skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
An engineer isn't the golden ticket to run every kind of job best.

In fact I wouldn't think an airline is the kind of company that needs nor should have an engineer at the helm. They're a transportation/marketing company, not a manufacturing company.

An airline markets a flight to a public which they perform on leased or purchased third party equipment based on negotiated route pairs/airport slots in a competitive market environment.

Even their 'digital' offerings are mostly outsourced (GDS, website/app, in-flight-entertainment) as they have low core competency in that, nor do they need to.
And very seldom suffer themselves for their choices.
Looks like the execs didn't get prosecuted and it all fell to low level employees. Not really justice if the people that are still in those positions are still free.
Uhh. This is so strange. I now realise that you're not really interested in engaging attentively, you just have a bizarre fixation with fighting against fasting.

I already brought up osteopenia and the effect on the immune system two posts ago. Furthermore, they are discussed at length in 2 of the sources I linked. Yet you repeated this point as if it was something completely new. It contributed nothing to adding further context and moving this particular conversation forward. I also never brought up the CALERIE trial (which btw had an average BMI of 25 and excluded anyone abouve 28); however, I did post a source to a different trial in healthy (normal weight) people, which you didn't engage with. You actually didn't engage directly with a single point of mine.

All in all, it seems I'm just wasting my time expecting a nuanced conversation that I can learn something new from. You're just eager to repeat a memorised script.
Did that outsourcing start with the merger? OP seems to suggest so?
If you subtract Spark/Flink-related ones not really. Plenty only in comparison with Kotlin backend roles (i.e. non-existent in the Bay Area). It's very disappointing to me personally but it is what it is.
Maybe a benefit of sales layoffs will be a real pricing page! Hard to "Contact Sales" when there isn't any.
Charging Teslas with Tesla Superchargers is as streamlined as possible: just plug in. Charging non-Teslas at SCs is almost as good, you just need to tell the app which unit you're plugged into.

It's third-party chargers that are an endless source of frustration.
That is more of an issue with education around money than anything. Access to investing is more available to the average person than at any point in human history. And if not a 401k, because the employer doesn’t offer one, something else, like a Roth IRA can be used in its place.

The information is more available than ever as well, however, there are a lot of people pushing out bad information to line their own pockets, or because they just don’t know better themselves. Sorting through the BS to get to something good can be hard, and can take more work than most people are willing to do. This is rather unfortunate, as a few really basic things can put someone far ahead of the average.

I don’t think we should cripple the best option for average people, just because not everyone is using it to its full advantage. We should be looking for ways to get more people to take advantage of compounding. It’s available today and it works. Putting retirement in the hopes of a complete overhaul of society doesn’t seem like a great bet.
GPT-4-1106-preview aka turbo has 128k tokens. Are they saying GPT-4 (0613) with 32k is better than GPT-4 Turbo?
Yeah, I have a lot of friends and family in German and think their labor laws are a little extreme.

Feels like some sort of balance should be achievable?
I've been thinking about this one, but I'm not sure it makes sense. Let's say that Alaska flew half Airbus. And let's say half their 737 fleet is MAX's. (E.g. a quarter of the fleet, same number they have today.) And as time goes on, it becomes increasingly 737MAX as they upgrade to get better fuel efficiency.

How would this help them? A large % of the fleet is still grounded.
My product has the typical SPA front-end and API backend. I understand that with HTMX, those API backends would have to return HTML fragments instead of JSON data (or another server endpoint that returns HTML fragments). I have few questions with this HTMX approach:

- We don't hire full-stack developers. Our UI/UX designers and web developers fully focus on the front-end (responsive for mobile/tablet/desktop, A/B testing, quick iterations of UI/UX enhancements) without bothering about the backend. The backend API developers focus on API returning the right data and don't care about UI. I like this separation as it helps to really iterate the UI/UX faster. With HTMX, those backend devs will now have to worry about returning the correct HTML fragment based on the client device, position of the HTML div, etc. The presentation concerns spill over to backend developer and we are back to the days of server-side templates like JSP/ASP/RoR/PHP/Django. Anyone else sees issue with this approach?

- React/similar web apps can handle quite complex UI with multiple flows and navigations. I assume HTMX is probably not suited for complex UIs. Is that right? has anyone built any complex UI with HTMX?
I don’t think you can have a company both be public and ethical in the way you’re describing, at least in the US where you’ll get sued for giving some profits back to employees instead of to the shareholders, for example. Though if the company stays private, they’re subject to the “benevolent dictator” problem where the company is only ethical because the leader is. At least with a public company (or a non-profit), the CEO is subject to discipline by the board of directors.
I didn't ask to be born therefore I have no duties to you or to anyone other than myself. You accepted no duty to ensure my life was protected from harm or that it's circumstances were fair. You can talk sensibly about global reproductive control once you've ensured that everyone's life is fair and just.

Humans are animals. We individually self regulate or we would die. We collectively don't which is why we were able to make things like the internet. Other species that operate under collective terms don't either. They don't seek equilibrium, they are simply hapless victims to it.
I think this is an edge case where intuition breaks down. I'm not sure if my intuition is broke or yours.

My intuition is that, if you publish something online and let me read it, I can use that knowledge. I can NOT flat out duplicate it for others, but I can still use the knowledge. Training OpenAI is akin to me using something I read. (Hell, most of what I know I obtained this way.)

To me, the only issue is if the model is reproducing text verbatim en masse.

I think my intuition above is basically where my intuition lands for search engines too. The can use datas found on the web, and can show me snippets, but I'd draw a line at them showing me all/most of an article.
This summer I replaced a couple switches with Lutron and they’ve been very solid, in six months there’s been only twice where an automation didn’t set a state correctly and I don’t even know if I can blame Lutron.
The harder, riskier, and more expensive you make it to hire new people, the more companies will play it safe by avoiding junior hires and putting more headcount in less restrictive countries.

A few jobs ago our mobile dev team was in an EU country with significant protections against firing people. Their interview process involved a take-home problem that would have easily taken 80-100 hours, more with polish. I couldn’t believe anyone would actually do that, but they had a long line of applicants requesting to apply. They said they couldn’t risk hiring anyone who couldn’t demonstrate that they were very good because firing them would be a huge ordeal involving lawyers, months of time, and very expensive payments if it didn’t work out.
Native widgets come with a bunch of accessibility and localization features that are typically missing from naive custom widgets.

A native English speaker with normal vision might naively assume that they could reimplement a widget that's just as good as the native one in less than a week, but the result will be awful for anyone who doesn't match that description.

If you're building with web tech accessibility and localization are easier to add to a custom widget (though they do still require thought), but this is Godot, not Electron.
They self-regulate? That is bullshit, the environment regulates them.
Boeing feels interesting through this lens, too - tracking the rise and decline of American business culture
> The animal kingdom operates differently than humanity.

But probably not out of consciousness nor choice. When you study ecosystems, boom and bust cycles are quite common. Visions of "harmonious" nature are greatly exaggerated -- and BTW will get you a tongue-lashing from Werner Herzog.

When you do see an ecosystem in relative harmony, just wait a while :P Even when it seems "calm", I would not tend to attribute that dynamic to "good actors" in any anthropomorphic sense -- as in various species consciously moderating their actions.

Evolving species can face rather brutal environments. Eeeking out an existence seems to have nothing to do with long-term plans. (Aside: this is not to say there is no cooperation between species!)

Now, I'll try to state perhaps a variation of what the above comment might have meant (I'm not sure)... growing too quickly and overcommitting resources is a risky endeavor. Relentless optimization over short time frames can little to brittleness and hurt long-term adaptation.

Last thing: I've studied enough mathematics and optimization to know that it is probably non-obvious -- if not altogether impossible -- to figure out the "optimal" time horizon. Optimization is only solvable if one assumes a particular formulation of a time horizon (or probabilistic blend of time horizons).
Not the corporations, the Fed. The Fed introduces high correlation, compels outsized urgency and economic volatility, and directly sets unemployment targets.
> I asked for examples of businesses where this is not the case. Instead of examples, I got back screetching, whining and whataboutism.

Please, point out where I did any of that sort.

And I asked for an example of a system that is more ethical, and got nothing but dodging and bitching. I don't think you have any ground to stand on to demand examples (certainly from me, who if you care to read again I'm not disputing your position that business can't be ethical, so it makes zero sense to ask me for an example). It seems unreasonable to expect of others what you aren't willing to give yourself. Dare I say that's ... unethical?

If you want to complain about the real world, then offer solutions that work in the real world. We can then consider and debate them and maybe get somewhere. If you just want to make philosophical contemplations, I'm actually up for that, but not if you aren't going to even bother getting your arguments straight. You just look like a troll in that case.

Actually I changed my mind. I am disputing your contention and here is my example. Please point out where the unethical parts are.

Person a and person b are stranded on an island in the South Pacific. There are no other humans around. Person A gets pretty good at catching fish, while person b gets pretty good at harvesting coconuts. Individually, person a can catch six fish and harvest two coconuts. Person b can catch one fish and harvest eight coconuts. Person b is concerned about not getting enough protein, so they approach person a and offer to trade two coconuts for one fish. Person a Agrees, and a mutually agreeable business transaction has taken place. Both parties are better off than they were before. What part of this is unethical?

By the way, please don't take offense by any of this. You seem to have thick enough skin to trade barbs, and honestly this has been an interesting discussion (minus some unneeded name calling but that's a minor detail between friends like us)
In Ada:

with Ada.Text_IO; use Ada.Text_IO;
procedure Example is
begin
Put_Line (Float (9999999999999999.0-9999999999999998.0)'Image);
end Example;

Result:

1.00000E+00

If I really wanted to, I could use a decimal instead, e.g.

with Ada.Text_IO; use Ada.Text_IO;
procedure Example is
type Decimal is delta 1.0E-20 digits 38;
begin
Put_Line (Decimal (9999999999999999.0-9999999999999998.0)'Image);
end Example;

Result:

1.00000000000000000000
My guess is that it won't be decided by a judge and we won't find out. But maybe not if the defendants are out for blood more than money.
The bar to create animation is going to be so incredibly low in just a few years time, that the skills to have will be writing, imagination, focus, clarity, cohesion, and taste making.

Katzenberg has had a lot of flops, but he's right about this [1]. I'd even wager costs will get cut by 99.9% in ten years time.

All this to say I think you're 100% correct. Now's the time to build platforms and tools for independent animators.

[1] https://www.cartoonbrew.com/ideas-commentary/jeffrey-katzenb...
So I actually predicted that "probably next year this time there will be more layoffs" when I was laid off about this same time last year by Google. I'm just surprised that it's in the ballpark of ~1000 and not say ~5000.

The basic mindset is summed up by a bunch of Eli Goldratt books, which, y'know, don't make them into a new Bible for business or anything, but they raise better questions than the ones you started with. You, oh corporate leader, look out upon the business and reason, "Well, I'm supposed to increase profits. Profits are revenues minus costs. As for revenues, money is coming in through these pipelines, and that's governed by these deals and those contracts and that's fine, there's not much I can do about that. I've got my sales staff, they are paid on commission, that's humming along just fine. So the main thing to increase my profits must be to cut my costs. So let us engage in broad-spectrum cost-cutting to reduce headcount, reduce benefits where we think we can, tighten belts, and then we'll be running a lean, mean, production machine."

This happens especially but not exclusively when companies are either experiencing or worried about hard times and money is getting tight.

The problem is, the broad spectrum. The easiest way for me to communicate this is pure numbers. You want to think that your company has an 80/20 rule, so 20% of your employees ultimately drive 80% of your performance. You shrink headcount by 10% and you try really hard to use some objective measurements to target that on the 80% of less-performant employees, but you don't succeed fully. Maybe that 20% becomes 19.5% while the 80% becomes 70.5%, to get your 19.5% + 70.5% = 90% and you have cut 10% of headcount. Great, you did so much better than chance! And in theory your performance is only 96% of what it was, so you take that 6% and pocket it as extra profit, right? Except, wrong. The people who were fired were doing something and even if you can work out ways to cancel half of it, you still have 90% of the people doing 95% of what the company did, and this 5% inefficiency is spread across the whole company with no regard for high or low performers.

So you actually basically break even, maybe make 1% more profit but it's hard to tell. And the next cycle you have the exact same calculation. It again seems like you'll make 6% more profit by removing the 10% lowest performers, so you do it again, and you don't make the extra profit again.
You don’t need everyone, just a majority. There is no value in arguing with people who think this is sustainable.
Explain why eastdakota was so quiet in yesterday’s Cloudflare thread.
Woah there. That’s a pretty intense opinion with some pretty harsh language.

Caveman jealous instinct? Eek. How management performs is between the management and the managed. Profit is not law, it’s not a god given right. Profit is a side affect from employees generating it. If you lay people off in a poor way, you can be chastised the same way a child gets chastised for cutting in line. Our society has an obligation to ensure everyone behaves in a pro-societal manner. Not a profitable manner. We shouldn’t need government laws to tell people to treat others well.

Oh and FWIW most companies that perform layoffs tend to not see positive outcomes for the shareholders, so you’d think they’d respond if they actually acted uniformly and rationally about shareholder value.
… which is irrelevant if advice to “just stop” has no effect
1 is the same as posted there fyi
If the US strong armed Israel into a cease fire and to open the blockade on Gaza, two things the US could do if it had the political will, this would stop the Houthi's from attacking ships in the Red Sea. They claim to be fighting against nations supporting the genocide. Seems like they are rational actors even thought I disagree with their methods. Why not deescalate the situation in Gaza and kill two birds with one stone?
I don’t see what’s so difficult here.

If it’s risky to hire (because terminating is difficult, takes a long time, is riddled with red tape), then employers will be slow to do so. Less competition for employers to find workers, lower pay overall. High compensation is even risky because of the burden of having to keep employees on due to labor law compliance.

I personally believe it is better to have a robust unemployment insurance system in place that helps workers bridge the gap between jobs.
I think one thing that's different about GCP is that Google itself is such an overwhelming tenant. If you read their SDN papers, their long-distance networks are operated near 100% nameplate capacity. For Google, I don't think squeezing customer flows is free.
Two simple reasons a video like this wouldn't be circulated widely:

1. Out of respect for the dead.

2. Because they retain the option to circulate it more widely when it most benefits them politically. There's not much need right now; Israel has overwhelming mainstream support in the west, despite appearances to the contrary online.

A number of very credible news organizations have reported on the video, as has the State Department. You could bet against it, but given the cards remaining in the shoe, I wouldn't.
I think it definitely has to do with Tesla, but perhaps not much to do with Musk. Tesla's price cuts have made other EVs look expensive by comparison, which is why they're piling up on lots while Teslas are still selling well. When you read past the headline, invariably what they really mean is that "the growth rate for non-Tesla EVs is slowing." In no case, however, do they mean demand is falling -- sales are still increasing.
That doesn’t really pass the smell test. Countries with employment protections still have probation periods during which the company can fire you without hassle. For example in Germany 6 months is a common duration.

https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/probezeit

If you cannot evaluate an employee’s worth in 6 months that’s pretty problematic.
The entire point of stuxnet was to covertly sabotage the centrifuges, so it wasn't clear that they were broken until months or years later. 2 weeks isn't remotely long enough for Iran to know they were sabotaged.
Personally, I do not even acknowledge AMD exists because:

* Their naming scheme is undiluted nonsense.

* Their software is jank, which makes their hardware also jank.

* I don't have time for jank anymore; I'm an ancient geezer in his mid-thirties, not a teenager with acne and far too much time I need to waste.

* They aren't providing any meaningful competition to Nvidia nor Intel with regards to pricing.
Employees are equally free to "screw over" companies by terminating their employment at any time; at-will is a two-way street. That seems like a fair and faithful manifestation of a free market.

Health care and insurance is also available without an employer, at least in the US.
It's interesting that Disney today almost the entire profits of the company come from the parks division (which also includes cruises, resorts and "experiences"). The media division by itself is in a massive war for eyeballs with tons of other streaming competitors, all of whom are probably over-investing in content relative to what consumers can support.

One interesting possibility is that maybe the business model of media companies in the 21st century will become content as a loss leader for the purpose of providing valuable IP to amusement parks. Certainly seems like a similar thing is happening with Comcast with their massive expansion of Universal parks.
No offense, but most (ex-) Googlers have zero business / customer value sense. So, they have no weight in their opinions about how to build a $1T Business
> Basically: Switching cost are stratospheric.

I can’t resist pointing out that an airline of all businesses should be comfortable with anything stratospheric!
I'd guess they're saying that if you're in an environment where making staffing changes can be legally challenging, you might opt to keep people on a tight leash at low salaries. You could in theory I guess hire someone low comp within a box, watch them, promote them quickly, and expand their latitude if they turn out to be high preformers. I don't know much about highly regulated labor markets so no clue if this exists in reality, but I suppose it's not impossible.
Those comments are totally consistent! If you hadn't hired X employees in the first place, you wouldn't be laying them off now. And, conversely, if you can afford to lay them off now, you could have afforded not to hire them earlier.

Apart from avoiding layoffs, hiring less quickly also lets you be more intentional about quality and culture. How can you expect any real continuity in your culture if like 30%–50% of your engineers are new in any given year?
The role of McDonnell-Douglas is exaggerated. Boeing had achieved pretty close to a monopoly in the mid-1970s, but things had changed by the mid-1990s.

1. Domestic airlines protected by regulation had been effective monopolies and Boeing's engineer-led culture thrived in an environment where airlines didn't care about costs. But that environment died with airline deregulation in 1978 and an engineer-led culture made it more difficult to compete in a cost sensitive environment.

2. Airbus' rise put Boeing on the defensive for the first time in many decades. By 1996, Boeing's market share was less than twice Airbus' and falling rapidly enough that people could foresee the day when Airbus would overtake them. Although Airbus had good aircraft, their key advantage was they could sell them for lower prices than Boeing could.

3. Shareholders had become increasingly activist, quick to overthrow management when they weren't getting enough dividends and share price increases, and willing to install new management who would give them what they wanted.

Outsourcing, cost-cutting, and a move to an accountancy-led culture were the obvious responses to these challenges and Boeing's then CEO, Phil Condit, had already started the ball rolling on them before buying McDonnell-Douglas.
> “I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies,” Jobs told me: They make some great products, but then the sales and marketing people take over the company, because they are the ones who can juice up profits. “When the sales guys run the company, the product guys don’t matter so much, and a lot of them just turn off. It happened at Apple when Sculley came in, which was my fault, and it happened when Ballmer took over at Microsoft.”

https://hbr.org/2012/04/the-real-leadership-lessons-of-steve...
Given GitHub also owns npm these days, at least some of the constantly reinstalled dependencies are just getting copied from the equivalent of "next door".