skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hadn't heard the Packer vs. Mapper analogy before and it's good. It reminds me of an experience I had in a different domain many years ago that I haven't been able to express in such succinct terms.

I hired a bookkeeper/comptroller/finance person for a very small startup and she was 100% a Packer. She had years of experience and interviewed very well but once she started I realized she knew all the motions of bookkeeping but she didn't actually grok what double-entry accounting was or what a balance sheet and how assets and liabilities and equity relate to each other.

So anytime we ran into a novel situation that could have been easily puzzled out by someone with a foundational understanding of accounting, she got paralyzed, made something up, and then blamed others for "not training her for this situation". Total nightmare.
That's exactly what it is. Many organizations have strict pay bands and cannot attract talent without overly inflated titles; cue dozens of "directors" with no reports, and people with < 5 years experience being hired as "Staff Engineers" to build web apps.
Typical hackernews to have threads full of well meaning but ultimately misguided people saying ah we have some technological solution for this.

The solution to this problem and every other problem caused by driving is not driving. Period.

Not driving doesn't require any new technology, it just requires getting serious about alternatives to driving. (safe, separated bike ways, ebike and micromobility subsidies, rail, public transit, better urban design, less subsidies to cars and trucks of any kind etc etc - all of these have a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop that lead to even less driving)
All the evidence points to the opposite. If you have some evidence or a series of logical statements, I will listen. But I'm not going to take your word for it when it directly contradicts all evidence.
I’ve been involved in some heinous forum threads with people arguing the difference in sound of music streamed from different SD Cards. People will argue about all sorts of drivel
I think the most likely take here is bureaucratic incompetence though. It’s not like the current administration can even guarantee it will continue through 2025.
Nuclear power plants to offset power use from new tech: Good.

Nuclear power plants being run by Microsoft Corporation: Concerning.
Sure, because that's how it would work out. :p
My favorite thing is that Gino is now suing DataColada [1], and basically is claiming that 'they were right in every other case and I supported them, but with me they are lying'.

1: https://datacolada.org/113
I'm a good counterexample to that story though. I've started coding when I was nine, have Masters in Computer Science, have worked in software for roughly 15 years (most of that coding). I've taught myself linear algebra, 3d computer vision/vSLAM from scratch, computer graphics (incl. more advanced concepts like PBR, Mesh Shaders etc.), statistics and machine learning, and probably other things I'm forgetting now.

However, in the end I chose not to do anything with that knowledge and that interest, and work relatively simple back-end jobs. Why? Because, no matter how hard I try, I can't put in more than 15-20 hours of hard focus per week. If I try to push myself harder, I just crash (sometimes even after two days - I get intense headaches on day three and my experiment is concluded). I've tried it probably dozens of times, and the results were always similar - if anything, it got worse with age (I had more energy in my twenties than now in my fourties).
When I worked on a project that had a dedicated architect, they really seemed like they were the only one doing engineering work (design). The rest of us were assembling their design, like technicians do.
increasingly i just disagree with the metrics along which people compare these things:

1. is the thing likely to survive for long enough that it makes sense for me to build a community/connections on it.

2. will my experience of it improve as it develops over the years.

and i’ve just been burned by the “shiny new platform, it’s cool for 5 years, then the investors cash out” playbook so many times now, and mutations of it like Apple’s (where they lock their devices down over time — but in a way that avoids backlash), that i just massively overweight (2).

Mastodon/Activity Pub is excellent. i don’t have to worry about some nutcase with $$ barging in and slapping ads everywhere, hiding shit behind paywalls, shoving “reels” or “shorts” i never asked for into my timeline, messing with the “algorithms”, or whatever. Mastodon is, and it will continue to be, and at this point that’s about all i ask from anything.
Perhaps the fundamental logic behind pure math is "real" in the sense that it's "found in nature" (whatever that means, I don't see how we would prove that), and we're only applying this real thing to models that we've completely made up.

e.g., modus ponens is real, but a Turing Machine is not. We can reason about it logically but we didn't discover it, we made it up. Maybe the same can be said about numbers.
There isn't much here to discuss. What does "solid, truly scientific proof" look like to you, and what would researchers need to do to meet that standard?
What word do you propose we use instead? I feel like HR won’t feel too happy about advertising job openings for a „senior turd wrangler“.
In my experience the software industry does not optimize engineering roles based on technical metrics. Getting promoted rarely involves demonstrating how you have grown technically. Instead it's about how well you communicate to the team and leadership, how well you organize the team around a problem, how well you put together a planned schedule. Getting estimates right and coming up with simple, effective solutions (for example), is rarely looked at for promotion. In other words, as engineers get promoted they do less engineering... and amazingly this has been literally admitted to me as if there's nothing wrong with it. It's no surprise that codebases get constantly re-written, simple features take exceedingly long to ship, and there is always a long list of bugs to fix, that often have recurring root causes that are never fixed. I think there's a need for engineers to optimize and maximize their specialty within an organization (because a lot of it is domain specific), and it would prevent a lot of the problems that plague software development, specially at enterprise levels.
Seems if you put just about any real person, even notable public figures, it pops up as a violation of the content policy, even though their policy doesn't say that explicitly. Perhaps it falls under "Deception, disinformation, and inauthentic activity" or their vague catchall "We prohibit the use of Image Creator for any other activity that significantly harms other individuals, organizations, or society"

I can squint and see why they wouldn't want my "Cowboy Al Gore rolls coal at a tractor pull" but I don't see how "Joe Bidden inauguration but wearing an orange suit" is going to bring down society. It shot me down for "angela merkel toasting beer glasses" despite her doing that all the time.
I tried it and it was more complex to do anything compared to PromQL.

Like, it looks super powerful for complex queries I will never need to make...
You know, I'm one of the few people who - as much as I'd love to honor the effort that went into it - I truly barely ever have the time to watch 2+ hour long videos anymore.

So I appreciate it.
Or more importantly in Ireland, religions based discrimination
Bus Sniffing the IBM 5150
Yes! All the big tire companies, Goodyear, Michelin and Firestone have a "natural rubber" development department and every couple years they come out with a "green tire" which they quickly drop and forget about.

As for the "technology" of natural rubber, yes again, ALL military aircraft tires are only natural rubber, people know, when it matters use ONLY natural rubber.

Again, we use choose to use and pollute with synthetic rubber because it is more profitable for the companies to sell us more tires that ware out more quickly. They know this and its on purpose.

[1] https://hcs.osu.edu/our-people/dr-katrina-cornish
It's not as if humans will go extinct. The UN predicts we will peak at 10 billion in 2100 and stabilize at 5 billion overall afterwards. When we were last at 5 billion, it was 1987, so it's not like we didn't build human societies before then. Those who want kids will have them and those who don't will not.
Oh, ok.

Yeah, the one thing we tested again and again is that if there is any difference on the speed of light going and coming back, it must average to the same thing in every direction (actually in every circuit, with any number or directional changes).

There are some experiments that measure one-way speed even on the link you posted. The first measurement of the speed of light was one-way. Those are just low precision ones.
Because to me it seems that if it were made consistent, it would extend into solipsism. And if it does, I don't think it's worth discussing then.
This is really good.

It covers one of the most common things people miss with regards to running migrations: it isn't possible to atomically deploy both the migration and the application code that uses it. This means if you want to avoid a few seconds/minutes of errors, you need to deploy the migration first in a way that doesn't break existing code, then the application change, and then often a cleanup step to complete the migration in a way that won't break.

Knowing how to do this isn't a common skill. It's probably a good topic for an interview question for senior engineering roles.
That's a fair point, but it's worth appreciating the fundamental differences between OLTP RDBMS and OLAP timeseries. I'm not saying deploy N different DBs, I'm saying pick a good OLTP solution (Postgres) and a good OLAP solution.

My bad experience with TimescaleDB 3 years ago was that enabling compression required disabling the "dynamic labels" feature, which was a total nonstarter for us. A proper timeseries DB is designed to achieve great compression while also allowing flexibility of series. Hopefully Timescale will/has fixed that without adding another drastic perf tradeoff, but given how Postgres is architected for OLTP I would be surprised.
Without evaporation sweat cannot cool
Common sense does not get you very far in a world where any video or audio can be fake, and you cannot really tell which one is and which one isn't. Common sense is officially done for. Bring on the math.
Having worked in research for a long time, once you've invested a lot of time an effort into some line of work, you're always looking for some way to continue, spin, or create the least amount of iterative difference in previous works to find funding or push an acceptable paper out. That's just the nature of the environment. Even if most the world moves on from something, the effort to change tracks is often higher than continuing down less promising routes.

Now, there is some value in continued work that ignores consensus or popularity. Consensus doesn't mean absolute certainty and historically big leaps have been made in areas people consider lost causes or wastes of time pursing. So, its good that we don't abandon searching the knowledge spaces entirely, but I will say that's often not the driving motive. It has more to do with careers and putting food on the table, such is the ecosystem that is research. LK99 won't disappear for quite awhile and people will continue novel research in the area.
Is that such a bad idea? It's probably better for the majority of the other species that inhabit this planet
That was some dodgy science (and people not being skeptical enough) but at least nobody out-right lied (afaik). And the hype only lasted a few weeks. The Schon case is worse IMHO and similarly points to bad incentives, although at least that one is 20 years old and there hasn't been a similarly large-scale fraud since (again afaik).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6n_scandal
This whole meme started because people could use DKIM to verify that Hunter Biden really did send his incriminating emails while we were all supposed to think they were russian disinfo.

Some people are literally so politics poisoned that they can't see that it cuts both ways. I can't wait until DKIM is used to prove something bad about Trump so everyone can flip their position on DKIM.

It isn't going to change anything, politics poisoned brains won't see the irony. But it's always funny to see anyway.
It's not that we don't have filters. You can filter your tap water right now of microplastics with standard filters. We don't have the capacity to filter the world's oceans before the microplastics enter the ecosystem.
Perspiration is only useful via evaporative cooling. It is of no use underwater.
From where I sit it sure looks like Musk is enabling antisemitism. Having said that, I’ll bite: can you give an example of fair criticism by Musk that was labeled antisemitic by the ADL?
[front-loading this caveat: I'm speaking from the POV of a web developer]

It's hard not to agree with the general premise of the article - anyone can see the trend. But as always, there's some nuance that I think the article leaves out.

Thinking of it as "two different types of programmers" is reductive and encourages you to have a fixed mindset about people (i.e. I "am" a packer vs I "am" a mapper). Really, these are two sets of behaviors and approaches towards software engineering, and almost everyone has bits of both behaviors.

I began my tech career in web development in 2009, before all the frameworks and bootcamps and influencers. In those days there was still a massive focus on performance, and since bundlers weren't really a thing yet, a lot of the stuff was made in-house. I obsessed over fine-tuning the critical rendering paths of my websites, even hand-modifying SVGs so I could strip out unnecessary vector points. I went a little overboard at times.

I didn't use a JS framework (other than jQuery) until 2016, and since then, I have to admit that my mapper brain has atrophied into a packer brain. In my opinion, my industry has undergone two significant changes:

1. We've been under increasing pressure to ship as fast as possible, which encourages a packer mentality.

2. We've seen an explosion of VC-backed technologies that are impossible to keep up with.

Both of these things together make it very difficult to resist packer-behavior. For instance, when I first read about NextJS and the idea of "hydration", I felt this overwhelming sense of weariness. I could immediately imagine what they were doing at a high level, because I understand the fundamentals of web technology. But still, I also knew that in order to use NextJS effectively, I'd have to spend hours digging through their documentation to learn the nuances of their approach. At my age, I simply don't have the time or energy, especially if they're going to ditch that approach in their next version.
Exactly.

https://www.diw.de/de/diw_01.c.879742.de/publikationen/diw_a...

> People who support the AfD would suffer the most from AfD politics, in nearly every area
>I had no idea the economy was like that in Germany.

Addiction to Russian gas, over-bureaucratic system that's super inefficient with tax-money meaning most goes to waste, an ageing population hoarding all the wealth and burdening the welfare system, uncontrolled unskilled immigration further burdening the welfare system and pushing rents up, clueless boomer leaders not investing in innovation and capturing new areas of the economy, refusing to build more real-estate because environment further pushing housing up, politics based on ideology not reality, a clueless and arrogant voter base thinking everything is perfect and none of the issues above need addressing, will do that to you.

Though, that's most of Europe, not just Germany.
Because Google Cloud don't care about their customers and have zero support. Srsly educate yourself on the horror stories about businesses built on Google Cloud having their account catastrophically, irrevocably deleted with zero explanation or ability to talk to anyone about it.
They just hate him because he's not ideologically compliant.
The report they cite has a litte icon of a train in their solutions infographic section, page 89:

https://www.systemiq.earth/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Breaki...
Been using MySQL for 20 years. It’s come a long way. What I most appreciate is the replication story with galera cluster, for the last 12 it’s provided us an incredibly stable core for our production system. Few years ago we did some testing with timescale extension to postgrsql and I was very impressed with the single node scalability. We had a hard time with vacuum but I’m sure enough time we’d figure it out and it could be a great solution. In this day I think you can’t go wrong with either solution. Both have an incredible community of documentation and support.
Microsoft priorities are AI and Cloud. Priorities defines where a company put their resources and what they focus on and what they don't. People who say that they have been using Windows and it is nice/fine are the one who knows how to do a clean install and use some debloat tool from github or use gpedit to make it work for them. For other folks that are not technically inclined they will have to suffer through whatever Microsoft/OEM vendors offers. So if you really want to make it more bearable, be ready to learn about all these tools/tweaks and be ready for the next Windows update :)

NOTE: No OS is perfect and they all have their own flaws. It depends on what you can tolerate and what you cannot.
does that say more about gpt or management consulting
While acknowledging that I don't know whether I can tell the difference in every case or not, I would summarize my own preference for lossless audio in the following terms. Choosing lossy audio, my best case scenario is that I save space or bandwidth because I can't tell the difference; my worst case scenario is that I'm missing some element of the music, whether it is consciously noticeable, something I'm unaware of entirely, or perhaps something that I may only be experiencing on a somatic level that doesn't reach the level of conscious thought (I know that the possibility of this last option will be contested by some, and that's fair enough). Choosing lossless audio, my best case scenario is that I'm hearing the music in a higher fidelity, and increasing the amount I'm capable of appreciating; my worst case scenario is that I'm wasting some space or bandwidth for the reassurance. Basically, Pascal's Wager, but for audio.
Not a secret to the research community... Let me balance the hype with some of the remaining challenges.

Depth is a problem; the deeper you go, the less effective it is. Heat is another issue; you can inadvertently damage nearby tissue. Targeting accuracy is vital, especially near critical structures (think nerves), and we're not at sub-millimeter precision yet. Also, real-time monitoring like MRI-guided FUS is expensive and complicated, and without it you have to guess that you're affecting the right tissue. Great promise, but multiple engineering hurdles to clear before FUS lives up to the hype.
population growth was always been a factor in faction power.

debatable if that has changed
Your plate should be full of food from the outside edges of the grocery store. If it’s primarily full of food from the isles then you are eating wrong. There are exceptions (rice, oats etc) that are in the isles.
The giveaway for low-mid nitrate MP3 is the high hats. The lower the nitrate, the more you get a sort of temporal ghosting that sounds like an almost “crunchy” swishy sizzle sort of sound, a bit like a jazz player using brushes, but more lo fi.
I agree computer engineering is some of the least rigorous, but you're probably ultimately yelling at clouds here.
My Bolt EV has a curb weight of 3624lbs; there are examples of vehicles that could have dramatically lower impact, but it's frustrating that GM doesn't seem inclined to keep cars like this in production. (Yes, they're hinting at producing the Bolt EV in the future, it's unfortunate that they can't just keep producing the current Bolt until then)
Last mile can be resolved with drones and bikes. I wouldnt even be opposed to consider going back to horses.
Cannabis, funny enough
A lot of European countries I've been to suffer an even worse result - restaurants are legally allowed to _charge_ already paying customers to use a restroom. Coming from Canada, I can never imagine treating your patrons like that.
I think its worth repeating that "cd quality" is a term of art being used here that does not necessarily mean the audio has the quality of a cd (and, as they emphasize, in fact does not). I would dispute that any new standard has taken the helm of "cd quality" - my experience is that such a phrase is never used in describing quality of lossy compression. Most music downloads are either described by their bitrate (so that the listener is left to figure out what these mean), or by labels like "low", "medium", and "high" quality (with the listener left to distinguish whether those are accurate descriptors).
It's a cargo cult, in the sense that the apes are aware that stock market investors are able to make large amounts of money by coming up with clever theories and using smart derivative plays to make ridiculous profits... and so they follow those patterns, creating elaborate theories, buying stocks, but they miss the critical underlying component of the professional trader's version: those theories and trades are based in an actual understanding of how the market and businesses work. Lacking that understanding, ape theories are untethered and random, their trades are insanely naive, and the ridiculous profits will therefore never arrive.

It must be because the theories weren't outlandish enough, right?
You're right, it's true that 24-bit reduces the noise floor and extends the dynamic range available. However, 16-bit audio already has a range of -96db (for reference, a quiet recording studio typically has an ambient noise floor of around -60db). In practice, this is beyond the noise floor of even the very best hi-fi systems. As you turn the volume up, you will start hearing the noise floor of your equipment long before you hear the noise floor of 16-bit audio.

Unless you mean that 24-bit allows for representing audio that is stored at an extremely quiet level at the peaks, wasting most of the dynamic range. That would make more sense - but if audio is printed in such a flawed way, I would expect other quality issues to be present as well.
I hate these kinds of articles, which come off as "I read about a bunch of these things and if you don't know all the same stuff, how dare you call yourself senior". I typically see this in mid-level engineers who haven't gotten humbled by experience yet. The premise is bogus - most people are a mix of mappers and packers, rather than landing squarely on one end. And you can absolutely be a wonderful senior without knowing the details of the CPU architecture or definitions of OSI layers or whatever. This is literally contradicting itself - you must not memorize but understand the why, but also here's a list of whys you should have memorized. Ugh. How about we accept that titles are meaningless, that companies have different standards and incentives, and that as long as higher titles mean more money and clout, individuals will generally optimize for that.

And speaking of titles, it looks like the author spent a total of one year in the workforce before going on to become a cofounder/CTO and currently claims that title at four organizations simultaneously (with under ten years of experience, not that this is an indicator of much). Wonder how he feels about the CTO bar.