skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your points are always saying the same thing.
It’s impossible because humanity hasn’t discovered how it could be possible today

It’s impossible because our physics today has a limit on how fast something can travel in line

And the relies are saying well maybe we don’t know everything, just like we didnt know everything 500 years ago or 1000 years ago or 10000 years ago but thought we did
Better how? The most you can definitively say is we understand things differently every 5 years. I doubt there exists a partial order of universal comprehensions, and even if it does exist I wouldn’t be surprised to find that all our so-called “developments” rank exactly equal under it.

As if one was hunting for Pi, knowing it could never be fully resolved, but still: “more digits is closer!”. Except they started with a “4.”
New Tesla Model Y Now Available in China
That Dinner Tab Has Soared
But why?

There is no GIL in C/C++/Rust/Zig/Whatever, just use threads.
So you do you disagree with the link I posted that the median income in the US is the fifth highest.

Again, you were wrong unless you can find a better citation. Because as of now, you have provided…nothing

> No, the reason people in the US have much more of an Apple fixation than other countries is because Apple is seen as an elite/luxury item,

Geeks just can’t stand the fact that when given the choice and have the ability, choose Apple devices and don’t care about running Linux on the Apple Pencil.

Can you name one country where higher income individuals don’t overwhelmingly by iPhones? It’s definitely true in China - the largest country in the world
Here's a hypothetical EU directive: Ban all-in-one computing devices that don't also function as dumb monitors. Set a maximum screen size to exclude phones and things with built-in secondary screens.
It’s so rare to see anyone admit the truth on this topic.

That’s how I know it’s BS on both sides. No one has ever admitted they exploit it - but we all know it happens.
Phone calls used to mostly be pretty damn clear.

But then we added more and more computers to the whole thing, and it got worse.

Usual story, really.
Dr. Kariko’s experience makes me wonder how many other potentially groundbreaking research nodes are being ignored and whether organizations like YC actually have adequate mechanisms to identify such potential bio-science startups.

"Dr. Kariko’s struggles to stay afloat in academia have a familiar ring to scientists. She needed grants to pursue ideas that seemed wild and fanciful. She did not get them, even as more mundane research was rewarded. “When your idea is against the conventional wisdom that makes sense to the star chamber, it is very hard to break out,” said Dr. David Langer ... Leading scientific journals rejected their work. When the research finally was published, in Immunity, it got little attention. ... “We talked to pharmaceutical companies and venture capitalists. No one cared,” Dr. Weissman said. “We were screaming a lot, but no one would listen.[1]”

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/08/health/coronavirus-mrna-k...
It's clear remote can work for at least some people and companies. So by going full RTO you're really leaving a lot of talent on the table. IMO an ability to hire is the hardest part about building an engineering org so you're really playing on hard mode. I generally think remote companies will out compete in-person ones given a competitive landscape (which unfortunately doesn't describe a lot of marketplaces).
My brother is looking at a new position that does 2d/week hybrid. He is thinking of laying it out this way:

* * W R F
M T W * *

So that he has wed to wed where he doesn’t go in.

Also some workers stagger their schedules and share rent on an apartment that is a “crash pad”, so they can live farther from the metro and then just commute for the two day office visit in one trip.

Pretty interesting seeing how people adapt to this.
Especially in February.
Prior to COVID, everyone understood that remote work was supported by some companies and not others. It was also a type of work that was preferred by some employees and not others.

As a result, everyone peacefully self-selected into their preferred employment relationships. Companies got the type of workforce they wanted and workers chose the type of environment they wanted. It was great.

Today, as some companies are changing their remote work policies to be return-to-office, there seems to be a lot of resentment about this, and I don't really understand why. We should just return to the status quo before COVID: choose the type of company you want to work for that supports the lifestyle you want to have. If your employer wants to transition back to in-office work and you don't want to do it, switch to one of the thousands of companies that will hire you.

You have no obligation to stay at a company that is forcing you back in the office, and the company has no obligation to keep an employee working in a remote context that the company doesn't favor anymore.
The Generative Leap: Where LLMs Are Outpacing the Competition by 10x
> The reduction stems from an accounting adjustment that lowered personal income from mutual funds and real estate investment trusts.

This is adjusting the inflows not the outflows of rich people (and thus low marginal propensity to spend) people. So while every revision teaches us more things, this doesn't isn't really hitting "where the action is".

Remember that in macroeconomics, saving is the break, and spending is the gas.
Canceling stale workload in AI code completion
If one wants to work from home, they will, just not at your company, unless they lack the ability to get a new job.
Another aspect of the RTO discussion that's missed: People in long-distance relationships.

I don't mind going to the office a fair share of the time but I don't want rules that require N days per week because that prevents me from visiting my partner. I generally work from my partner's place about 1-2 out of every 8 weeks. Going to the office as little or as much on other weeks isn't a huge issue (though admittedly I do work more efficiently from home, and have way better snacks and drinks at home than the office) but I want those 1-2 weeks to be respected.
? Have you? (Note I'm not op)
I don't believe even public colleges want this. They're raking in too much money, at this point.
Unless you work in a company that only has one office in one locale, it's frankly pointless. Going to an office to sit in a meeting room with two other people so you three can video call with 12 other people in other offices is ridiculous.
This is somewhat similar to the model we do at my current employer: ~4-5 days in office every 4 months.
I would say it's definitely way preferable for me vs having been fully remote without yearly gatherings.
> to the top N people in the state, with N being decided by the payers (i.e. democratic electorate).

I don't know how it works in the EU, but one issue I see with that it has the danger of permanently locking people who grow up with worse early/middle/high school education into their socioeconomic status, i.e. it would prevent social mobility for those with less resources. Unless public schooling standards prior to college are also improved, limiting higher education to "top N%" students ensures entrenched socioeconomic inequity. I think there is already enough class-based discontent, and making it worse via limiting (one of the few) means of social mobility wouldn't help, I think.
Location: Berlin, Germany

Remote: Hybrid prefered. Remote within Germay is also ok (because of visa restrictions I need to be employed by a german company)

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: React, Typescript, Node, Python, Flask, MongoDB, Docker, K8S, AWS

Résumé/CV: https://iheredia.com/ignacio_heredia_cv.pdf

Email: ignacio.nh@gmail.com
Walking over and talking? You can just jump on Zoom for a quick chat with a coworker. Text messages are low bandwidth, but Zoom calls are not.

Everyone on my team is available for a Zoom call when they're at their laptops, which is for the majority of the working day.

Just because your workplace didn't result in an ideal result doesn't mean that it's the norm.
I used to do this to salesmen, ask them a simple factual question about the product, to see if they'd lie to me.

They all lied to me. I don't ask salesmen questions any more.
The RTO push for 3, 4, or 5 days a week for devs is simply unreasonable. The company I work for encourages (but doesn't mandate) 1 day per week, which works great for us. You can then spend more time helping junior coworkers, having in person discussions, and happy hours for that day. It's a good minimum to feel connected. Obviously, it all depends on what type of role you have.
> Every company that issued forced relocation ultimatums to their pre-pandemic remote workers will not only lose most (if not all) their top talent in the next year, but they will struggle to hire for at least the coming decade

People have been saying that over here on HN too.

It’s what they WANT to happen, but not at all what will happen.

It’s a feel good narrative based on the fact that engineers want to believe they are “top talent”, that their skills alone will be enough for them to do well economically, that in the end the people that don’t respect the tech will suffer consequences.

Sorry, “top talent” isn’t that scarce or NEEDED at all in software engineering. Even FAANG is more than happy to churn on 20 something college grads with no deep expertise. In fact, engineers with deep expertise who wants to work on challenging technical problems often have to take pay CUTS to be able to do so.

With no unions and no solidarity between workers, the future is clear: come back to the office or take a pay cut.
> Once people enjoyed the flexibility they aren't going back.

This was the line I was directly responding to.
Most people who claim to like an office specifically like other people being at an office
If you’re more concerned with how long a software engineer sits in front of a computer, opposed to the work they actually get done, you’ve already lost.

Edit: if you’re going to downvote me that’s fine, but please explain why “number of hours spent at computer” is at all a useful metric. It’s a genuine question; I’m not being facetious. I’ll get nothing done all day then wake up in the middle of the night with the solution to a problem. The amount of time I spend coding doesn’t really correlate with business value.
There are things I love about remote, but there are also advantages of an office. Before we see the next Google or OpenAI being founded as fully remote we'll never know of it actually works. My instinct tells me it's hard to build new great company with the current remote tech we have even if it's possible to sustain mature companies that way for some time. With VR/AR that will change.
AIUI, one of the worst cases of interoperability legacy I've ever seen. If even one thing in the pipeline is compatible with POTS ("plain old telephone service", i.e., land lines in all their 3KHz glory), the whole call degrades, and since the whole call is going to be degraded anyhow, almost everything written to handle voice calling just drops straight to the POTS lowest common denominator. Which in a digital world can be even lower than POTS due to our ability to just set a number on our lossy compression codecs with all the regard for how much money bandwidth costs and no regard for quality.

This includes hardware too, e.g., microphones that work fine in the POTS frequency regimes but don't produce high quality audio, speakers chosen just to work well in the old frequency regime, etc.

So, despite the fact I have to imagine the odds of a call hitting the actual physical POTS system approaches zero today, and that in general in 2023 a high-quality phone call wouldn't actually be that expensive, the odds of a call traversing something that lazily fell back to POTS-level standards for whatever reason is still quite high.

One could write a brief sci-fi story in a Star Trek-inspired universe in which galactic war is started because the video call to High Command in the year 2642 is still running on POTS audio quality standards and some words are fatally compromised....
I'm not. Is the time on your computer correct?
How exactly do you think taxes are used?
They've created artificial scarcity through overhiring and bullshit layoffs. The total pool of workers is shrinking thanks to the pandemic and we still haven't seen the full impact of that. Future COVID waves will shrink it further. The employers are massively fucking up right now in thinking they have the upper hand. They're just igniting the kindling for tech unions, which they _really_ won't like.

Also, India didn't replace you in the 90's and AI isn't replacing you now.
Yours wasn't a really substantive answer. The next person provided more details and didn't add 'lol' at the end of his short statement. Just some feedback if you want people to accept your points more often!
> Audio calls also still suck. Commercials in the 90s advertised "crystal clear audio quality" - they stopped talking about it but it never materialised.

So this is a funny one because its definitely solvable but it's kind of a classic principal agent problem. There's a number of things that are going into 'clear audio quality'.

1. Receiver's audio output quality - This is rarely if ever the problem. People usually use their speakers/headset to listen to stuff besides corporate meetings, so they're motivated to have something at least good enough that they can enjoy their music, talk shows, whatever.

2. Bandwidth allocation - This... this really shouldn't be an issue, but it is because the user isn't paying for the bandwidth, whether that's classic cellphone calls, Teams voice, whatever. And so its in the company's best financial interest to compress the audio as much as is tolerable. This isn't really an issue if #3 isn't a problem and the user is in a place without too much background noise, but with open-plan offices, it is a problem if there's a lot of people talking.

3. User's mic quality - So in gaming communities, people will generally tell you if your mic sucks, because you're just some random stranger. And if your mic sucks and you want people to listen to you, you will probably buy a good mic eventually, tweak the settings etc. In a business context, my experience has been that the audio quality has to be pretty bad before anyone even says anything to the speaker. And then it's up to that person to either try to get it replaced by IT or pay out of pocket for a good quality mic. And this is assuming that they're technical enough to be able to pick out a good mic to begin with or even realize that its something they can solve.
To me, the key component of remote work is that I can choose where to live according to the needs of my family. If I need to come in to work every month then I still need to live within commuting distance. Some people can tolerate taking a work trip 12 times a year, I suppose, but that'd be a huge downside for me.

I actually prefer to be in the office if I live near the office. But being able to live in the city that lets me support my spouse's career is non-negotiable for me.
My understanding is most low hanging fruit were picked for Python 3.11. And the faster CPython team have been looking at more mid to long term goals with the addition of a JIT and other accompanying infrastructure around for 3.13 and 3.14.

However, the recent no-GIL decision I think has sent a few things back to the drawing board to see what can and cannot be salvaged from their progress and plans so far.
you replied to the wrong comment LOL
That is my experience in the East coast US. Here, the suburbs are very spread out, with amenities 15-20 minutes away by car. There are older suburbs where that is not true, but that's more of an exception. Housing in those older suburbs costs more than the newer more spread out developments and there are fewer of them than the newer more spread out ones.

Typically, those old suburbs were originally built around train stations or street car lines, which influenced their design. The newer ones were designed around access by car and zoning prevents any non residential land uses nearby.
There’s a flip side to this where you’re not observing the negatives coming to the company as a result.

It’s not all bad but it’s not all good either.

Just as an example, I see people complain (a lot) about “cameras on” policies. This is the result of a company trying to eliminate an issue that they are seeing from non-participation to potential instances of fraud. They want to do return to office, but this is a “let’s find a middle ground” step.

And yet, people will act as if it’s the end of the world. The alternative is being in the room itself. You have to pick your battles.
As an illustrator who has also done some non-negligible sculpting, this kind of stuff is so much easier than 'lifelike realism' that it's not even close.
That's just...weird advice.

"Honey, playing WoW 12 hours a day is a dealbreaker for me."

"You must enter your information into our new HR system."
Promises companies failed to keep:

- Decent working environment. I was moved into a single person office with another person that was so cramped I had to move if they needed to use the bathroom and ended up begging to be moved into the open office plan (which was so distracting but less humiliating.)

- Performance based bonuses/promotions

- Not working on weekends/holidays.

- Company Transit (a spot wasn't guaranteed or reservable so it wasn't reliable)

- 40 hour work week. Expected that I will go over 40 hours sometimes but under was taboo. And of course the 2 hours of commuting doesn't count.

- Plenty of other passive aggressive stuff by management during meetings

So I don't think people should feel that bad about negotiating the work environment on their terms. If companies don't follow the rules, why should people always be expected to fulfill your requirements that are something they never wanted.
Lossy to lossy transcodes always cause more degradation, so it's better to keep your lossy files in their original format without any re-encoding.

Easy transcodes to various lossy formats are the primary reason for a well maintained and curated library of proper FLACs (or ALACs).

The main advantage being that your can fit more great sounding music on your space-limited device. Disk space is cheap, but upgrades on your phone are probably not. Even if your Music collection fits easily, why not have more room for other media / apps?
Honest question, do you have a college degree, and do you think the majority of the population being generally educated is actually a bad thing?

I can understand the reaction to the cost, and many people work outside of the degree they majored in, but I do value the general education of the population. It’s been a remarkably uplifting force in society, if you look back over history.

I also wonder what that means for the competition between nations, it seems like the countries that I think are doing well really lean in to general education of their populations.

I came to college a different way, I went into the Marines first and only attended college after that. I didn’t live in the dorm and didn’t have a traditional college experience, but I am glad every day that I didn’t just have engineering classes.
Being interrupted while I work because someone walked over to talk to me, when they could have sent a message to request to talk to me, is the second strongest reason I refuse to work in an office. The first is that I am not paid to commute, and commute time is non-trivial.

Having multiple tasks on the go is good. I did it even when I worked in an office; it seems common practice to have many active repos hot on disk.
2011 here. Fully remote teams for more of that.

It does take time and active effort to become fully productive in a remote environment. It's not something you're just born knowing how to do, it's a set of skills just like working in an office is a set of skills. You have to learn them.
I mean, yes it's bullshit to try to apply RTO policies on remote workers that were hired as remote workers. It's not even a "return" in that scenario, properly understood. And IANAL but I wonder if that could be considered a constructive dismissal that mandates severance rather than a "soft" one.

That said, this article flirts with the often-made argument that RTO is some sort of way of boosting commercial property prices or tax incentives. I've never bought this and would be curious to see the argument steelmanned, since I don't think large corporations are going to easily fall into this sunk cost fallacy style thinking. If remote work boosts productivity and allows them to lower the costs of having offices, companies should embrace this even if they made prior investments in having offices.
It's not really clear what you mean, maybe there's gaps in my ML knowledge, but generally the answer depends on "what throughput do you need for your use case?"

Generally I agree that if you only need to deliver mail once daily on a mile long route, a car that takes 24 hours to travel a mile is fine.
> The people on the assembly line would look at you like the most spoilt people in the world.

Ok, working standards and life in general have gotten better for people. Why is that a bad thing?

> It's a nicer life working from home

Again, why is people having a better life a bad thing?
Do you feel comfortable sending your personal data to their servers, without encryption?

With File37, nobody, even those who have access to the database, can read your data.

Because all your files and texts are encrypted on your device before they are sent to the server.

Give it a try!
> It's such a strange thing to argue that a child who is poor would be better off never to have been born at all—and then to characterize that argument as somehow being in favor of that child's interest.

> My point is that a hard-working, upright and moral couple that wants a child should have one even if they are dirt poor, and shouldn't stop themselves because they don't have money. If the child ends up being unhappy in that environment purely as a result of the lack of money, then that is society's failing—our failing—not a failing of the parents'. We haven't done our duty to help this couple raise a happy family.

This is such a ridiculous point. Hypothetical children do exists because they will be when its enacted upon. For example, if a couple keep giving birth KNOWING that their children will suffer, are they not responsible for their children suffering?

Sure, it is not their fault that the children suffers. Perhaps because they have bad genes, stuck in a warzone, lives in an awful country, have mental health issues, cannot provide for their children, or whatever. The fact is still that they KNOW this hypothetical children will suffer.

Imagine if we are able to write an executable that will startup a simulation where it will simulate a universe with maximum suffering. I have compiled the program, its right there to be executed. Is it immoral to execute this binary? Yes of course it is. Similarly, if I KNOW that having a child right now, given all the circumstances that I am in, whether its my fault or not, will cause this potential child to suffer, then I am immoral.
Kind of on management for being so ineffectual than an indictment on the principle.
It sort of is with the inevitable team dinner and social activity etc. Although I have a closer office I literally never go into, I do go into our urban office now and then for customer meetings. It's 90 minutes each way, it's barely doable, and if I have 2 days of meetings in a row, especially with a dinner in-between, I book a hotel room if at all possible.

2 hours each way is doable I guess. But I'd probably end up coming in late and passing on any after-5 activities.
Just a reminder... this is from comp.lang.python. It's not unbiased.