have been too lucky with my managers, but the trope of middle managers hating WFH does not resonate with my experience. Also the famous rule of 7 +/- 2 still holds in remote environment. If you have many enough engineers there is no way you could do without middle managers.
It’s difficult to get a person to understand something when their income depends on them not understanding it. —Upton Sinclair
All games on Steam have a 2-week after buying or 2 hours after playing refund period, so it's easy to try to see if the game works on Linux or not.
Partisan Gerrymandering Mostly Cancels Out at National Level
And they don't even follow them: Thou shall not kill.
Hmmm...I might suggest looking into the transcoding settings and changing some things next time you take a look. Because I run Plex alongside Jellyfin (the wife prefers Plex's UI once I tweak it), and it typically runs just as efficiently if not a bit more.
Even before WFH, meetings with people in different offices occurred. There's a much better range of software options now too.
My raspberry pi has been slowly dying lately. Last thursday I ordered an ODROID C4, because pi's are overpriced at the moment.

At the same time I also moved from plex to jellyfin, and it's really nice, but some files stutter during playback in both the browser and on my chromecast.

Trying different hardware accelerated decoders did not help, so now I'm not sure what to do and debating to go back to plex. Although plex felt like it was getting worse in terms of functionality (I can't put my finger on it exactly).
I know you have made your mind, but still I could try. And please do not reply by saying these things don't matter. They might not matter to you and that is your choice, but it matters to me.

- No background noise of children in people's microphone.

- No exhausting hour long zoom calls. For me, online meeting is much more exhausting than in person.

- Watercooler discussion

- Parties

- Social circle
Hey, I have such glasses, and here in France at least they are still marketed. Do you have any reference pointing out the fact that they do not work? (Are they even worse than regular glasses?)
I've never seen (or rather heard) one that worked well enough.

Most recent one I've used was a Meeting Owl 3 which I think was in that $1k ballpark. It has quite a novel way of picking up on the 360 camera who it thinks is talking which works pretty well, but the audio just isn't anywhere near as good as everyone having their own mic attached. I'm not sure anything could be.
Pharma ads are not permitted here, so I sometimes look em up on the YouTube’s for amusement.
> what is it really worth?

For some, nothing. For some, a lot.

If you’re looking to create a ChatGPT replacement, this ain’t it.

If you’re trying to learn about LLMs, how they work, capabilities vs deficiencies, private data use, etc., these are invaluable to get your hands dirty in a private environment.
> no sitting in uncomfortable meeting room chairs

Why are meeting room chairs so uncomfortable?
> The switch between languages isn’t random, though

We kind of do this already in mainline English, switching between Germanic, French, Latin and Greek based on some unwritten rules. Adding Spanish wouldn’t really change things that much considering its close relatives French and Latin are already so well represented. Though I’m sure the Spanish part is more dominant in this dialect than it would be eventually in the broader language.
It's the last one. Your loss, though.
Ever worked on an open source project? Seems to work quite well without middle management.
Oh interesting. Is that tailscale but worse?
GraphQL is such complete and utter garbage for anything but the simplest of queries. I pity anyone who has to use it for anything more complicated.
What a paradox. You are blessed with innocence about the ways of low-rent security auditors, but poisoned with cynicism toward their victims.
For those who learn better from videos, here's a 37 minute Pycon 2017 talk that covers all of the major aspects of Python dictionaries including how they became ordered and compacted, how object dictionaries share keys, why full hashes are stored, how the probing sequence works, when resizing occurs, etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npw4s1QTmPg
It's just the reality of how scheduling time works remotely vs in-person. In-person you have immediate and implicit knowledge of who's available / what everybody's schedules are, etc, so by using that knowledge you can seem to "magically" pick times that everybody is available. Remotely, you have a much larger coordination overhead because there's no passive knowledge of who is or isn't available, and people's schedules aren't synced up.

> What if you’re the app team and your network has issues, but the network team is in another building? Do you just not dial them?

I don't know, but I would honestly absolutely hate to work at a company like this just as much as I dislike working remotely. When you're already dealing with the large barriers / restrictions that naturally grow up between different teams and then you add in the mix of not being in the same physical location, it's bound to be a recipe for never-ending meetings and scheduling nightmares that make it impossible for work to get done without mountains of ritual.
Is there a single open source LLM model that plays in the same league as GPT-3.5 ?

AFAIK the largest available models are for non-commercial use only.

This is a big limitation to the ´LLMs are entering their stable diffusion moment’ narrative.
I have replaced Pocket with Omnivore[1], its still in development, but they support all major platforms and are open-source and the app has all the features you could possibly ask for.

[1]: https://omnivore.app
Scalene: A high-performance, CPU, GPU, and memory profiler for Python
This article is about a VPN service.

How does a clientless ngrok alternative help here (which tunnels server traffic), and why is it even necessary given that many OSes support at least one VPN protocol natively?
Mobil's catalyst patented 1975 converts alcohols to gasoline at industrial scale
From the linked AI product page:

> What is digital greatness?

Has no-one in Twilio ever seen Parks and Rec? This is definitely a Ron Swanson thing.
Thanks I’ll check
out these options. The search is usually very disappointing.. Is it just me?
Theres this assumption from the wfh crowd that everyone wants to wfh (and if you don’t want to youre some sort of scab) when that isn’t the case, for starters.
Yeah but you have to remember the length of the enterprise sales cycle, and factor in at least 200 years of torture, oppression and martyrdom at the hands of the big corporation before you finally convince their CEO to buy in. Once he does, it's suddenly death threats all around for those who don't adopt your product, so if you make it that far, you're golden.
Flan-T5 is a 3B model that is of comparable quality to Llama 13B.

Moreover, you can fine-tune model for your specific tasks and you need fewer resources to fine tune a smaller model.
This is a ridiculous comment devoid of any value whatsoever.

Productivity has nothing to do with working for a company. The linked article is valuable for me for my personal projects that will never make a dime or be seen by anyone else except for myself.

This statement:

> any value produced immediately and only goes towards lining the pockets of the wealthy

...is both irrelevant to the article, and a fluffy "generic tangent" decried in the HN guidelines that is solely meant to start a political discussion.
If an llm labels it, does that have the same value? Isn’t it just fancy regurgitation of knowns?
How are you determining what is "virtue signalling" as opposed to, say, virtue?

It's not clear to me whether you mean (1) the companies are virtue-signalling or (2) the purpose of their products is so that their customers can virtue-signal. Maybe 1 in some cases and 2 in others?

In any case, I don't quite understand why signalling virtue is considered -- as it seems to be -- worse than signalling wealth or conformity or nonconformity. I quite like living in a world where one of the things people commonly want to advertise is virtue, even if sometimes they advertise virtue they don't really have or virtue that isn't as valuable as it looks.

(In my more cynical moments I think that calling things "virtue signalling" is itself mostly a form of signalling. Sophistication-signalling or something of the kind. And like other forms of signalling, sometimes the signals are honest and sometimes not.)
> So you move the issue to the resolver instead?

Yes. Where it can be logged, inspected and dealt with wholesale.

It's moveing a problem from intra-team verbal communication into software where it can be dealt with more efficiently with software tools and methods.

> Not to say either way around is inherently better, I just see it as a switch from backend-driven to frontend-driven.

Yes. I think that's the whole point and main benefit of GraphQL which makes a lot of sense since apps that evolve through their development usually have most changes UI driven.
I’d argue that FEniCs was a prime example of this in some ways, at least earlier in it’s history.

I started using it in about 2014. It was not exactly what I would call a simple project. It used to be an ordeal to build, could only easily be used via Docker, ported to Python 3 a long long time after most of it’s dependencies did, had an unstable C++ API that changes were not documented for but nonetheless you were required to use if you wanted for reasonable performance for some calculations, etc. The national supercomputing centre in my country managed to only get one version to build because it was so poorly specified at the time and basically only supported Ubuntu!

FEniCsX is considerably better usability wise, but that’s the result of hard lessons learnt.
> you own their full time focus five days a week

That is the kind of "ownership" that the article is describing, but I don't think it's actually true. Even employees sitting in a office aren't focusing full time on the business for every single minute they are in the office.

That's why I phrased it instead in terms of assignments and how specific the definition of the job is, as compared with an independent contractor. You might not be focused on the business every single minute of your nominal working hours--but your boss can come to you in any one of those minutes and basically redefine what your job is. That's what the company "owns" if you are an employee. And that can happen just as easily if you're remote.

> it's also about owning part of the business

But employees, unless they are also stockholders, don't own any part of the business. And even in cases where employees do own stock on paper, their ownership share is so tiny that it arguably does not provide any meaningful motivation.
You sound a little nuts but I appreciate the candor! One thing you are completely missing here (and to be fair, may not be for you) is the actual benefits of a relationship - as opposed to quantifying the ego-boost of a hookup or whatever.

Like, I enjoyed my slutty single says but I LOVE father's day with my two kids and wife even more :) I don't measure the "value add" that my wife brought me in units of her desire for me or something weird like that - I look at the life I am enjoying and could not have without her.

As I said this may not be for you but a mention of this was completely absent altogether and that was odd for me.
The *arr suite of apps is made to automate the whole process of building up your media library. You have Prowlarr for managing your download sites and clients, Sonarr/Radarr for TV shows/movies, Lidarr for music, Readarr for books, etc.

These apps can be self hosted and are fully open source. The basic workflow is that you add a movie/show, it automatically searches all of your download sites for the title, chooses the best download based on your filter criteria (resolution, size, etc.), sends it to your download client and then places the movie/show into your library based on the folder/file naming pattern you specified previously.

You can choose to automate as much of the process as you want or do most of it manually. E.g. grabbing new episodes as soon as they air vs supplying your own files (if you rip your media yourself for example) and only letting the program do the part of renaming and moving your files.
my comment is descriptive, not prescriptive. i doubt anyone even knows the difference anymore because of all the smarmy posturing these days.

"this rock is hard, and has sharp edges. it will cut you."

"no! that is terrible! rocks should be soft, with round edges! how dare you! nobody should accept rocks that are hard and sharp! that's dangerous! why do you support dangerous things?!"
Running a discord server for an open source project, I very much echo this feeling. I came after the discord server's creation, and the best I can do is help keep the IRC open and advocate that we keep the server on the lowest security level so people without accounts can join (in the odd case that feature actually works - it's very strictly behind captchas and IP rangebans, and desktop-only). Getting people off the platform and moving elsewhere is not an option, even if I had full decision-making power.

But it's a question that constantly weighs on my mind. There's a lot of knowledge and information archived in the server, and it's really not easily findable without knowing to look in the discord server. Opening a second Q&A site would mean nobody would ask there, as the barrier to entry and use would be too high (even if it had a discord login). Using github discussions binds us even closer to github (they can't be exported), and I'm not comfortable with that either.

I would love to see a service appear that allows us to publish discord forums on the net. I feel this is the closest thing we can do to something that would actually spark change. Discord's forum system is absolutely rancid compared to everything else, but my biggest priority is getting the information out there and at least slightly ordered. I feel this would encourage the most people to actually use it.
CMU tried to build a self-learning expert system called NELL but it failed. Never-Ending Language Learning system (NELL) is a semantic machine learning system developed by a research team at Carnegie Mellon University, and supported by grants from DARPA, Google, NSF, and CNPq with portions of the system running on a supercomputing cluster provided by Yahoo!

In his 2019 book "Human Compatible", Stuart Russell commented that 'Unfortunately NELL has confidence in only 3 percent of its beliefs and relies on human experts to clean out false or meaningless beliefs on a regular basis—such as its beliefs that “Nepal is a country also known as United States” and "value is an agricultural product that is usually cut into basis."'
And writing up a doc in 20 minutes can save months of back and forth. A said x to B, B said y to C, C said z to A, and it's all wrong but "we discussed it so it's good, right?" - months of endless meetings and fixing up wrong in-everybody's-head specs.

> If that's me just standing up and saying "hey A, B, and C, you guys got a sec? Here is a problem I found, mind going to the whiteboard real quick" will always trump "shit, let me look at everyone's calendar and schedule a 30 minute meeting" then get an email asking about agenda, and 2 people who have personal conflicts and someone asking to reschedule last minute.

This is what's disrespectful. If you're incapable of synthesizing the problem effectively into written form, then honestly you're the problem here. It takes a given amount of your time, where you can think twice and edit the document and synthesize ideas well, objectively better then dumping your stream of thoughts on everyone. Then, others may spend much less, or more, time on it on their rhythm. This flexibility makes it more efficient and respectful of others.

The scheduling is a 100% solved problem. Google calendar/mail let's you pick a free slot in a matter of clicks. But do you need the schedule a meeting immediately all the time?

It all just sounds like bad management and incapacity of expressing ideas well in written form. The kind of job anybody with half a brain cell can do.
The Last Place on Earth (2013)
Meta/Facebook is inviting Fediverse admins under NDA for “meetings”
> executives are scared of their employees “working part-time (but paid full salary)” and “even working on side hustle startups, while on a full-time salary,”

I am an engineer-became-manager, and I have anecdata about it. In the last 3 years I had 4 cases of sudden productivity decline. One case was because of a family problem, three others — because of second job/own project. Overall I had about 50 direct and indirect reports during these years, so it's about 5%.

I also know about at least 3 pals who has two jobs now. One of them actually had three jobs, but quickly burned out and quit one of them.

Before COVID and lockdowns I had only two or three cases of one-time side gigs and zero second jobs cases in 10+ years of being an engineering manager.

This is a real problem for the industry.
No idea.

But friends seem to think so, so they are happy!
Thanks for the polite reply :) I am very confident I am right about this very pedantic point, though obviously it matters little in the end for many roles, as you’ve noted.

For example, this is a good link: https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/pay-salary/salary-vs-ho...

Your job may require you work 40h, but that’s more of a employment requirement, such as “you’re a boat captain and need to be on the bridge for X hours in normal workdays, but get paid a monthly salary regardless.” That doesn’t mean you’re paid for your time any more than a dress code clause means you’re being paid for your fashion :)

But again all moot in our industry in most cases! Really gets important in cases such as fast food, where they’ll promote people to salaried “manager” positions paying $40K/y that have no set working hours, but their responsibilities require them to work well over 40h/week

EDIT: perhaps a clearer example: if you had to crunch and work 50h this week, and couldn’t take 10h off next week, would you require extra pay for that? If no, you’re salaried!
It’s a play on words, nothing to do with the gay community.
Managers have meetings the whole day with other managers. Those managers are often in different locations. Thus, WFH often the best situation for managers.
A huge change for the company I work for was breaking the lease on the old office and then getting a new office that is 1/3 the size and 1/4 the cost. And we doubled in size.

So... there's a bit of an economic argument.

Also, I have a team that contains people in Spain and Poland (mostly Poland), my customers are in London, New York and India. So, wtf am I supposed to work?!