skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The easiest way to follow this advice is to take it to its logical conclusion and just offer your services on a contracting basis, as a single member LLC or a small partnership. At this point in the US tech industry the relationship between employers and FTEs is so tenuous that there isn’t much difference between the two legal arrangements in terms stability. I’ve kept my best clients much, much longer than my longest tenured FTE jobs.

And there are lots of benefits to being independent legally. Tax benefits aside, the pay is usually much higher, and you can/should take on multiple clients simultaneously. This leaves you less exposed to the whims of a single C-suite, and lets you stack up silly amounts of money when times are good.
Lazy question, sorry briefly skimmed the PDF and this doesn’t do this, but hypothetically could one design a PDF file generator technique the produces a spec compliant file that uses this technique to chain load another arbitrary base64 encoded binary stored inside the PDF. Maybe someone has already done that.
Feels to me like tech companies saw how successful their late 2022/early 2023 layoffs were and decided to make it an annual thing.
Are you saying Japan is lacking accurate birth/death tracking?
People aren’t passing you through a filter because you are brash and undiplomatic and “unaligned”, it’s because your communication style is borderline incomprehensible.
Kudos to Futurism for mentioning that it's about 10% of the translators, in the first paragraph even. Several others didn't, and it sort of sounded like "the translators are being replaced by AI", rather different.
Also discussed at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38933315
> Don't like Bitcoin's Proof of work properties, check out Ethereum.

Ethereum's move to a Proof-of-Stake system was the best thing to happen to the cryptocurrency world, from an ecological point of view; however, that does not change anything about Bitcoin's energy consumption.

Someone who objects to Bitcoin due to its excessive energy use will not stop disliking Bitcoin just because an unrelated cryptocurrency became better.
I don't know much about the margins and volumes of this sort of industrial equipment, but, are they so low that nobody can hire a skilled team of software engineers to write proper code for this stuff?

The UX is always trash, the security is non-existent, the smart-components are always low-spec and low quality (displays?). Is adding £5, £10, £100 to the cost of a unit to do it right going to hurt _that_ much?

Genuinely, I don't understand. Surely one of these things costs at least 5 figures and are bought in multiples of tens or hundreds?
This has long been true to some degree when you work with people scattered around the world. But it's a legit concern that, overall, we're probably developing much shallower relationships with the people we work with compared to when we were together in-person more of the time. Doubtless there are people who prefer just tuning out co-workers as much as possible. But it's reasonable to ask how it will affect many companies in the longer run when many co-worker relationships are very surface compared to pre-COVID.
Most "leetcode" questions they ask are just easy level programming puzzles. The fact that many developers seem to hate it and even struggle with it says more about the developers applying than it does about Google.
Is anyone controlling for how much people smoke today vs in the 70s, quantity-wise? Strength is relatively meaningless on its own, except for first timers who might get caught out. Our baseline genetic tolerance hasn't changed since the 70s.

People generally take/drink/smoke as much as it takes to get to where they want to be. I might drink a 0.5L of beer, or I might have a shot of liquor, but I won't have 0.5L of vodka because I'm a thinking human being who realizes that vodka is much stronger than beer. Ditto for low potency 70s cannabis vs fancy 90% extracts today.
But this also means that they know your plaintext password, meaning that they're saving passwords in plaintext. Given that this is mostly a technical community, it's much more the risk of keeping a database of plaintext passwords than the benefit of being able to obfuscate passwords in comments.

EDIT: thanks to another commenter, I understood that what's happening in the above comments is just a meme and HN isn't storing plaintext passwords. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
Investors want more money
> Evil manager from hell: nope, you can still reconfigure the <thing> to use telnet.

Possible reply for some folks: our cyber-insurance mandates encryption for all logins.
https://github.com/erlang/otp/blob/adf0d2204215c12a03188f5d5...
Even if they didn't get internal discount, there's no way they pay retail as in advertised prices. At that size AWS itself would likely want bandwidth commitment for a longer period too.
Understanding the impact of organised gang attacks in Ecuador
Nothing FUD about highly respected engineers I know personally getting fired when the company is immensely profitable. The FUD is created by Google’s senior leadership.
> This event requires a media analysis.

This event requires a rethinking of responsabilities and the power structure in the Post Office (but probably in all external goal oriented orgs). What a media analysis, in all its sloppiness, will do is make people believe there's a format for exposing scandals that can be used at will.
Layoffs that don't target whole teams are always a mix of politics and performance. The lie that they aren't is what people tell themselves to feel better.
You can disable the option on phones to auto capitalize.

Again, my observation here is not that "TVs should stay grayscale" but that this lowercase movement is now being used to "fight the AI generated content" which I find pretty funny because it makes no sense. You can tell ChatGPT to write in lowercase.

It especially got traction after @sama's tweet that had no intention to associate it with non-GPT content, but just weirdly flexed that he types in lowercase.
I can assume that a wider and deeper understanding of how software works would have meant that the investigations would have demanded a more thorough accounting of how the software worked, evidence provided by the system that it's calculations were correct (an audit trail) and that these questions would be asked at every juncture whenever the issue was raised to a new body or party.

As can be seen by following the story, this wasn't the case. The only evidence provided in criminal cases was essentially a witness statement saying that the system was working correctly and that was the end of it.
> The sweet victory against the no coiners.

This fight only exists in your head.
Are layoffs becoming an annual thing in tech now? Last year there was the "macroeconomic conditions" excuse that every company used. How are they justifying this round?
Why did the biggest ape go extinct?
It could be better than conventional controls at low speed, dependign on how strong the pressurized air jets are. A bit like reaction control thrusters on a spacecraft?

I wouldn't be surprised if there are even control forces at zero airspeed, with just the air jets acting like reaction control thrusters.

Or it might be more like active boundary layer control, just nudging the passing air stream one way or the other with the air jets.
Sure, but the product was incredibly well marketed, designed and implemented with just those original 13 employees and sold for $1 billion.

Those features you’ve listed were added in the 11 odd years since. I think that the original set of employees could have implemented every aspect of the application since the date of sale!
> has to be weighed up against the indirect downsides

Renumeration is directly measurable (and I think directly attribute to sustained investment in the industry, notably VCs), while the indirect downsides are just harder to pinpoint how and why they arise. e.g. low quality code bases ... I've seen that in all types of organizations, I've also seen very high quality code in VC-funded startups.
A nerd finds a talking frog by a pond. The frog says, "Hey, I'm not really a frog. I'm a beautiful princess, and if you kiss me, I'll turn back into a princess, and I'll grant you one wish."

The nerd thinks for a moment, then puts the frog in his pocket and continues walking.

The frog says, "Aren't you going to kiss me and make a wish?"

The nerd replies, "Nah, I'd rather have a talking frog."
The over 150-year mystery of why urine is yellow has been cracked: study
The Docker team is now considering a flatpak: https://github.com/docker/roadmap/issues/593#issuecomment-18...
E-Nose Sniffs Out Coffee Varieties Nearly Perfectly
There are many ways of counting in Japanese, such as a counting system based on shape, or people, or numbers.

numbers: ichi, ni, san, ....

or hitotsu, futatsu, mittsu,

people: hitori, futari, nin ..

Or by shape:
hon (thin objects), ko (small round objects), mai (flat objects).
The Docker team is now considering a flatpak. Please upvote. https://github.com/docker/roadmap/issues/593#issuecomment-18...
Why Would I Buy This Useless, Evil Thing?
The Magic of the Blackboard
I think it's safe to say we are on the downward slop of peak Google.
Check out: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kQeDnFUNW-Q

And gate starts at 4:49.
Or gate starts at 6:27.
The trick is to make some gears not stationary, moving along as other gears push them.
Flip flop represented as a stick is genius, should be obvious, but looking at at a level of electronics, isn't. IMHO that is stepping back/out of the box thinking.

A flip flop is a circuit whose design only exists because electric on its own can't be held in a fixed representational state, whereas a stick obviously can!
Because it also happens to be the best talent pool. And because US happens to be the market that every company dreams to dominate.
Scheduling takes the fun out of free time (2016)
Gonna be a long tunnel, and what will be at the other side?
You can start out by presuming they have reasons to choose a difficult path. Probably it’s anxiety inducing so they aren’t forthright about it but it’s not necessarily the wrong decision from their point of view. If you have the chance you could ask them what they perceive the financial picture looks like going forward.

To generalize without knowing your situation, right now people feel that no financing is coming for a long time if ever again unless you are a top quality company. So getting disciplined on cash flow positivity may be their focus for good reasons.
but apparently the snake charger or the quick battery change infrastructure or the robotaxis... never came to fruition.
Show HN: Auth and analytics for your Custom GPT
> People came to assume that a total comp >$100k is a norm, but it's really not….
Microsoft makes a shitload of money

Who should receive the shitload of money that these companies make?
How is this a decent gesture ? Any employer with visibility and cash flow wants to hire engineers. Do you think employers are doing workers a favor and being so nice and humane when they go out of their way and give us poor peons a chance at a job ?
> my experience sets me apart from anyone under 35 in tech

great to hear. It's nice to hear experienced practitioners speak with confidence about their future prospects. The doom&gloom you read a lot about agism etc.. are scary.
> the simple MFA story invites blaming people (invariably called 'users' when doing this)

It's littered with this stuff, but here's one example of silliness. People aren't called users when blaming people. They're called users because they use the software. There's no need to invent perjoratives to make interesting a simple article that restates a known problem. Just state it simply. Or better - get to the point of realising the root problem of this problem, which is also known, and suggest something novel in that regard.
I've been interviewing people for Software Eng jobs for more than 10 years an I haven't used leetcode style problems for like 8 of those years.

Leetcode interviewing is lazy interviewing. It's for when you don't want to put an effort in your interviewing process to check if the candidates have the skills you need for the position you are filling.

For example. My interview process nowadays is one web API interaction challenge: Https://challenge.bax-dev.com (in Spanish, so you may have to do a Google translate. Use with curl)

In that untimed challenge the candidate submits their code and email. They arrive to my email and I check the code quality of submissions with my morning coffee.

Then in the ONLY 90 minutes Interview with me, we talk 30 mins about experience in their resume, 30 mins about our company and the position, and we code the "server" side to the web client they created .

We do it pair programming style. The questions I achieve to answer are: would I pair program with thus guy? (Like, is she cool to work with?) And does she know what she is doing?

I've had very good results with this method.

And, from the code exercises I am sure anyone can guess what skills am I looking for.

There was a great circlejerk on reddit in one of the outages where people asked whither Google engineers have inverted enough binary trees to bring their systems online. Basically saying that the skills they hire for are for Algirithm competitions, not for building enterprise software.

And I say this as a CompSci PhD who did his good share of data structure and algorithms during my time in academia.
I have a custom GPT for telling my 3 year old bedtime stories. It's super cute to listen to the two of them collaborate back and forth where my kid will add new characters (friends from school, or stuffed animals) and new wacky twists to their adventures, and the storyteller GPT will come up with a new revised version.

It would be pretty rad if she could just have the app on her tablet with a family plan. She doesn't use it quite enough to justify getting her own subscription, but especially if we could share GPTs across devices, so she gets the ones I make for her, but doesn't get flooded with my work or research related GPTs.
Where did you read this and why did you believe it? There is no technical reason this is true of course, for many reasons, including that many of the earliest coins are clones of bitcoin.

Are you copying some talking points or can you explain on a fundamental level why you believe this?
The last snapshot in the Wayback Machine seems to be from 19 Jul 2023: http://web.archive.org/web/20230719193319/http://www.bash.or...
I don’t understand how the population can boom that much when the existing population is unable to feed itself and relies on foreign aid. Sounds like a humanitarian disaster in the making
If thee crew is this easily rattled, how come we trust their communication skills so much?

I see your point, but I think that the rate of false positives can be tuned to be very low, with a good design of the system.

In the rare event of a false positive, it’s still extremely unlikely that this will cause any more disruption than the co-pilot pushing a button and double checking with the tower.
I learned of this one in year 2016: https://nathanfriend.io/inspiral-web/
If it's a matter of tracking, it could still be done using a simple connector and some kind of base station. Presumably these things have batteries that need to be charged, so they need to be returned to some central location and connect by copper wires periodically one way or another. They don't need network connectivity to accomplish this.
Maybe fix the part where Americans rightfully have zero trust in their “health care” system first.
The 17% who don’t use outlook email all their data to the 83% who do use outlook on a daily basis. MSFT has it all.
Part of the problem is that techy people, or justice-minded people, love the detail of just how awful something is. I've been boring my friends to death for years over this scandal.

By comparison, this drama was only a few hours long, was aired while people were still in a holiday/relaxing mood after Xmas and New Year, and spun a compelling narrative about the people and communities affected. It had much clearer "goodies" and "baddies" (without being unfair). So it deserves credit in reigniting interest in the scandal.
Fast-Servers
Pretty sure most companies use different pricing internally for stuff like this?
Maybe Twitch and others have finally moved to the "later" phase of the "grow first and make money later" strategy.
Why do you assume they pay sticker price for IVS, if they even use that?
I get the argument, but the networks seem to be operating quite inefficiently anyway. They have been given a tonne of spectrum over the years and yet they don't tend to address areas of concern over coverage. They could put in more small cells to improve coverage, but they just want to maximise the utilisation their wide area coverage frequencies. I live in an area where you'd expect fantastic coverage, close to a globally significant city and yet not too dense population. A 5G speed test will often get you DSL speeds. Leaving a few channels, or even allocating guard bands to low power 3G seems like it won't significantly impact the networks and at worse inspire them to invest better in their networks. Scarcity drives innovation afterall.
This is why the logical conclusion of this culture change is for anyone who can to move toward independent contracting. Like I mentioned in a different comment, I’ve had my best clients longer than any single job. But for the ones that didn’t work out, no one bats an eye at a 3 month contract.
I mean, yeah, of course if you eat less than your body needs, you will lose weight, nobody is denying that. You can lose weight drinking only coca cola every day. Now, how _easy_ that would be, how much hunger one would feel, the effect on health, mental health, energy, what the rebound is after the diet is done etc., that's a completely different discussion. And another discussion is how much the weight loss is sustainable/maintainable in the long term.

So yeah, in a vacuum, with a perfectly spherical cow, it's not that far off.
Hooray, the Scunthorpe Problem[0]!

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem
Yes, it is this one:

<erno> hm. I've lost a machine.. literally _lost_. it responds to ping, it works completely, I just can't figure out where in my apartment it is.

Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20230610235249/http://bash.org/?5...
Why? South Sudan has also been recognised. Why is Somaliland different? From what I understand, it's been operating independently from Somalia for decades and stayed out of the civil war that wrecked Somalia.
Wow... This all seems a bit cherry-picked...

- The google metric doesn't make sense. In fact, the graph tells sort of the opposite story. Revenue per employee shot up and then they did layoffs in response... huh? My guess is that this graph is missing the forecasts that are being used to make these decisions. Google likely has a similar chart, but one that goes out 5-10 years and is showing a concerning trend (that was certainly the case when I worked there).

- Austerity is a government thing. I'm not connecting the dots between deficit reduction and corporate layoffs...

- I thought the money supply calculations changed recently which is why the metric shot up in recent years.

- How are you getting Microsoft was rewarded with 9.8M per employee for their "layoffs?" They cut 10k people, so wouldn't this mean if they had laid off 1 person, they would have earned 98B per layoff? This metric doesn't make sense.

- The "other CEO" you link to runs a company with 200 employees. I'm not sure this is comparable to a company the size of Google.
I contacted a real live accountant a few years ago and was not impressed. I needed help implementing nanny tax for the first time. I wanted a one stop shop that would reduce it to just signatures for me. Instead it was more work than doing it myself and I wasn’t confident in the end result.
Yeah I can see how the more tied you are the more exposure you would have, especially for very frequent / long running tasks and etc.

My exposure is increasing, but it's still intermittent / not stuff ongoing all the time and if it doesn't work ... oh well it will run later when it does. So the impact is lower than some.
It’s still macro.

The media has been peddling the idea that things are rosy economically but that’s not people are seeing and experiencing. December’s CPI is through the roof. The economy has been soft and with ZIRP gone, things are adjusting accordingly.

We’re now paying the piper —a little.
You can combine both.
If you don't want to be laid off, don't get hired. It's just part of the process. Or get a government job. I hear people can last dozens of years in those.
> It can't be that a genuine issue has filtered into the public consciousness via a dramatised TV show.

Strongly disagree, for examples: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17820571.amp

(also one underestimates the sheer presence of Toby Jones at one’s peril)
Sure, that's because a good piece of jewelry shares the same property of a good money: its scarcity. Gold was introduced to humanity as an ornament, but eventually humans discovered a better use for it.
The other complication was that a change in the law was made to assume computer systems were correct by default due to the problems with the existing law around breathalysers and speed cameras:

"In 1997 the Law Commission published a paper which went into some detail about the use of mechanical and computer evidence in court. It seemed a little too fixated with the effective workings of speedometers, traffic lights and breathalysing devices called ‘Intoximeters.’ It concluded that the present law is ‘unsatisfactory’ because of the necessity for prosecutors to ‘prove that the computer is reliable.’"[0]

The amended law changed the burden of proof from the prosecution proving the system functioned correctly to the defence proving it didn't, without access to the systems being used to prosecute them.

[0]: The Great Post Office Scandal, Nick Wallis
Russia is also a real country
Second-Chance Pool:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308
Kernel Connection Multiplexor
Cannot be gamed? C'mon now... You could pay a bunch of people to vote for your model in the arena.
US companies and Chinese experts engaged in secret diplomacy on AI safety
This might still be useful in the real world. Think movie industry, where having a mock OS for showing characters doing computer things is practically a trope in its own right. I was recently in a discussion with some fans of the movie Hackers, in which one of them asked what OS they used in the movie. My reply was to the effect of, what every movie in the 90s used, which was basically Mac OS with fake UI elements cobbled together in Macromedia Director (or Flash in later films).

With film studios increasingly turning to game engines for applications like providing real-time on-set CG as a reference for a shoot, something like this may well be the modern version of that.
https://archive.ph/B9ztq
Telnet will still work. So if you're developing an embedded device that will keep functioning after 20 years, it's best to not use any crypto at all. I'm half joking here.
FYI: The linked video is Smarter Every Day dunking on NASA, Boeing, ULA, the pork barrel, and all that kind of stuff in-front of a bunch of big names in the space industry for around an hour.

It's a tough watch with some hairy moments, however really well captures the kind of culture and environment that led to the somewhat dire and/or depressing state of space exploration that we are at today.

Even the infrequent successes like Curiosity were billions (with a 'B') over-budget and years delayed.
> The only evidence provided in criminal cases was essentially a witness statement saying that the system was working correctly and that was the end of it.

I'm not saying it wasn't. You're assuming a blind faith in all IT is the cause of this witness' belief. I'm disagreeing with you there.