skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's so cool to see someone actually try to build their silly daydream.

When I was about 12, in the early 1980's when consumer VCR's were hot "new" tech, I imagined building a giant purely mechanical (except for I/O) VCR. The thing I imagined was huge - it was about 50ft wide x 100ft long x 50ft tall and would have used tape about 6 feet wide. The size was apparently due to the limitations of mechanical modulation of permanent magnets used to record and the bandwidth required to record video. Don't ask me how playback was supposed to work with passive magnets but I think the idea was very sensitive paramagnetic heads amplified mechanically by some absurd degree. There was lots of mechanical differential signal processing in this idea.

This wasn't some passing daydream. Over at least six months I became increasingly obsessed with the idea of figuring out if it was even possible to build though I never had any intentions of actually building it. What I was obsessed with is figuring out how or if you could build such an outrageously impractical device.
Neither this round of layoffs at Google nor the last had any association with performance as far as anyone can tell.

Strong performers from the teams around have been laid off, and people who really need to be gone have not.
The deficit hawks have routinely included legislation that included automatic ways to reduce the US deficit to be implemented at a future point in time, when hopefully Congress has sorted out whether or not such a thing is actually desirable. It's essentially a budget Sword of Damocles.

Of course, Congressional budget negotiations have been an unproductive circus show for a while, so this never actually happened and the thing that was never actually intended to go in place went in effect. With the current razor-thin majority in the House constantly getting derailed over budget negotiations, this is unlikely to resolve any time soon.
Right, the topic "Extreme PC Gaming" - PC - PC - PC - yeah just for you spelled again PC - is extremely misleading - next time they should include "Not Overpriced" that people like you know their beloved Hardware isnt meant.
and w3m has w3m-img if you want to get just one step more graphical while still being fundamentally a tui (it does terminal/character cell layout, then uses the WINDOWID to stuff images on the terminal screen. Probably the kind of thing wayland doesn't allow? :-)
I always appreciate Siracusa's approach to laying out his thought process. Great article, thanks for sharing it.
Heh, I cancelled my newspaper sub once they went hard-paywall. I was happy to support the freeloaders but not once they axed them.

Made for a confusing desub call.

I’m sure they’ll come out ahead but at least I know I hurt their user-hostile project’s ROI a bit.
In some way, unrelated to the topic, I became too concerned to have a consent pop-up without the "Reject All" being clearly the default CTA. Having both buttons marked as "primary" makes it easy to trick the user to choose "Accept" by mistake.

Another place where I encounter this behavior is the pop-ups shown by web browsers for sites asking for special, sometimes weird [1], permission like "location" which took me about five seconds to make sure I pick the "Block" button.

I hope this sort of behavior gets regulated by the corresponding authorities.

1. I once hear a youtuber say: Why on earth a wallpaper app needs to access my and manage my phone calls?!
> The article's claim that AI is responsible for a shrinking job market is tenuous at best.

It serves its purpose as a clickbait
I didn't miss it ;)

Just because it had a good in-universe reason didn't stop it being grating.
On topics like this there are always "why don't they just do this" comments as if nobody in one of the most safety-minded has thought of it yet. I collect them in my HN favorites. Also there is a lot of safety that comes from not being too reactionary and adding complexity anytime someone has an idea. I think it's better to ask something like "does the industry use or plan to use any automation for this?"
I do use the IMDB recommender but is rarely my first choice. I'm not entirely disconnected from recommendations, but I do take my time to pick what to see (by reading some critics you can also get related content). If it's something interesting and maybe not so similar to something that I've recently seen I consider watching it. I guess that at some point yes, you need to have some source where to pick things from. With music sometimes can get easier, you listen a band then learn that maybe a guitarist or bassist is now part of another project (or has been in a past band). Going to Wikipedia and starting with a band you're interested in you can get a ton of new music this way. Other times simply if you're listening something you like you can use Shazam.
All big companies do this, even ones that have a supposed "freeze."
This article has some good points but suffers from rosy retrospection where it seems to think the Internet wasn't wildly full of misinformation before LLMs and AI articles. The sad fact is LLM's now are often more articulate and more accurate than an unfortunately large percentage of actual people posting on the Internet. Google has always had inaccuracies and is constantly tweaking their search algorithm and ranking system. Google giving you inaccurate results on a couple edge cases is not proof positive Internet is full of AI "Dogshit". Issues with Google is a Google problem not an AI Internet content problem.
(D'oh, looks like the submission title auto-populated to the link title rather than the submitted title. Just to clarify, this is a survey asking for your thoughts, not an article about your thoughts!)
The change was part of the trump tax bill, which at least needed to be able to claim that it was revenue-neutral after 10 years to be able to be passed through the budget reconciliation process.
What do you write your step functions in? Are you using ASL or something that compiles to it?
> […]thanks to the early lead the company has taken in generative artificial intelligence through an investment in ChatGPT-maker OpenAI.
>Hard to say if BigHead style devs are being affected here. Annual review ratings aren't quite yet finalized

They aren't yet finalized, but pretty damn close. Don't you think this probably plays into it? VPs were likely told 'put 6% of your engineers below 'meets expectations', and some VPs probably thought about it and said "actually we have a really weak division, i'd rather axe that, than taking a 6% haircut across the board.

It makes sense, if you have a few teams of rockstars, a division of 'meh', and one weak director that has hired a few weaker managers who also hires weaker engineers, why give everyone the same PiP quota?
Greatest book I've ever read
Seems the status page is down as well?

edit: Actually seems Codeberg is down too!
Factorio has a mod where you can program electricity circuits using assembly, I forgot the name. You place a "computer facility", connect to the signal network, then open a terminal to start programming.

It's pretty cool because factories can be very complex, giving it real utility. And you can communicate over the wire with fair sophistication using items as signal symbols. The clock speed of the devices was limited to a few instructions per game tick.
Linux 6.8 Continues Work for Clearing the Sysctl Sentinel Bloat
No they definitely aren’t wrong at this time. Don’t know that it requires an ad campaign though.
I'm doing the same thing. I build database of links I find interesting.

For example.
https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database
I've seen this too. With recent versions nonetheless.
The problem in Academia is that its too crowded. With crowding, in many fields, the de facto way to progress has become to play corridor and department politics. I know completely clueless and incompetent researchers that made an effortless transition to faculty positions at top 10 universities, whereas some great postdocs were stuck forever, burnt out, and left. Ironically, some of said postdocs did the work the others took credit for in order to be promoted.

Some fields are more prone to this kind of behavior and power structures than others. Plus, in the past, it was much easier for recent PhD graduates to progress to tenure-track positions, without needing to do a postdoc (or many!) in between.

Actually, some countries have established regulations to try to prevent postdoc abuse, as faculty is typically interested in getting them to do all work, giving them little credit, etc. Some of my postdoc friends were supervising students, designing studies, and writing grants but their names were never officially on paper! Their PI used this as a way to getting them trapped. Without e.g. supervision experience, they would not be able to move to tenure-track positions, thereby getting stuck with him (as cheap labor) forever.
Sounds like we are in a similar boat :-/
This is required by law in the eurozone and has been for some years now.

Users must be able to get their own data exported, in some useful format.
> link you're referring to only goes to next year, whereas the infamous pessimistic graphs tried to extrapolate for around a decade

This CleanTechnica article references the short-term energy outlook. The context is near-term forecasts.

> capitulation would count as an adjustment

What else would it be?
It is, but it will get you banned.

Has no one else noticed the rise of censorship evading slang among zoomers? Eg saying "unalive" instead of "kill". I remember there was a big file with a bunch of these for chinese youth I found fascinating some 15 years ago. And now we have to do it too.
I'm wondering if by "layoff season" you mean the first quarter, or the entire last 2 years?

January of last year had more than twice as many layoffs as any other month of the year, and the first quarter of '23 had nearly twice as many layoffs as the rest of the year combined. Not sure if we'll see the same trend this year, but it does seem like there have been an uncharacteristic number of layoffs this month already.
Yeah, we require a shift in the system that kneecapped nuclear energy through pointless regulation.
I see a parallel to short vs long term thinking here that applies to R&D.

When quarterly results are the priority, innovation is stifled but what's insidious is that this only becomes evident over a long time span.
Content (even the garbage that most of it is) is expensive, don't expect more, quality content, they're just making you pay for more of the existing costs.
They also price gouge by charging each job you run as per minute rounded up.

So if you have 5 10 second actions that run when a PR is created, that 50 seconds of compute is charged as 5 minutes.
Right now, most container sea traffic is going around Cape Horn rather than risking the Red Sea. China is working on the Belt and Road scheme to move container traffic from China to Europe to rail.
Are you insinuating that the workers (or the public) have the ability to self-determine through share ownership? You are aware that Alphabet stock is split, with the class B shares being owned by the founders, right?
Information takes time to disseminate to people. I think the transition happened "as fast as it could" given that people tend to oppose change, have a hard time understand scientific results and science takes a long time anyhow.

If anything I would say "we should educate more people". Because that is the only thing that might prevent the next "we shouldn't have waited..." (for any of the problems that we could solve, but people just don't think/understand them - like antibiotic microbial resistance and other topics)
yeah, and google cloud is hiring. They're winding down teams in non profitable areas.

I wish they were a little more strategic, but this time they are allowing affected team members to keep corporate access and apply internally to open roles.
A relevant parody, "The front fell off"

https://youtu.be/3m5qxZm_JqM
Being 'fair' helps company relationships with current and future employees.
we use this feature in Supabase, works great.
Before I left academia, I felt that I would be a terrible failure. The people I was surrounded by looked at leaving the academy as a sad admission of defeat. In retrospect, I think this was largely a reflection of their own insecurity and lack of perspective because most had never been outside of the academic bubble.

Life on the outside is different. Having been gone over a decade, there are some things I miss and that are definitely hard to find in other environments. On the other hand, I feel immeasurably better about myself not having to beg to toil away on projects of questionable significance that happen to have funding and be stuck in the precarity of borderline poverty in the service of supposedly higher ideals.
"Typo"? … whoever is creating these polygons surely isn't punching in coordinates by hand … right? I mean there are websites that can do this graphically a Google query away, not to mention professional tooling…

And the warrant was approved? That says the judge didn't read¹ the warrant, and "trust us our GeoJSON is chefs kiss" counts as not reading.

(¹i.e., render: if you're not reading the information in a format that's going to make sense, you're not reading it. I.e., reading for comprehension here requires rendering.)
How do Apple, Netflix, Amazon, etc manage this without fucking up as colossally as Google?
Have you heard of AppImage?
in this case, Facebook is navigating this by giving 5 months of severance,
in excess of what the WARN act requires.
Companies only have a single mouth but essentially infinite assholes.
I think if you survive(d) layoffs, then that means the company employing you now has a more long-term view of their investment into your onboarding and continued growth. So while the pain at first may be jarring, in the long run it is worth it if the move causes companies to view their developers as long-term team members rather than assets which can be depreciated right away.

Especially in vesting environments, where devs need to wait for the vesting to have made their R&D-heavy roles worth it from a monetary point of view. Well, large firms will need to give their devs enough runway now so that they can depreciate the costs over a longer period of time instead of only thinking in the short term. They can still fully deduct the salaries, just over a longer period of time. It is 5 years for domestic R&D / development and 15 years for foreign. I think that is good and will cause better treatment of developers in the long run.
> Shouldn't that be a norm?

When guilds/unions are stronger, then project only work is fine to organize around.
Simple, only allow them after top management takes a heavy decrease in compensation.
Ratings aren't even finalized at Google for another week to be used for a layoff decision.
They put themselves in the best position to capitalize on AI especially in the enterprise but also by integrating Copilot into Windows. With so many companies already trusting their confidential data to MS, it's easy to justifying using their/OpenAI tech through Azure.

CPU architectures are irrelevant to Microsoft at this point.
An RTX 4060 (with a pitiful 8GB vram) is about $300. Something a bit more practical like an RTX 4070 (with 12GB vram) is about $550.

That is bullshit expensive. It's still nowhere near as bad as during the cryptomining craze, but remember a GTX 1080 MSRP'd for about $430 back in the old days. An RTX 4080 for context is around $1,500 to $2,000 right now.

If I'm just looking to game and only have a reasonable budget like most people, I'll just grab some AMD APU and be done with it. Better yet just go and buy a console or game on my phone.
"What Do You Care What Other People Think?"
seems reasonable iff you have a tax system where this deductability is based on the product employees produce which seems strange to be but might be normal

if I understand it correctly it means the cost of this year would be written of over 5 year each year 20%, but if you keep your employees it means in the second year you have 20% write off from that year and 20% of the previous years and so one, so 5 years in still 100% write off every year

I wonder if that would motivate companies to have a more constant number of employees or more precise a similar income bill every year.

Through it would definitely mean if you had considered layoffs this year is the year to go.
Wouldn't surprise me. After all, Microsoft has always been built on a process of reimplementing/porting/integrating what others have made/invented before them, then doing a bunch of shady/clever business moves to corner the market.
I don't understand the uncertainty of this whole article. "It is unclear on the
one hand which toxic reaction products are generated in detail and in which quantities they are formed"

Is a microscopic bit of harmful chemical going to do anything? We are exposed to lots of harmful chemicals all the time. Even our cleaning products are harmful.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dose_makes_the_poison

Admittedly I'm not going to go around boiling sucralose and drinking it but I'm also not going to give this much more thought either.
Round up of API Predictions for 2024 APIFutures
Great - I'll rely on scientific thinking -- nullius in verba -- and ask questions I'd ask anyone else about how they gather their data, how they know what they claim to know, etc. You believe in the church when it says the sun revolves around the earth.
So you're saying it's a good time to buy a cheap electric vehicle?
But what about people that are not yet in the community? Are we going to make "it's not what you know but who you know" our default mode of finding answers?
The end of anonymity online in China
https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/section-174/ is a good overview and describes some of the history:

> In 2017, then-President, Donald Trump, signed the 2017 Tax Cuts & Jobs act, which overhauled tax codes and reduced tax – for example, it reduced the top tax bracket from 39.6% to 37%. To make the bill pass strict budgetary rules, the Senate used a process called reconciliation: adding in tax code changes that delayed tax increases. These delayed increases “balanced out” the tax reduction.

> One of these changes was Section 174, set to come into effect 5 years later, in 2022. These parts deliver the blow by making it clear that software development costs need to be amortized over 5-15 years. Most experts expected Congress to push back the Section 174 amendment to a later date, or simply remove it. But Congressional negotiations to repeal the changes fell apart at the last minute in December 2022, meaning it became law.

> Amazon, Microsoft, Intel, Ford, Lockheed Martin, and other US companies created the US R&D Coalition in 2018 to advocate in reversing this change. This group concludes... "By diminishing the near-term value of R&D expenditures, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act will reduce incentives for companies to invest in the development of new products, ultimately hurting consumers and businesses alike.”

> What about VC-funded companies? For loss-making companies this change doesn’t make much of a difference. But the change does impact VC-funded companies near to break even. Most VC-funded companies close to breakeven have big-enough cash buffers with which to pay unexpected tax bills. However, these companies might reduce hiring – or even consider letting go staff.

My 2c are that big tech companies with large amounts of cash on hand wanted to be seen optically as fighting against this change... but those with cash on hand would also benefit from being the only ones able to weather the storm relative to their would-be competitors. It's unclear that incentives were aligned here among those companies with lobbying budgets.
When you don't have many customers [as AWS] there's much less to lose by eliminating these fees. Also makes AWS look bad by comparison. Smart move.
Hmm. I'm having a hard time being sad about bootstrapping renewable energy production capacity using nonrenewable energy. Sure, panels have a finite lifespan -- and then in 2040, if we succeed, all new panels will be built using renewable energy. (In other words, it's a one-time cost, rather than an ongoing cost.)

Ethanol and wood pellets can absolutely be produced sustainably and with positive EROEI, so I'm not sure what the connection is here. Yes, they're not amazing from a pollution perspective, but they can be net-zero from an eCO2 perspective.

One take here is that capitalism has a lot of flaws, but price action stimulating investment isn't one of them. There are quite a few executives with $$$ in their eyes figuring out how to get the raw materials needed for this transition. Moore's law has lasted us nearly 60 years, a result of a mix of process improvements--old ideas done better--as well as new techniques. Pointing out how our current resource extraction isn't enough to satisfy the world's energy needs in 20 years is a little bit like pointing out that current tech isn't enough to keep Moore's law going. It's not wrong! But it also rests on the assumptions about what's possible that may not be true.
enshitification intensifies. Sorry I know this is a low quality comment. But I think it fits with the irony of everything.
Under capitalism, investors.

Under UBI, you and I.
Why would I mind if other people hold their money themselves or use a custodian as long as I have the option to custody my own money? Let people choose
I get that it's a great solution for much of the world - and that is fantastic.

But they were asking about its effectiveness in northern climates during winter (which I also live in). It sounds like your answer is: "it doesn't work there". If so, that's fine, we can focus on other approaches in such climates.

What seems like an emerging shortsighted opinion (on HN at least) is: "it's so cheap, just use more". That doesn't really work when:
- you're in a place that gets a small fraction of solar radiation during the winter
- it's often overcast
- the requirement for electricity for heat pumps goes up drastically during this time
- the nighttime requirement is even higher, as temps can get to -20 C or lower

I can't imagine the system you'd have to build to satisfy such demand with solar and battery (or similar) storage in the worst case, but I don't imagine it's "cheap".
> If a company needs to do a layoff to remain viable it must be allowed to

What makes you think that's why most of these tech companies are laying people off?
Germany is irrationally closing down their completely green nuclear plants and installing gas and coal. I don't think that was the plan.

Blackballing nuclear has been the worst environmental decision our society has ever made. We would've solved this problem by now if we had just gone all in on nuclear energy
As academic with the tenure job, I don't think it gets easier with the tenure -- you'll have to do more non-research stuff, admin, teaching, supervisions, grading, grant writing etc. (some people like it, but I just prefer research)

I do have burn-out certainly that appeared after I had a faculty job for a few years. That mostly has affected my overtime research work, which previously would take most of my free-time, but now I try to spend more of my free time on hobbies.

My advice is that unless you can overcome burnout somehow, not to try tenure positions in the states, because there you'll have to work really hard to get to tenure. I think positions in Europe tend to be often tenured from the beginning (i.e. UK) so it may be easier.

(throwaway account)