skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People have been quick to point out how Google's culture has had a fall from grace, but I don't think I've seen too many mention that the rest of the industry copied (to varying degrees) a lot of Google's culture in a good way, narrowing the gap quite a bit.

When I joined the tech industry in the early 2000s, most companies, including many tech companies, were very Office Space esque. Drab cube farms with dull carpet, horrible coffee, and MBA types running the show. Getting a second monitor or different equipment took months if it was even possible.

Maybe you got lucky and got some free snacks and coke. The idea that an engineer could be paid as much on an IC track as a manager or director was quite rare, much less showering employees with perks such as free food, gourmet coffee, video games, lounges, and the like.

All of that is fairly common. I've worked at startups that had free food, plenty of companies have a fairly lucrative IC track, snacks/perks, pleasant looking offices and all that.

The gap is a lot smaller, even on Google's good days, and I think that affects everyone's perception more than they realize.
Just came to say this doc beat hands down any official or blog style explanation - I wish we all read this and learnt
Ah yes I also sometimes think that some people who champion more regulations and safety actually don't want the thing to exist. Like any discussion about traffic management for example. Or every "think of the children!!".
I am bearish on that prediction. I’m not convinced LLMs can scale that much more. Of course, I’d be happy to be wrong. In that case, I’ll leverage the tools to become more productive.
Sadly, but unsurprisingly, searching for "Crypto 2.0" does not yield information about a shift in cryptography. What time period was this around when this phrase was being used? Where could I find more info on it? What was the shift primarily about?
I did that with Turbo Pascal in the 90s. Having your app on the color monitor, while the debugger was on the Hercules one was amazing.
1k Word Philosophy
I think AI will still be important, but the AI of the future won't look like the AI that we have today. People have a tendency to redefine "AI" to mean whatever the new hotness is -- LLMs today, deep neural nets a few years ago -- but new things are created all the time, and fads always change. When I started grad school for comp sci nearly 20 years ago, I worked with a group that was big on "AI", but we were dealing with multi-agent systems. No neural nets or super-intelligences or anything like that. Neural nets were actually considered passé back then; I vividly recall a professor telling me that SVMs (support vector machines) were stronger than neural nets, because SVMs had a stronger theoretical foundation and were more amenable to mathematical analysis. Neural nets, on the other hand, just happen to work -- but they happen to work very very well! Deep learning didn't gain traction until after I had finished grad school.

The LLMs that we have today are amazing, but there is still plenty of room for improvement. Having to train it on a huge dataset is problematic for some uses; perhaps there is a related structure that can be trained more easily and more quickly. That would also reduce the effect of OpenAI's monopoly. LLMs also have specific weaknesses, like poor performance at arithmetic. At this stage, I wouldn't really feel comfortable feeding problems into an LLM and presenting users with the LLM's answers. It's still the Wild West in many aspects. There is always an improvement on the horizon, but it's hard to tell where it will come from and when it will come. Maybe we'll have LLMs that really start to resemble intelligence, or maybe we'll have a totally different structure that does everything LLMs can do plus more.
> Page turning would change two numbers, one of them would always increment by 1

I don't think most end-users will like that.

> But the same issues exist today with PDF since you have page count (more visible since it's usually permanently visible in the app) and page labels

Yes, not a good situation, so why duplicate it elsewhere? Anyway, if I say 'page 545', IME people understand it's the document's page number and not the PDF page count.
Shapes, areas of simple polygons and circles, Pythagorean theorem, volume of solids, graphing, translation, all that stuff and more that one might call “geometry”, is scattered between roughly ages 6 and 12.

I think the high school level “geometry” class—which may be the only one named such, but primary school math is full of geometry—is an atrophied organ left over from when it was still common to teach directly from Euclid, which is why it tends be about introducing proofs more than covering new abilities and techniques in geometry (though it may cover some of that, too)
On a twisty road, having the driver behind you back off a bit more sounds like a benefit.
How do I talk to a live person at United?
How is that even possible? Won't he just get exposed in the first performace review? Or is he in some cushy managerial role?
Don't these things keep coming up, and it turns out that all these artists actually go via a label, and this is just another deflection from the RIAA and equivalents.

They made their first profit last quarter by having their own audiobooks and not needing to spend as much on music royalties.

Spotify pays out 70% of revenue, and Wierd Al can't do maths.
That is why I've decided to develop all my apps in Qt C++ and QML. For example I've created Plume[1] - an alternative to the resource-hag Electron app Notion. It's the fastest block editor in my benchmarks (on the website). Faster than the fastest comparable native app on macOS.

Yes, Qt is quite a bloaty - the binary size is 139.2mb currently, but I think with static linking and some trimming, I can get it much lower.

[1] https://www.get-plume.com/
My main point is: on a desktop/laptop personal computer, you can install software without any overlord's permission. On iOS, you can't. That's seriously messed up, and wrong. And, yes, a lot of business (and landlords) are Mafia like. I'm hoping for a strong left-wing party to come into power in the future, and completely turn this upside down.
I worked for a bootstrapped startup where the opposite was true. While the company was in survival mode, employees were highly valued and the owners had a "we're in it together" type of attitude. When the money started rolling in, their attitude changed to "we are better than you." They moved all their employees to a different office than themselves, and started treating us like we are expendable. They lost all their competent staff in a year, and had to start relying on freelancers to get anything done.
See also a related video by About Here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRdwXQb7CfM

which mentions this very pertinent section of the US National Housing Association Proceedings (1913), p.212:

"Do everything possible in our laws to encourage the construction of private dwellings and even two-family dwellings, because the two-family house is the next least objectionable type, and penalize so far as we can in our statute, the multiple dwelling of any kind... if we require multiple dwellings to be fireproof, and thus increase the cost of construction; if we require stairs to be fireproofed, even where there are only three families; if we require fire escapes and a host of other things, all dealing with fire protection, we are on safe grounds (compared to zoning regulations based on race), because that can be justified as a legitimate exercise of the police power[...] In our laws let most of the fire provisions relate solely to multiple dwellings, and allow our private houses and two-family houses to be built with no fire protection whatever"
Related:

Changes to Gmail syncing with other email clients

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38975692
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_scaling_law#Chinchilla_...
> providing access to everybody else's copyrighted content in novel ways

That's a very biased characterization that downplays a debate that people have right now as basically being already solved. It's simply not truthful, unless they started a side business in developing a torrent tracker or something.
In most non-dictatorships, private parties are free to start almost any civil case against each other. The judge may grant a motion to dismiss for things that are obviously bogus, but a decently filed grievance about the hiring process, supported by the counterparty's own statements, would likely require more scrutiny.

That is: the litigation could probably happen in most countries and even not be summarily dismissed.
Who knows why they're on those lists. A lot are their for starting fights in airports and other stuff.

Whatever it is, being banned from an airplane is better than being arrested and serving several years for liking a facebook post saying "king dum thums up if u agree" as actually happens in Thailand.
I've been reading your comments in this thread and wanted to say thank you. I recently lost my parrot (not directly — I had rehomed her with a friend and there was an accident with my friend's parents) and so much grief and regret choked me for a few days. But the ball has grown around it. And I am grateful that I had her company for a few years. Thank you.
And they still can't manage to pull out of Russia. :/
Absolutely. I still remember the disbelief when I realized that you could observe Windows 95 booting. It hooked into system before the OS.
It's too naive to say "*one of* the purpose of meta is sexual harassment of children".

So easy to say *one of* a knife's purpose is murder thus knives should "cease-operations".

----

I did what you asked, but fail to see how that changes anything. Please if you're going to ask me to change something, have that change be meaningful.
I think there was a kind of "golden period" that goes in between.

In the 90s, the economics around software had already heated up to the point where there was an insatiable appetite for software engineering manpower, but the university system wasn't yet geared to churning out specialists in this field in such large numbers, so a lot of software engineers back then were people coming from other professions who picked it up autodidactically and were just not very good. At the same time programming languages and tooling weren't yet at a point where they were good at guiding people towards good software engineering practice, and this lead to a kind of software quality crisis.

But this situation changed fast. I would say from maybe roundabout 2003 to maybe roundabout 2013 there was a bit of a "golden period" where we had good reason to be optimistic about the future of software quality. The software quality crisis of the 90s was largely overcome through better education, better software engineering methodology, and better programming language ecosystems and toolchains. Back in those days we still had purpose-built tooling for doing things like desktop UIs. Windows Forms based in C# and Aqua-era MacOS GUI programming in ObjC were actually quite a good experience for both developers and users. We also had cross-platform ways of doing GUI programming like Swing on Java.

In the next ten years, i.e. the ten years leading up to now, things took a decided turn for the worse. If I were to speculate about the reasons, I would say it was related to the rise of mobile, and the continued rise in the importance of the web platform over the desktop platform, meaning that application development now had to straddle web, mobile, and desktop as three distinct development targets. This created a need for truly cross-platform application development, while Apple and Microsoft continued to make plays to fortify their monopoly power instead of giving the world what it needed. Swing/JavaFX lost its footing when enterprises decided that web was all they really needed.

So, to answer your intial question: Has software quality really gotten worse? I would say, yes, over the last 10-15 years definitely. If you compare now to the mid-90s, then maybe, maybe not.
I usually use Chinese knockoffs. Brands like Cameron Sino and Nohon are growing brands who accurately state capacity, make good batteries, and don't pretend to be OEMs.

As for official batteries, California's Right to Repair law compels manufacturers to sell parts like batteries for as long as they sell battery replacement services, up to 7 years. Apple still replaces batteries for the iPhone 5S, a 10-year-old phone, so they 2022+ phones should have official batteries available for a long while (and the prices seem quite fair). Google also sells genuine batteries for the Pixel 2, a 6-year-old phone, through iFixit. Samsung only offers batteries attached to a midframe and display assembly, for the S20 and newer, through iFixit for $200+. So the former 2 brands seem like good options.
I think the recent treatment by companies of its employees will remove the rosy glass from our eyes. All employee goodiness is a fair weather phenomena. Always keep a healthy distance from your work and company.
Levitating, magnet-powered train will travel at Mach .8 by 2035
Tesla leak: Australian judge refuses 'draconian' request for arrest warrant
Is he renaming the company again?
I have found my best experiences with HN is when I never click the "next" button after 30 stories. Same with so very many other websites like Reddit or YouTube. The problem is I'm not engaging with the content, but anxious/bored/etc about something else and using HN as an escape. Hell I'm annoyed about something else completely unrelated and I landed here on page 2 at 11pm.

I"m taking this comment as a cue to call it a day as well. Take a break. I promise you won't miss anything that important for a few days, and you will feel better too.
I think it's a testament to HN that your very-critical comment is at the top. I generally love HN and the discussions here. My life is better with it.
That’s global which is hardly relevant because for most people outside of highly developed countries MacBooks are prohibitively expensive so aren’t even an option.

Apple seems to be at 28% in the US (a few percent below HP and above Dell). I’d guess that if we removed corporate sales it would be considerably higher.
Hans Reiser's fully formatted letter can be found at: https://ftp.mfek.org/Reiser/Letters/%E2%84%962%20Hans%E2%86%...
So this is a change in topic, from "will surveillance help them catch more criminals", to "is surveillance a bad thing".

Basically, your view is that surveillance is bad because it can be abused by an authoritarian and eventually lead to the erosion of liberal democracy and individual freedoms. Which has validity.

What about terrorism, though? If we completely eliminated the surveillance apparatus, how many more terrorist attacks would there be, and what would the consequences of that be on the survival of liberal democracy? I ask these questions in earnest. Maybe the answer is "not many terrorist attacks would have been prevented". But then I read these news articles of multiple terrorist plotters being arrested before committing the act. What percentage of those arrests are attributable to the surveillance apparatus? And if that apparatus was removed, and these people successfully committed those acts (say, they blew up a bunch of people on NYE), what impact would this have on people's voting patterns? Well, people would be more inclined to vote for a strongman authoritarian to fix the terrorism issue, which then creates the very problem that you are concerned about with the surveillance state in the first place. Which is the erosion of liberalism and democracy and freedoms. The AfD will get elected. Forget any progress on climate change. Then we get climate refugees, leading to further destabilization. Etc. What I'm getting at is there is no solution that doesn't involve trade-offs when it comes to protecting freedoms and democracy.

Maybe the answer in the modern world isn't that surveillance is always bad, it's that surveillance needs to be heavily constrained with newly designed checks and balances.
As another Pakistani, I don't understand the need for a protest... Let the names be used.
Well, yes. In a better parallel universe. In our real world, the healthcare industry in the USA is a for-profit business with few partial exceptions. The costs are ruinous and the trend is not sustainable. It is naive not to think about costs, unless you are wealthy. The cost of blood tests done at a local hospital's lab will almost always be much higher than at a large national network like Labcorp or Quest. Even after insurance contract repricing. Quality is the same. Why would you pay more? The doctor belonging to a local hospital network will be inclined to send your blood work there and use "Hippocratic Oath doesn't say anything about pricing" as an excuse...
It opens up the security vulnerability of your software not meeting requirements and thus users deciding instead to use other software, workarounds, and hacks.
Once again, I stated "regardless of whether it is or not." I'm sorry, but you failed to convey that.

Anyway, I hope this is hope this is a productive learning experience.
> It's time for smaller, scrappier tech companies to be the place where innovation happens

I think this is exactly what is being lamented. There was interesting stuff happening for a really long time, and now there isn't. And companies that stop innovating tend to die long, slow deaths. It sounds like Google held out longer than most, but now runs the risk of going the way of the dodo. I'd lament that too.
Thank you for writing that, really helped me out back when Microsoft pushed OAuth for Office 365.
ChatGPT, is that you ?
Maybe another name would help with that?
I'm sorry, I'm speaking from a point of absolutely no experience in these high-profile Silicon Valley jobs, but "companies refuse to hire Google employees" strikes me as a statement akin to "the king refuses to dine from a 99.999% gold plate because they skimped out on getting him a 100% pure plate". Even right now, many tech workers see Google and other big-name tech companies as basically the ultimate goal of their careers, and I can't really imagine the kind of a one-in-a-million company that'd be justified in turning down a Google ex-employee based on just their employer.
I’m
Curious about this too actually.

The closest “easy” thing would be a statutory claim I think.

But you can’t make it if the debt is over 6 years old.

https://www.gov.uk/statutory-demands

It appears you can sue for the return of property in civil court.

https://www.askthe.police.uk/view-category/?id=2ec7e112-6ad2...

I’m
Sure though there’s complexity that make all of that not relevant if it’s a country suing.

Usually international treaty comes into place when things are international.

However, some interesting cases against the British museum.

https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/a-uk-heritage-group-wi...

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/15/world/europe/greece-briti...

There’s a whole book on this dispute from a litigator.

https://www.elginism.com/elgin-marbles/why-dont-we-just-sue-...

And the British museum policy on giving back objects.
https://www.britishmuseum.org/sites/default/files/2019-10/De...

Finally, it looks like
The government may be preventing this. They may have been acted upon in 2005?

And also https://www.museumsassociation.org/museums-journal/news/2022...

However, this may answer all your questions.

https://davidallengreen.com/2021/05/the-british-museum-loote...
The software crisis was proclaimed to exist as early as 1969. We never solved it. But we did massively improve the scope of what software can do. The natural state of software is always to be almost but not quite at the breaking point. This is actually fine. Occasionally something goes wrong and then we fix it. And we move on. But the amount of stuff that works just fine is actually constantly growing.

The average software project sits on ginormous mountain of existing software. Libraries, components, tools, operating systems, etc. As a percentage of the overall source code, the tiny bit you add is a vanishingly small proportion. All this stuff exists, is being maintained by someone, and replacing it with something else has very low economic value. It adds negative value when it doesn't work because then you have to fix it or deal with the problems it is causing. But if it works as advertised, it just levels the playing field. Because everybody else is at that level as well.

Your attention as a software engineer should be focused mainly on things that others don't have that are valuable. It's always been like that. What has changed over time is the amount of stuff that you no longer have to build or worry about that much. That's the value of cloud based services. You get a lot of decent quality stuff that you pay a premium for that would be very expensive to match with in house development. Reinventing wheels like that is not lean but stupid.
And EGA had 64, because while its display output pins where still TTL, there was no longer a single intensity bit (RGBI) like in CGA but individual intensity bits wired for each color component (rRgGbB)
Not if that human is congenitally psychopathic. That is the situation we are trying to avoid.
> A Tesla can't compete with the economy of a 3k 2004 ICE car where you don't even have to think about range.

I used to think about the range of my diesel regularly since eventually I would need to visit a petrol station. My EV is fully charged every morning and does every journey I’d need to do in a normal day. I think about its range less than my old diesel. As for fiscal responsibility, the EV costs 3p/mile to run.
Sure! I wrote some about it recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38793540

tl;dr: the sync/live editing is very impressive, and that's encouraging if it ever wants to become a collaborative tool (would I ever have the need for one), but the way attributes are managed is manual and inconsistent.
A reply to my comment says that they are putting some thought into the problem, so I'll definitely keep an eye on them and see what they come up with.

At their place, I would:

- do away with the current templates implementation, it lets you define attributes at template (=representation) level and at type (=model) level simultaneously. I'm also unconvinced that a type needs multiple competing ways to be represented

- consider organizing types as hierarchies with attributes inheritance as a core principle. Done right, it could address one of notion's biggest shortcomings and be a more approachable Tana's "supertag"

- consider letting template blocks be annotated as to prevent type instances/objects to change their layout too much (that's something Trilium doesn't have due to its rudimentary editor and which I sometimes miss), this could also be used to configure how inheriting types could alter (or not) the base type's layout

- imposing all new objects to be typed or at least suggesting a type to derive from. Changing the type of an object isn't easy (I don't remember if even possible), so it's probably good to encourage the user thinking about it upfront
In C, you don't even have to cast const away, since all pointer types are implicitly convertible between each other. So you can pass a `const int*` to a function that takes a `int*` with only a compiler warning, no errors.
Check out the book Never Search Alone. Not that I recommend it, but it will lead you to a networking group of lots of product people.
I haven't had any issues with a Samsung S7, Samsung S9 (although I broke HDMI output), and Sony Xperia 5 Mark II (very pleasant to repair). iPhones have been much more troublesome for me, as I have destroyed three during repair attempts. All the issues were from damage to ribbon cables, as they are fragile and easily damaged from being bent. So I'd advise avoiding devices with tight tolerances like iPhones, and minimizing interaction with ribbon cables.
They should have called it Ludicrous Speed.