skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But don’t you know? We are exceptional. Unions are for the plebs. /s

But of course the reality is tech workers are the plebs too, far closer to the median than to capital elite. Treasured illusions die hard.

Unions enjoy 71% public support and organizing is federally protected activity. The minority isn’t stopping anyone, they can be safely ignored.

(My note: I recognize I will never be obscenely wealthy; it does not appeal to me. The wealthy just try to buy back their soul with charity after leaving a wake of destruction on their journey. I would rather work for autonomy and quality of life for my peers, which if done properly, will lead to a better life for myself)
So why isn't it? Genuine question. A enormous number of jobs can be done remote. Certainly mine (I've been full remote for over three years - one day during Covid the boss just told everyone to go home and we literally never went back to the physical office, which no longer exists). I can see entire companies, maybe entire industries, where vast amounts of the work can be done remotely.

So why aren't all these companies cutting salary costs by 90%? That's a huge, huge amount of money. The stock price would go berserk. Dividends would soar. The C-suite would see incredible increases on their wealth. So if all these jobs can be done for 90% less, PLUS the savings of having no expensive office lease costs, why aren't they?
I would like something that can keep postgres (or other source of truth) in sync with existing search database (like Elastic, Meili, or Qdrant).

But the catch is that it's rare that there's 1:1 mapping between the source of truth and what is indexed. The simplest example would be: You have a document table, but you actually index document chunks.

Therefore I would like something that accepts a preprocessing function and keeps the search data in sync when the source changes. Ideally, it should not reinvent full-text / vector based search and plug in with existing solutions.
I have seen little evidence that there is such thing as natural ability, except in rare cases such as actual geniuses, where the elasticity of the brain cannot adapt to develop that ability.

An important lesson children should be taught as earlu as possible is that effort is useless and wasteful if they fail. I agree with perhaps lowering the bar until they develop the skill, but fundamentally engraining tolerance for failure into a child is one of the worst things you can do to a human psyche. It's nearly impossible to remove that mindset later ok. In every aspect of their life they won't just fail, they'll use their supposed natural inability as an excuse for many other harmful ends!

I am not suggesting making them feel like losers when they fail. What should happen is you tell them: "You failed and it's all your fault, but so long as you learn from your failure and keep trying to succeed, you are on the right path."

Talent, effort, opportunities, genius all mean nothing in the real world without perseverance. The most talentess and clueless fool can succeed beyond anyone else simply by virtue of perseverance and discipline.

Praising a child is making them associate a good emotion with the thing they are praised for. Don't let that thing be failure. Even worse, don't let them believe they are fundamentally flawed and handicapped when that isn't true. When they see other kids work hard and succeed, the conclusion is effort is enough because they are incapable anyways.

I don't even know how the author put together such a horrible advice but please! If you insist on bringing a human into this world, don't ruin their chances in life over bullshit like this where the only purpose is to make insincere parents feel good about themselves. Do the right thing which is hard and uncomfortable.
Trust doesn’t mean I think they’re angels.

I think MS is an awful company that tries to win by destroying the competition using all sorts of legal and illegal tricks to do so.

At the same time, it MS starts a new product, I would trust them to support it for a reasonable amount of time and give a reasonable amount of transition time if they did decide to wind it down based entirely on their history.

OTOH, 4 years ago I thought that Google was a much better supporter of Open Source but even then I wouldn’t trust them enough to not sunset a new product with months of notice at best to actually use something new they came up with.
compete with them
This isn't particularly well-argued. Just a lot of handwavy grievance about "elites" as though there's some kind of coordinated conspiracy.
Realistically, a well researched flat earth scientist could destroy the average nasa scientist in a debate. You only need to lie about or misrepresent a few facts to undermine a whole field, and to an outside observer it looks like science got conclusively btfo. Of course, given enough time the nasa scientist will be able to piece things together, but they might never be able to recover some people.

> While there are legitimate concerns about the scientific method being too strict, I think it's necessary to help us keep faith in a field.

Important phrase: "keep faith in" - faith is always in play (it is fundamental to culture & consciousness), and it is healthy for the institution of science to acknowledge it imho.

> That's why I dislike fields that lean into methodological anarchy, like critical theory. They really have no business claiming any sort of authority.

Might this be an instance of "You only need to lie about or misrepresent a few facts to undermine a whole field, and to an outside observer it looks like {the field} got conclusively btfo"?

You are discussing your opinion/interpretation of critical theory, necessarily, but it would be very easy for readers (or even yourself) to form a belief (which is typically perceived as knowledge) that your subjective evaluation is objective and accurate.

Science and its methodologies are excellent for figuring out the physical realm, but watch out if you apply these methods to the metaphysical realm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysics
How are "the elite" forcing companies that do not own real estate and who rent their office space to mandate RTO? How are they forcing these companies to renew their leases when they expire?
At a quick glance, I’m not quite sure what this does. What does Jema do that chatgpt cant ? They look one and the same to me. Perhaps if you can add a differentiating factor in the site would be great.
The problem is that lots of wealth capital (both personal and corporate) is tied up in commercial real estate. It’s the reason everyone from Martha Stewart to Musk to hedge fund managers are screaming about how “unethical” remote work is. They literally can’t afford to have those buildings sit empty, so they will have to force the peons back into them by any means necessary.
> - Addressing the "America is too big and spread out for rail" arguments, notably that USA and Canada were built by trains, and streetcar suburbs, and that most journes Americans take every day are less than 5 miles. - "The Dumbest Excuse for Bad Cities" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REni8Oi1QJQ

The Eastern seaboard of the U.S. absolutely has a) a very linear quality to it (from DC to Boston), b) density, and it's been so since the the early 19th century. Canada is huge, but its population lives along a very narrow latitude band, so it's linear (and low-density).

Outside the Eastern seaboard the U.S. really is huge, with nothing like a linear arrangement of cities.
> I don't like it.

I agree. I don't like writing HTML either. That being said ....

> It gives me pain in my hand muscles to have to hold Shift and write those symbols all the time. It also bores me and annoys me.

I use vim, and with some macros and vimscript in my config, tags are not hard to write (especially if you're willing to make a ftplugin abusing the leader key + first letter of tag to automatically write the common tags).

Even without vim, I was pleasantly surprised at how VSCode (using some HTML plugin) handled raw HTML editing.

You don't need to ever hit the shift key if using vim, and you get pretty similar autocomplete in VSCode (and I assume other editors too).
It's really not. Docker is a tool for binary distribution. Docker images are those binaries. Dockerfiles used to create Docker images don't have any mechanism to ensure reproducibility whatsoever. Unlike Nix, you can't take a Dockerfile and expect builds to succeed.

Furthermore, Docker images are monoliths that's isolated from the system. Instead of system administrators choosing the isolation boundaries that best fits their requirements, the image packagers put walls around each and every image. As a result, Docker containers are inflexible compared to traditional Unix applications. Piecing together multiple Docker containers is a clunky experience.

In contrast, Nix is an integrated build/configuration/deployment system. Entire systems down to the package level can be reproduced from Nix expressions.

It also gives system administrators power over the whole process. Administrators have control over things like how each components are pieced together, and where isolation boundaries are placed. They can even make tweaks to the package build steps.

Docker can't substitute Nix. It's not a matter of elegance. Their features and capabilities are wildly different.
Rezoning alone is insufficient. For traditional (but interestingly not technical) reasons, the designs of commercial and residential buildings are very different and converting between them in already built structures is going to be very costly.
A lot of investments, including pension funds and 401ks, have money tied into commercial real estate through ETFs if not outright ownership.

I’m not justifying the for-back-to-work, but to point out the vested interests fighting against remote workers.
> The risk about finding if a provision is binding exists for a plaintiff too

Your risks affect you whether or not you account for them.

The other party’s risks of litigation against you only benefit you when the other side properly (or overly) accounts for them. Or, looked at a different way, they are mitigated by the risk of a risk-tolerant counterparty. (This would be somewhat less true in non-US jurisdictions where lawsuits generally have a loser pays rules, since there would be a greater chance of having some or all of the cost of a lawsuit against you that fails compensated.)
Idk how realistic it is to convert those buildings, nor how much value it would take off (from the buildings themselves, but also from the rest of the real-estate market).

But it's not unreasonable to assume fear of loss as a motivation, at all. However, what's the link between the people that can actually re-implement work-from-office and those holding all those office buildings?
For rights discussions you have to consider the exceptional cases, too. If we don't insist on rights for people we think are wrong, then the rights are hollow.
So technically we have the technology to simulate a human brain. Just not anywhere near real time. And not at any semblance of reasonable cost. And not guaranteed to simulate the important parts.
The "elites"? That's a funny term for people who own commercial real estate.
they could all be colluding with each other with master keys with the US govt.
https://archive.is/6Dht4
Well, my impression regarding the latest rounds of layoffs is that they are intentionally trying to create headlines about those layoffs. The C level is more interested in higher share prices than they are interested in costs for the layoffs themselves. But, admittedly, it is hard to prove the truth of such an impression.
MS has lot more products were you can't completely turn off telemetry if you aren't using the Enterprise version.

Don't forget the Office 365 "productivity" measures.

And the latest insanity, at least for me, ads in the settings of Windows 11. Never ever put ads in any configuration menu of the operating system. That clearly says, it's not my computer, its MS's and they try to squeeze every penny out they can get. So they aren't any different from Google, they even try to push you to the Cloud and then make mistakes a cloud enterprise shouldn't make
Document Intelligence Series – Part-1: Table Detection with YOLOv8M
China and Russia definitely do cybercrime, but:

> In its release, WikiLeaks said "Marble" was used to insert foreign language text into the malware to mask viruses, trojans and hacking attacks, making it more difficult for them to be tracked to the CIA and to cause forensic investigators to falsely attribute code to the wrong nation. The source code revealed that Marble had examples in Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic and Persian.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vault_7

The government and media pretends that attribution is a slam-dunk when it virtually never is. On the other hand, there are big career benefits to discovering the next "Chinese" malware vs. stumbling upon some US/EU script kiddy nonsense that included Chinese characters as a prank/red herring. There is incentive to misattribute & sensationalize.

I would wager that ~100% of CIA/NSA malware (or any state actor, really) has a plausible red herring cover. It would be foolish not to.
It's been a while since I've really looked, but I seem to remember that the major contributors are either employed by various hardware/software vendors (Google, Valve, Intel, AMD, VMWare) or do contract/consulting work on the Linux graphics stack (LunarG), not unlike the Linux kernel.
It doesn’t seem to be going well for them.
I can’t force myself to like vscode. I need to code right? So I need 1-to be able to write text, 2-syntax highlighting. VSCode is an absolute mess of unnecessary plugins and popup that reminds me of an internet explorer 6 with too many web bars and a bonzi buddy dancing at the bottom of the screen.

I also dislike Chrome and any chrome based reskin. I appreciate Firefox and even Safari. Specially Safari for the same reasons the average JavaScript Stan hates it: it’s keeping the web from implementing the latest usb-over-browser crap or wathever the-chrome-consortion (google) comes up with. Safari on iOS is the only thing that keeps “best viewed on Chrome” from happening in current year.

Those are personal opinions though.
Sounds about right, my manager enjoys tennis, frequent coffee breaks, one or two light meetings, and he activates with out of touch "ideas" in the last hour of the day. It's ridiculous.
Can’t you just use OpenSearch? What is the point of going through Postgres when you already have OpenSearch?
Bad take. There are plenty of dumb reasons people are wanted back at the office but the most predominant one is probably that it just "feels like" it will make your company better.

I'd think people would be happy that at least some remote work will never go away at this point. To argue that you should never ever even have to consider going back into an office for any amount of time is just silly. But to also argue you can never ever work from home is also silly.
Klaus Schwab: “If you have nothing to hide you have no reason to be afraid.”
Yes, this reads exactly like it was written by someone who's never had a leadership role, and probably doesn't want to hold such a role, but deigns to know exactly the motivations of people in those roles.
One big confound was the gap between national averages and the Bay Area. I knew a ton of people who ended up finding jobs at large businesses, higher education, government, etc. which they weren’t looking at during the height of the dotcom bubble. None of those places had had an easy time hiring then, but also that almost always meant relocating.
Office space is very expensive to convert to residential, you have large rectangle with windows on the perimeter only, weird elevator/stair layout, insufficient plumbing for many individual bathrooms, and poor ventilation for kitchens.
live usb with persistence on the usb stick itself or on hdd partition running windows works like a charm. save your data on the hdd.

im on mx linux and life is such a breath of fresh air.
> Additionally, crappy wages and unrealistic job descriptions.

What’s interesting, is from what I’ve seen, a lot of stuff is paying a lot better than I remember seeing a decade ago. However, the costs, notably the cost of things you need to survive (especially housing) has managed to far outpace those wage gains in a much shorter period of time. Although that might be specific to my location.
Why not both?

Inefficiency sucks, and electron enables that on a large scale.

I have to assume that photoshop could start faster, but trade offs would be made.
The problem isn’t the zoning. That can be fixed with literally a stroke of a pen. The problem is that the buildings were never designed for habitation, and so you run into issues with plumbing and windows. Sometimes these things are fixable, but usually at great cost, especially for newer construction.
I run a hybrid team while working remotely. The only thing that is considerably more difficult remotely is getting a feeling for how the team members feel. Are they doing okay? Are they bored/annoyed? But that‘s more of a problem for insecure managers. I trust my teams, talk to each regularly and all is fine so far.
I think it goes beyond that. Your average pointy haired boss loves asses in seats.
It would be nice to have a shorthand value that means "evaluate this pure function exactly the same way regardless of the 'system' parameter", which would be helpful for completely architecture-less packages (such as interpreted scripts).
YouTube Premium exists and there are still masses of people that refuse to pay for it despite hating ads. You’re in the minority.
Causing harm is a priority of both parties. They differ only in target and vector.

The "good" one doesn't even try to pretend otherwise anymore; neither represents the interests of centrists.
Apple's vertical integration really ends at the cloud. There's iCloud, but that's a small offering. Microsoft has Azure, which extends their vertical integration in a direction Apple doesn't even try for.
W2K was certainly peak UI for me - all my windows machines run as close to that UI as I can get them.
It's about to be multiplied several times over with AI startups promising the moon and the stars and handwaving away criticisms with anthropomorphized terms like "hallucinations".
Casefolding for Bcachefs File-System Posted
https://archive.is/VqD9F
As for myself, I'd prefer to not bail out commercial real estate in order to prop up the economies of major metropolitan areas that will be inundated with sea water in the next decade.

I think we can do better.
And if the hammer comes with a label that says "it feels good to hit your face with this"?

We'll have to accept the world isn't binary in many situations. There are gradients from "you should know better" to "outright criminal behavior from a device".
Oversimplified History of Retro Game Consoles for Programmers
I keep track of where I apply and if I get a no-response or a rejection or an interview.

Right now, 70 applications over 2 months, I had a ~4% interview rate. Slightly lower than normal. July and August were absolutely dead. June I had some interviews. Fall it may pick up from what I've read.

I don't know how well tailoring works. If it's a special job, maybe it's worth it, otherwise, it may me more efficient to submit a comprehensive but otherwise non-tailored application. Maybe run an A/B test to see what gives you better results. You could also have a few pre-tailored resumes you can use for the typical positions you apply for (for eg Frontend, Backend, Fullstack, DevOps) instead of recreating one each time.
You got to be an idiot to trust any public or vc company. You can use their products and services when it makes sense, you should never trust them.
If your job isn't remote, it can also be offshored for 1/10 the cost - just get an office building.

The arbitrage from offshoring is much narrower than most people think. You mostly get what you pay for and companies can easily waste a lot of money and time trying to go the low-cost more-employees route.
China courts Germany's far-right populist AfD
Did positive definite not imply Hermitian? I feel like I'm forgetting my linear algebra.

Edit: Yup, Wikipedia agrees "this condition implies that M is Hermitian"; see their counterexample with a complex vector: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definite_matrix#Consistency_be...

Note: Crucially, this is specific to the field of complex numbers (hence the discussion of Hermitian vs. just symmetry). For the field of real numbers, PSD does not imply symmetry, though that's commonly assumed for convenience.
Don't love all the negative attitude about the NHS in the comments. Yes, could be better. Still, amazing progress over time. This un-constructive pessimism really doesn't serve much purpose IMO.

Heartfelt (no pun intended) get-well wishes to the author. May he be able to send many more excellent write-ups.
A the top end there is a lot of coordination, big money conservatives get together at CPAC and other venues to make plans, each political party is a powerful coordinated force of elites, they are all on each other's boards, etc.

However this article did not present any evidence of any given group of elites doing this, for this reason, so...
> The “elites”? That’s a funny term for people who own commercial real estate

You think commercial real estate isn’t disproportionately owned, directly or indirectly, by the narrow haut bourgeoisie?
That sounds instead like optimizing your car for the parking lot. If Google doesn't see your site, you've got to put 100x the effort into marketing that site.
Heh you underestimate (or perhaps understate) the predictability of stupidity... somewhere down the road you'll have kids running for-loops on top of GB-large LLM models :D

now, seriously - it gets me thinking a lot that certain generation is going to be the last to be interested in assembly, but actually there are always people fascinated by the beauty of assembly language.
I have no proof but i would think share holder power?
AMD supports VFIO on most of their cards. All of the RDNA based cards support it. Even some pre-RDNA ones too, and with a recent-ish driver NVIDIA's Geforce line supports it too without hacks.

Problem isn't really HW support, its that the software side is super glitchy and its not all that easy to configure and in most cases requires a 2nd GPU if you still want basic host functions.

Where as VirGL is much easier to get working and doesn't require specific HW support as far as I'm aware.
That’s good, but reuse is best - maybe something like https://www.pcsforpeople.org/ is nearby. They’re great.
The heat/efficiency issue is just one of many problems with laser weapons.
I stopped praising hard work some time ago when I really started to look at society around me. I don't want my kid to think that hard work is the key to happiness. Satisfaction is an admirable goal, pride in ones work is an admirable goal, staying up late and working all weekend for an A is not an admirable goal.

Call us cynical but we've started teaching our kids a gamer attitude towards school. There are 'tricks' you can learn to get an A that aren't staying up all night reading every single page in your Physics textbook.
They are very much (ab-)using the old get-you-hooked-by-loosing-money-then-slowly-crank-up-the-prices-til-it-hurts-when-you-have-a-monopoly trick?

The others were never as aggressive in their quest for monopolies and made it on some other merit. Not to say the others are much better, but Temu will have to make that money back somehow, eventually.

Basically price-dumping to destroy the competition and gain market share.
I will never give up the freedom and convenience to go where I want, when I want, and with whom I want that a car provides and public transportation can never.