skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I think a lot of these contractors operate with the mindset that customers will always be available and none of them will talk to each other or seek reference checks, but this approach suffers as the person’s reputation permeates their local industry. There are a few contractors in one niche I worked in where nearly everyone knows to avoid them, or at least to put strict oversight and micromanaging in place on their work and billing. At this point their primary audience is new startups where they can milk them for overpriced work until they catch on.

Well, did they get out of business ? No? Then by captialism the approach is great working strategy...
They seem to do great on the shock and awe, not so much on the occupation part.
Intercepting and modifying Linux system calls with ptrace
This is me as well. I’m not very good at memorizing things so I have to build a mental model of a system that I’m working in and extrapolate.

It gives me a lot of anxiety to be in that trough before it clicks.
The point isn't establishing deniability, the point is undermining the authenticity argument (these are at least subtly different I think).

It isn't actually possible to prove that the key was secure at some point in time prior to publication, publication of the key moots that discussion, which is probably going to generally be socially favorable enough of the time to be the better thing to do.
I get this is how people meet but I never liked this dynamic. Most relationships end and it can make it weird for everyone else. Wish fewer people comingled their hobbies and dating life like this.
That's a belief you have, but it isn't something that one can be "wrong" about.
It's just a label at this point, and it really means technical product owner. I'd be ok with an engineering license, because maybe then it would be clear what kind of tasks engineers should be engaging in.
just another disingenuous and petty hitpiece from people who are mad that X is outcompeting the obsolete media by lightyears

Linda didn't say the number of users were declining, she said the opposite:

regarding comments from yoel: "one of the things he talked about was... 75% decline in content posted to X, that in fact is not true... and there's many days where there's more content posted to X and that is in spite of our aggressive efforts to fight spam and bots"

its around 6:40, source:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYymRU-bfpQ

which you notice after this comment the interviewer is just a tad bit upset to hear the good news

> When Yaccarino was first asked about user metrics during the interview, she seemingly wanted to move away from that particular conversation

no she didn't she was annoyed that yoel got to talk about it for 25 minutes and said that specifically while the interviewer pushed the conversation away from it

more sources citing the increase in usage

elon saying there's 3 billion views a day on long-form posts, which he says it equal to all newspapers on earth

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1704728644269064631

news regarding MONETIZABLE daily users sitting at 245 million

https://twitter.com/xDaily/status/1707754435861008713

while total daily users are over 500 million

https://twitter.com/xDaily/status/1707755712674160757

linda says there are even over 500 million posts per day

https://twitter.com/lindayaX/status/1707855477609029879

and to swing for the fences, to add to the decrease in bots, decrease in spam, and decrease in nazi content there's been a massive push on the pedophile front to remove child sexual exploitation on the platform

https://twitter.com/xDaily/status/1669738881246273541

pre-elon there were disgusting amounts of pedophiles on twitter, and they basically went ignored for years, apparently the old moderation team like that content

free speech is here to stay and people like it
Well, most classical songs are very well compressible, because not much is going on. Punk Rock or any other music were a lot is happening, at the same time, can suffer very audible from 128 kbit lossy compression. So you can hear lossy compression better in a loud pop song than other music.
This same post links to this post by Elon Musk which shows monthly users growing: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1684978651857596429

Difficult to see how its relevance is declining when users are either declining very slowly or increasing, depending on which metric you look.
Maybe I'll burn some Internet points here but

How the computer works, from electrons to transistors, to CPU, assembly, and high-level programming languages.

How the internet/network works, how you send some information from one computer to another, all OSI 7 Layers.

Engineers who fixate on this kind of detail are useless to most businesses most of the time.

If you structure everything on reducing, and value people only on their ability to reduce, everything to first principles of how electricity works then you're wasting everyone's time.

I want senior engineers to:

Be up to date but pragmatic about patterns and solutions
Be able to, within minutes of being asked, map that knowledge to new business needs, explain that thinking across non-technical stakeholders through to junior devs
Be able to lead and execute a plan with a level of pragmatism that reflects the fact that businesses aren't playgrounds for indulging in their own fixations

If they're more worried about NAND gates then not only are they failing in their duties, the industry has failed in providing meaningful abstractions so that smart people aren't bogged down in cruft.
Well you can't make things TOO good! How else would you sell more shit to the proles?

We were (or at least I was) told in school that capitalism allowed our civilization to make and sell things we used to only dream about. And when I learned the truth, it was that capitalism was only concerned with how much to sell. If that meant making your products cheaper/worse/less durable on a creeping basis, then that's what the company did.

Capitalism itself is subject to enshittification that affects all products and services.
Prompt: "an anime girl making a peace sign and smiling. She is wearing a thick orange hoodie with the hood pulled up."

Result (x3): "Unsafe image content detected
Your image generations are not displayed because we detected unsafe content in the images based on our content policy. Please try creating again with another prompt."

The 4th attempt gave me this which is actually pretty good https://www.bing.com/images/create/an-anime-girl-making-a-pe...

the restrictions on this are pretty extreme.
> Why can't the majority of the people walk to a store and the rest can be serviced by a smaller truck?

Single-use zoning. Most people in the US live in areas where you can't walk to a store.
It's meaningful insofar as you might want to continue to receive raises etc as your experience level goes up.
Fair warning, I had serious scaling issues with Timescale.

Solutions like Grafana Mimir, Victoria Metrics, Clickhouse, or yes, the new Influx implementation, are much more scalable and will give you much fewer headaches.

ClickhouseDB is realy brilliant, btw, it's a powerhouse.
Especially with the fairly recent additions that enable hybrid local + S3 option, pushing older metrics to S3 for cheap long-term storage.
This is the kind of snake oil that double blind studies in controlled reference environments have established is snake oil.

Like for example, the fact there is an "audible" diff is meaningless. The threshold of hearing is not linear nor frequency independent. This is called "masking" and it's exploited by lossy codecs to allow for better encoding as well as audio watermarking. You can add a noise that would be perceptible by itself to content that is entirely masked by the content itself. And the reverse is true, you can remove content without it being perceptible.
The next frontier for LLMs: hall monitors
It’s standard for white papers to write equation and theories that takes effort to prove wrong and it usually is(get the lazy guys to invest), even just by skimming the few parts that the analogy to finding the right hashes is to calculate gradients does not make any sense, I just stop there.
The article describes two different learning styles and pronounces one as better than the other. Some people learn by trial and error (the "packers" I guess), and some people learn by stroking their neckbeards and thinking a lot (the "mappers").

How you learn doesn't matter -- the results you deliver do. This should be obvious in an engineering discipline. Physicists know better than to turn their noses at mechanical engineers for not studiously considering general relativity in their day to day work. Maybe the more computer science-oriented people in software should follow that example.
Presumably authors of articles holding such a view/opinion as to split people into two groups do not hold such a view/opinion as an inherent characteristic of their being.
> all titles except for the ones indicating executive or direct reports are meaningless.
Yep! That would be the predecessor to our modern TACAN systems.
I still love Go, but I think Rust is a better fit for very performance sensitive systems software like a database.
Batteries are still heavy.

For instance, the VW id.3 (small-ish EV) has a curb weight 250-450kg (550-1,000lbs) more than my wife's gasoline VW Passat, a quite spacious estate wagon.
And https://www.odditycentral.com/news/2-70-supermarket-wine-win...
Thanks for the valuable and edgy comment
I think that’s a fair question. The grass is always greener but most are thinking about Scandinavian countries or the Netherlands.

For me, climate change should also factor into this. While Germany will probably be fine temperature wise, I’m not sure if I’d considered moving to Southern Europe anymore.
I'd wait a bit, at least until end of Q1 2024 to see which place makes the most sense socioeconomically.

That said, I strongly recommend the Balkans (e.g: Serbia, Montenegro, Romania, Bulgaria, etc.) if you have a remote source of income: very safe, great people, fantastic culture, in the big cities English is widely spoken, low cost-of-living, active tech communities, and you're usually surrounded by tons of beautiful nature and again, some of the best people ever.

Not to mention, setting up your own company usually allows you to operate in a low tax/tax-optimized fashion.

For what it's worth, I've lived all over Europe (including Germany) and the Balkans really must be the best place in Europe - as long as you're earning remotely, local wages are unfortunately ridiculously low.
I get that splitting can be useful and logical in many particular situations. But when we talk about very general case like being a good engineer, it is definitely not a good way to reason.
One buzzword just wasn't enough, was it...
The article misses out on the fact that, as human beings with varying tenure, exposure and interests, all mental maps are not similar. Which makes on often misjudge another engineer' skills or abilities as purely being "packers".

Lets take the example provided by the author about `Solving a Problem`,

It is always possible, that the engineer fixing the bug might not have a lot of time to spend on it, or the fix does not need to cover all edge cases and a quick fix is good enough based on their own mental map. But to an outsider, it might seems as if the engineer has not taken ample time to `understand the root cause of the error, and which assumptions are wrong in their mental model`, which is a valid thought, but not necessarily true.
If they're that high why are you looking for a job?
"Elon Musk" is a banned phrase.
There's a paradox that if you're telling the truth in the interview, there should be no reason for someone to feel the need to question it. The story will hang together, nothing will stick out as odd, and you can get on with talking about the tech you used, the skills you have, and the fit for the new position.

If someone needs "proof" of something that you know is true, you don't need to work for them and it's likely some kind of "dance for my entertainment" rather than a genuine "I'll hire MB, but only if he can prove this one thing with paperwork."
On that note, what is the fastest way to make an app that just allows multiple signed in users to mark something on the map? I'd like to make an app that marks all public hand-pumps in India. My hope is that this would increase the hygiene in my country.
As a human, I care a lot more about humans than the other species on this planet. To be clear, I care about the other species on the planet also, but if I have an opportunity to save one human or five dolphins from a burning building...
YouTube is surprisingly unusable for indexing historical content. There used to be alternative UIs for the site but I assume Google over time killed those off while they dark patterned their own UI into being a TikTok stream of consciousness UI. I don’t mind that flavor for discovery of new content, but it is surprising that they seem to intentionally make older content inaccessible.

PBS space time is a perfect example of how badly it interferes with the quantity of the content. The episodes cross link and build on each other, but finding X episode about Y is almost impossible. You can’t apparently even search a single channels content by string.
Disagree. I know multiple providers that speak very little English. There is enough of a Chinese community here that they can work in Chinese businesses where the lack of English isn't a big handicap.
No. You can have multiple DKIM DNS records (each identified by an id called selector). Each DKIM signature includes the selector. When you change keys, you create a new DNS entry with a new selector, then change the settings of the mailserver. New mails will then be signed by the new key with the new selector. Old mails can still be verified until you delete the old DNS entry.
To be frank, when I think of Sunni Islam, I tend to think of the four canonical schools and ignore Salafi nonsense. Their influence is disproportionate to their numbers, unfortunately. It's not abnormal for them to reach strange conclusions, but I am surprised to see them do so on this particular question.

In any event, Salafis do not constitute a majority of Sunni Muslims (by far), and Sunni Islam is not a religious system that includes a clergy. Nothing on websites like IslamQA binds anyone, and people who identify as "Salafi" do not automatically or necessarily adhere to rulings in the way you seem to imagine.

And as you note, even the "scholars" and other content creators on that site, try as they might, in the end must admit it is not obligatory.

> If some segments of Islam – such as the Salafis – view having children as highly encouraged, even quasi-obligatory, then (all else being equal) those segments of Islam are going to grow faster than segments of Islam who view having children as more optional.

Leaving aside whether that's actually the case, this was not the original claim that was being disputed. The original issue was whether getting married and having kids is obligatory for Muslims, a requirement of their religion like ritual prayer, fasting during Ramadan, etc. It isn't.
Related data structure: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_array_mapped_trie
>A tiny enough dose may even serve to remind our immune system of a pathogen’s existence, boosting our antibody response to keep us protected against it.

This article should be required reading, whatever your views on Covid and other conditions.

Although the attack method of the infection is significant, and the potential victim’s defenses are significant, the raw quantity of infectious agent and the exposure rate are also both important

Nothing is certain. Everything is statistics.
I still use Firefox, I find its UI prettier than Chrome's these days... but I wish it handled many tabs better. Google's solution of squishing the tabs until only the favicons are visible seems so obviously better than the horizontal scroll with wide tabs Firefox does.
What are some Lily bugs you've encountered?
>Confounding fair criticism with “antisemitism” is absolutely pathetic.

I wouldn't say pathetic, but it is dishonest. In terms of realpolitik it makes sense. Political groups will act politically. Elon's break with the previous Twitterati regime is a political move. Of course there will be push back from opposing partisans.

It is also problematic in that it trivializes antisemitism. The worst opposition elements are empowered when identity politics warriors overstep and trivialize. To be clear, this works both ways.
We've learned a lot. We've learned that global social media needs tens of billions of dollars in funding to succeed, and the only possible alternatives are those backed by nation-states.

I know we'd love to believe that a bunch of geeks with $5 Digital Ocean droplets running Mastodon can disrupt this reality, but that's just not happening outside of a very niche market.
I think you are on to something. When I started coding in 1980 you really had to figure things out and what you coded was your code, you wrote every bit of it. Why, because we didn't have Stackoverflow, Github or Google to help us out t best we had a friend who also liked to code and they might help you but it was still all you. Now coding seems a lot more like cutting and pasting of someone else's code and making it work for you, so much of the heavy lifting has been done by someone els, the equivalent of knowing how to drive vs knowing how to build the car that you are driving. As you said now being a programmer is where the money is, I can assure you that making big dollars was on nobodies mind in the '80's. If anything being a programmer back then was anti-social, something that people would make fun of you over not something that was praised now every unemployed idiot is encouraged to "learn to program". You did it because it was something that interested you, you enjoyed it and to be quiet frank unless you wanted to be a Cobal or PL1 programmer there weren't a lot of jobs out there certainly not for the PC.

So you've gone from a group of people that got into programming because it peaked their interest and their hobby became their occupation to a group of people who look at programming as a way to make a lot of money. I'm not saying these people aren't talented and don't enjoy what they do I just think they are coming from a different angle than us grey beards. I also think the real problem is figuring something out on your own is no longer a thing, if there's a problem you go straight to google for the answer and while efficient it screws with the learning process and it reduces new and novel ideas.
So you're saying that the splitters are split into two groups? One group which knows when it's a good time to split, and the other group which doesn't?,
I don't know why, but I just love seeing jailbreaks where the input/output isn't just plain text.
> But what else do we have these days? Safari?

Safari in WSL

Edge Linux :P

I just run Degoogled Chromium forks (Cromite/Thorium) these days. Maybe its still Chrome underneath, but if I'm blocking Google Ads and their native browser tracking, at least its still a middle finger to Google's business model.
And changing to mixed-use zoning- that is the number one issue in fixing our transport system
Food Delivery Robots Are Feeding Camera Footage to the LAPD, Emails Show
Oh my I wasn't aware of that interview with Linda Yaccarino from Code 2023: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYymRU-bfpQ

Yes, they threw her a curveball by having Yoel on before, but still, that's just painful.
Why is an aging population an issue? Labour participation and productivity is up over the decades, society can produce more than enough widgets to keep everyone comfortable, despite the aging population causing a regression-to-historic-mean in labour participation.
I guess this also creates valuable learning material, when people iterate through different prompts to get the results they want and seeing which alternative they pick.
Well the War in Ukraine isn't over and the USA/West doesn't seem to have the will or resolve to help Ukraine win and any help is purely defensive. As the world has seen, Russia has a disregard for life and a willingness to destroy the civilian population without any kind of conscience. They can simply use this same formula on Europe and perhaps that is why the Baltic's who have a large Russian population already, are afraid.

Lets not forget what happened with the USA/NATO in Afghanistan where a a stronger force with powerful modern weapons was defeated.

Hope I'm full of shit and wrong but I don't have a lot of faith in the USA/West and their resolve and capability when faced with a formidable foe.
I could have $20M in the bank and there's a very high chance that I'd go apply for a SWE-3 level position somewhere in retirement.

In this context "kind of high" might be only a couple of million in profits. Enough to not want people to know, but not enough to retire on.
I asked it for “A hand with the correct number of fingers”, and it got it right, in three out of four of the returned images!
Can you elaborate on "within minutes of being asked"? Is "I need a few hours to chew on this" unacceptable?
Also gotta recommend Burden of Dreams, the making of Fitzcarraldo, which is arguably an even crazier story
I'm similar. It takes me longer to get comfortable than others because it has to join up for me. It has been observed by many that I seem slow to get started on things.

Others seem to be happy taking snippets of stuff and just applying them straight away. But equally, they have not developed a deeper understanding and they will struggle when faced with edge cases. Pros and cons I guess.
Really? Having been in those places that's like going from bad to worse.
While one can bring a lot of nuance to the conversation, most imperative languages do not have the &/&mut separation that Rust does and are therefore bad. &/&mut is basically essential to writing correct code in an imperative language.
The problem is on assuming the groups are static.

The first group has been bad at writing articles up to now. That just doesn't tell you anything about what their next article will look up.
Pumping out children is ... noble? How?
I mean, this is basically the author of this post :-)
I completely quit Twitter in the last month for 3 reasons:

- the « my feed » tab (or whatever it’s called) is filled with Elon’s tweets. Wtf? It’s not like he’s that interesting

- their new logo with the marble effect is cringe, every time I went to open it, I decided not to instead because it’s not attractive to me. The new name is cringe too, and no one seems willing to adopt it

- and finally the last step that made me uninstall it for good is Musk’s recent stances in politics (he’s clearly pro Russian and there’s no way I’ll believe the starlink debacle in Ukraine was not directly linked to Musk and Putin ; now he has a word to say on how European countries manage the migrant crisis). He’s an asshole and I don’t think I can trust anything linked to him, including Twitter, ever again
To be fair, we didn't drop everything and do a rewrite. Over the last 3.5 years (the length of time for this project), our total engineering team has ranged from 50-90 people. For the first year it was me and two other people. Then for the 2 years following that it was 9 people total.

It wasn't until late last year that we made the decision to go all in on the rewrite and made that the focus of everyone in engineering. And we did that because we had 4 years of experience trying to get v2 and Flux to be successful, with modest results.

Most of the time we were developing this version, we were spending massively more engineering effort on developing v2 or maintaining v1 for our customers.
You can just tell them that.

"That is not the type of jobs we usually do, and if we did we'd have to use a lot of time to build competency in the problem and that would've costed you a lot. You'd be better off trying X or Y contractor, that's closer to their wheelhouse"

And as a bonus you'd still be considered for future work that's not that rather than being filed under "those are those super expensive guys we can't afford"