skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>For the latter, I normally have to roll out a quote I can't remember well enough to google, that's something along the lines of "your dog is juggling, filing taxes, and baking a cake, and rather than be impressed it can do any of those things, you're complaining it drops some balls, misses some figures, and the cake recipe leaves a lot to be desired".

Not the quote, but there was a Farside cartoon along those lines where the dog was being berated for not doing a very good job mowing the lawn:

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/22/22/79/222279ceaa98f293e76e...
How to Assess AI Governance Tools
> doubly so in places that attract talent through the mythos of only hiring the best.

Does any job-seeker think of that in recent years?

I can't think of a company who only hires the best, and I don't very often anymore see companies trying to claim that.

I suspect job-seekers are thinking about compensation, career advancement, and what they'd be working on.
"as well as a handful of unlucky folks who deliver solid results but lack social grace and self-promotion skills"

Which is coincidentally, usually, the most productive problem-solvers. The biggest talkers tend to not be doers, at least not in a way that is beneficial to the company, just themselves.
Tangential, but it seems to me that as organizations grow, more and more resources are poured into everything other than what made them successful in the first place. Bureaucracy grows, hierarchies increase, teams upon teams organize, things are envisioned and realized and KPId, volumes of messages and emails shift back and forth, endless hours are met in meetings...

At the same time, productivity is reduced, actual communication diminished, gatekeepers slow everything and everyone down, fiefdoms form with their territorial turf wars, naked emperors run amok fanned by yes-men. On average three people out of a hundred are doing something actually useful, while the company slowly loses its grip on whatever niche monopoly has allowed it to so grotesquely exist thus far.

Everyone else is gradually PTSD'd into a corpo version of Homo Sovieticus, filling out time sheets and RTO attendance records while duly marching towards V17 in the most recent two-year plan, aligned with the corporate values writ large on the HR site's main banner.
What if Java developers could build web apps without touching JavaScript? [video]
Thanks for the fact check. I'm writing on my phone so I can't do this justice, but the operative wording of the Sherman Act (or its followup the Clayton Act) is something like: "unfair restraint on trade is unlawful," or something like that. That's the one to two sentences I'm referring to. My point is that it's extremely limited phrasing. In the 100 years it has been in place there have been thousands or court decisions explaining what it means - and refining and defining what that sentence means in the US legal system.

If the act itself is only 2 pages that is a marvel, though. Usually they spend at least ten explaining why they are passing a law and who they are.
I remember listening both to the few PDQ Bach albums my parents owned and then his excellent radio show on music theory and concepts. I found some old episodes online and have been enjoying them again the last few days.
People use computers to accomplish tasks. Not to use operating systems, not to use applications, just to accomplish tasks.

Often those tasks involve a particular workflow they know, so alternative applications must support the exact same workflow to be acceptable.

Linux usually has different workflows, and thus can't accomplish the same tasks. It can often accomplish similar tasks, but that's not usually good enough to be worth the effort of switching away from a default. The alternative has to be significantly better than the original.

Some tasks also have network effects, e.g. online games. Alternatives that aren't compatible with the existing network are useless.

Most people don't care about the OS. They don't really care about the particular applications. People care about the tasks they want to accomplish & the workflows they know to accomplish them.
Performance reviews make sense for people at bat for promotion. They are overkill for the masses of tech workers who have reached their terminal level and aim for nothing more than a steady state of satisfactory, but not groundbreaking, contributions to the organization.

For these people, their managers should be able to click a button and generate a ceremonial "keep up the good work" compensation letter with a new salary adjusted only for inflation. The rigmarole of self feedback, peer reviews, and calibration is needless overhead for the average employee getting a "Meets All."
The Invisible Class Dynamics of Readers
Couldn't agree more. Knocking on contractors seems random, out of place, factually inaccurate, and it doesn't really add anything to the substance of this article, so also completely unnecessary to sustain the actual point the article is trying to make. It's just bad writing.
I'd bet 2017 looked different from 2020 too.
I don't think any of that is true.

There are many people who have a social dislike for haggling for anything.

There are many places that offer used merchandise for a fixed price that people shop at, flea markets are fairly unsuccessful in the market for used merchandise. There are many stores that sell jewelry at a fixed price. Stories about people groaning about bidding wars on homes are ubiquitous. And some sellers don't negotiate.

Consumers are consumers, and some cross-section of them will always lack negotiation skills and/or have a distaste for the practice.
Quantum Sensing in Your Pocket: Using OLEDs to Image Magnetic Fields
What kills me about macOS is that the window border is now pixel thin, but macOS simultaneously lacks the keyboard shortcuts that exist in Linux for easily resizing.

Like, a 1px border isn't too back when I have a keyboard shortcut that makes a full 1/9th or so of the window's area the effective border. But when it's exactly a pixel — and combined with macOS's cursor's hotspot not being on the cursor tip … it just takes what should be simple to way harder than it need be.
I have my own bootstrapping scripts but lately I’m interested in nix-darwin and related ecosystems to reproducibly setup a Mac.
There are claims and anecdotal reports but (caveat that I'm not an earthquake scientist lol) doesn't seem to have expert consensus and I'm not seeing anything that passes the bar of not being able to be explained by people who've heard that animals predict earthquakes retroactively blaming any behavior they noticed on earthquake awareness.

Review article linked from usgs.gov: https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/ssa/bssa/article-abstract/1...
Maybe your path in life is just taking you elsewhere? It's not a big deal. I used to like programming too but it became too formal with all the frameworks like agile and scrum. I'm not a team player so having all that collaboration is really annoying. I just need a clear task with defined in/outs that I can bite into and don't want to deal with everyone else.

Also it could be that the lead role is just not your thing. But it can be difficult to change from a financial perspective. I'm also an architect and I'm not as efficient at it as when I was in more hands-on roles. Unfortunately our new director decided to split the technical work out from architecture to a new operations team and I don't want to take a pay cut because that work is less valued.

So I'm staying for now but looking around for something better.
> "...as well as a handful of unlucky folks who deliver solid results but lack social grace and self-promotion skills."

Ironic that what was once the character archetype for geeky programmers have now become pariahs in the industry they pioneered. Now we all toot our own horns as loudly as we can, hoping to drown out our fellows, in search of the next bonus or job hop and devil take the hindmost. Introverted, have social anxiety, not neurotypical or simply don't like self-promotion, as is common among nerds? Yup, expect to get screwed good and hard.
The joke is that you consider the price they sold at to be a “fair” value when their values led to them going out of business. Presumably, if you did not have vroom as an option and had to trade in your car, you might claim you received an “unfair” value, even though that value might be helping the businesses stay in business.
Tape is more-or-less meant to be accessed linearly. SQLite is not designed for that and will not perform well. But nothing stops you from making such an archive and sticking it onto tape, later retrieving it, and opening it from a medium that handles seeks well.
Google marked this vulnerability as "Won't Fix" but I disagree. Care to comment?
tldr; You can view a preview of private Google Docs despite not having access, as long as you have the doc's link.

Longer version:
I received a link to a Google doc on slack recently, but the owner had forgotten to share permissions with me. Though I couldn't view the doc when I clicked it, I did notice that I could view the first page of the doc in the link preview. It was very high res and I could view the text clearly. Isn't this a security vulnerability worth plugging? I reported it to Google, but they responded with:

"Hi! We've decided that the issue you reported is not severe enough for us to track it as a security bug: when someone with access to a doc sends a link over slack, they express their intent to share this document, hence the preview shared independently from the sharing setup on the doc does not represent a significant risk."

I tried responding that many people have Google Drive links exposed even publicly, but they assume that only those with access can view them. But I got the same response pretty much. Am I missing something here, or is this an oversight by Google?
Show HN: Monetize Unreleased Media
Online marketplace to monetize unreleased digital media. For example, leaked tracks, behind-the-scenes footage, instrumentals & acapellas, etc.
>The problem with this design is that most people don't understand state machines, and this design confused a lot of people who were unable to lock the door correctly, or believed they'd locked the door when they hadn't.

no, the problem was that it's a stupid state machine that even conducting experiments with you can't be sure how it works unless you're Shrodinger's cat and and you have Shrodinger outside the door and you can communicate
Exactly. Yes. That's the idea.

The US legal system relies more on "ex post" legal enforcement - meaning, if you break the law then you get busted and you personally pay the victim. Europe is a more "ex ante" system - they rely on regulators to strictly define what the law should look like exactly and actually requires industry to do very specific things to comply with it. If someone gets hurt the system compensates them from a fund. The person who hurt them doesn't necessarily pay.

That's the theoretical underpinning and difference in our systems. But like I said the systems have a bit of both these days. Eu is flirting with more class actions, and US has more regulatory scrutiny in certain sectors, like California privacy laws for example being very detailed.
The HTML input element without any styling applied is usually rendered by the browser using the UI conventions of the operating system. But nobody uses bare input elements these days.
Fair enough. Thanks. But... When I offer to do this here no one takes me up on it! So maybe the world doesn't need my blog.
Is it? Which of these "attackers" are you most concerned with? I hesitate to even call them "attackers." They're jiggling your front door knob, at worst.
The simple answer is that we don't know yet. We don't know at what level of complexity a nervous system starts to have subjective experience (qualia), or even how to detect the condition. However, constructing a computer program that's aware of its own programmedness, or a robot that can tell itself apart in (for example) a reflection from other robots is not terribly difficult. Do such machines have qualia? How could we know? How can I know you have qualia?

What we do know is that doing purely physical things to the brain has very apparent effects on the person. People with brain damage have suffered effects as varied as changes in personality, to defects in information processing, to loss of abilities and memories. Less extremely, psychoactive drugs operate physically on the brain and cause changes in behavior, mood, and perception.

If the brain is not the seat of consciousness and the self is instead the result of some metaphysical process that's external to the body, these effects remain to be accounted for. And that aside, I've never heard any reason to accept dualism, besides an appeal to incredulity that the mind could be caused purely by physical processes.
If code is copied and pasted everywhere that is obviously bad. However, some repeated code is better than none in many cases.
This is not a good analogy as professional sports is much easier to assess performance and also much much more ruthless in terms of being cut.
Energy Density
A core part of Nazism was Germany's greatness, even beyond others of the same race. They "tolerated" the British "race". So I doubt the claim that German theories about race were drawn from British and American sources unless you're talking about pro-German idealogues.
The flip side to these performance cycles is all the time in between in which often very little actionable feedback is provided to engineers which makes the mid year and end of year reviews so difficult.

Across 3 companies and 8 managers, I have yet to receive feedback that was productive in helping me understand what skills or track record is lacking and what is necessary to move up. Managers are (often) bad at providing actionable feedback let alone any feedback which leads to lots of blandness in 1:1s which translates to lots of blandness in mid year and end of year review cycles.

I try and rectify this by finding quantitative data: impact on revenue (very difficult though most of the time), MRs merged, GitHub activity, tickets closed, projects led, initiatives taken, demos presented etc but this only goes so far.

All this leads me to believe that at the end of the day promotions are decided by various levels of managers getting together with a few beers, deciding how many total promotions can take place due to budget, and going through a list of names while deciding based on their gut but of course this can't be admitted as the official process.

It is frustrating that unlike other careers IE finance, law, medicine etc where performance can be directly tied to revenue (investment returns, client income, patient income) we have yet to design a standard for measuring impact for many software engineering roles.
No. Microsoft is manager based. There's a peer feedback system but it's mostly useless
For some narrow definition of problem - sure.
Labwc – openbox-inspired, wlroots-based window-stacking Wayland compositor
Learning an instrument is the only skills based learning that activates both hemispheres and eases their collaboration:

https://youtu.be/R0JKCYZ8hng?si=VA5zRZPZIWxHlmPP

Other skills, tested via imaging, seem to dominate one side or the other.
I'm not sure how those values are derived. Yes, the Hamming distances between them should be maximized, but the current values don't seem to be optimized for that:

SUCC FAIL INTR ERR NONI
0 28 20 11 16 AUTH_SUCCESS
28 0 12 19 14 AUTH_FAILURE
20 12 0 31 16 AUTH_INTR
11 19 31 0 15 AUTH_ERROR
16 14 16 15 0 AUTH_NONINTERACTIVE

Sure, AUTH_SUCCESS and AUTH_FAILURE have a Hamming distance of 28, but it takes only 11 or 16 bit flips to go from AUTH_ERROR or AUTH_NONINTERACTIVE to AUTH_SUCCESS. (AUTH_ERROR can only happen from an internal error, so I believe AUTH_NONINTERACTIVE is easier to trigger.)

A quick Python search was able to find some alternatives:

0x0f7b74c5 0x810d2b99 0x63a64616 0xcab4a865 0xbe705abb
...maximizes all distances (17--19)

0x28d803a4 0x352ef6d3 0xdb61dce1 0xb3edf85c 0xe62f7508
...maximizes a distance from the first and others (21--22), disregarding other pairs (14--21)

It seems that fixing one element to be a bitwise negation of the first element is not a good search tactic in my short testing. Also as notpushkin noted, if you really want to disregard other pairs you should just make one pair with the maximal distance and derive every other code from them (say, -1 0 1 2 3 would work for this purpose).

By the way, finding a binary code with maximal Hamming distance is an open problem [1] [2].

[1] https://www.win.tue.nl/%7Eaeb/codes/binary-1.html

[2] https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/4288902/generation-...
Who's marketing a free app with no profit motive?
The criticism from the second camp stems from the fact that the WHOLE job is to not drop anything.

A fence with a hole is useless even if it's 99% intact.

A lot of human jobs, especially white collar, are about providing reassurance about the correctness of the results. A system that cannot provide that may be worse than useless since it creates noise, false sense of security and information load.
Oddities – The Calvin and Hobbes Wiki
https://youtu.be/ag14Ao_xO4c

“We are selling to willing buyers at the current fair market price.”
Pet Safe Kennels
The rooftop solar industry could be on the verge of collapse
I think you're drawing a lot of conclusions out of the word 'fair' that aren't really there to draw from. The commentor above is saying they were happy with the money they were offered. This was a person selling their car, not an accountant doing due diligence on their books.
Farms plant seeds, which costs some amount of money. They then wait for a harvest, at which point they hope that the sale price of that harvest covers their expenses. How is that not speculation on the price of a given crop?
I still don't believe it. Mexican candles? This is a technology from ancient times; why would a candle made in Mexico in 2024 be any different from an American or Chinese or wherever candle?
> On the closer-to-respectable side of organized crime in Chicago, even the "Democratic Machine" is largely dead.

When did that happen? I have a buddy of mine who attends community action groups run by local alderman out of churches on the south side. As of maybe 2017 he was telling me about how "The Machine" was alive and well and aldermen were still afraid to speak out about it (even if they move across the country afterward).
I would love to see something like this for sim city 2000. I know someone tried and was threatened with a lawsuit

https://github.com/nicholas-ochoa/OpenSC2K
Agreed. The employee is rather judged by something like their peer's perception of how competent the employee is, their knowledge of the work the employee did, and their own belief of how important that work was, all filtered through their various cognitive biases about what work is important to the company and what a competent employee looks like.

There are so many of these biases. As just one example, studies have shown more talkative people are perceived as being more intelligent, even when this is objectively not true. I will take the time to find references if anyone's curious; I recall an experiment in which a group discussion was held and participants were rated by their peers on intelligence. The experimenters then measured how talkative each person was during the discussion, and their actual intelligence was assessed via a standardized test. Peer's perceptions of intelligence were uncorrelated with actual intelligence, but strongly correlated with talkativeness.

The result is that fast talking employees who focus on impression management, self-promotion, and securing juicier work - work that is of a quality or type more likely to be perceived as being important - at the expense of getting genuinely important but often less glamorous things done, and less things done overall, get rewarded.

This problem is particularly pronounced in American culture where extraversion is already a highly regarded and arguably overvalued trait (e.g. show and tell). It's less of a problem in other cultures, e.g. European cultures, that place higher value on introversion (e.g. quiet work and study).
Huh, these posts usually get hundreds of replies. What gives?
When I transfer my subscription to a new physical SIM I am issued a new SIM card, aren't I? Or do they use used SIM cards in those situations?

I've needed to go from a full-size SIM to a mini to a micro to a nano over the years. Each time was a new physical SIM, each time was more of a "transfer" to the new SIM card.
Ask HN: How to compensate domain experts for advice, as a pre-seed startup?
I am a founder/CEO who is considering building support/features into our service for certain domains.

I have domain expert contacts that can help guide this, but I don't know how best to compensate them. Their contributions will be a call or meeting every week or two for a couple of months or so, as they guide me on the appropriate must-haves and pitfalls, and review the initial implementations of said features. Plus intermittent emails during the work week.

This is obviously too much of a lift to do as a "favor". But as a pre-seed startup, we can't afford their hourly market rates, and we aren't a full-blown C-corp to pay them in equity easily. Would mini-SAFEs be the answer? How would you compensate such advisors for their time and input?
Hahaha :) good, you’re welcome. Can relate! This is my favorite comment
Focus on performance marketers who have verifiable performance. You want someone who speaks in numbers (e.g., ask vlookup vs index/match type questions) and is driven to test-- so look for someone who can explain different strategies (e.g. alpha/beta, how they segregate kws/match types, thoughts on long tail, negative management, manually managing bids vs automated systems, campaign structures, even basic things like constrained budget allocation) in a manner you feel comfortable with. Given your niches and scale, maybe place more emphasis on testing novel channels to help establish both CACs and LTVs, because much of automotive search will be likely weirdly high funnel because it is a highly considered purchase category.

Marketers are going to be good self-promoters (it is their job, after all), and the good ones are worth a lot because they can save multiples of their comp in wasted spend, but most are unfortunately flunkies who parrot Google's talking points, always use automated bidding and constantly change KPIs.
Yeah, with generic stock photos of some random office and actors
This article reminds me a bit of a 'ethics' issue in one of the top-name journals, Science or Nature, some years ago. Every article was about the ethics of sharing credit, granting tenure, awarding prizes, etc. Not a word about anything like the ethics of designing AI systems for the military to use in autonomous kill vehicles, reckless gain-of-function research with pathogenic microorganisms, etc.

So, here we have a discussion of how to reward and advance employees who are most aligned with the corporation's overall or specific goals, and certainly that makes sense, you want the best people in the right jobs - but everyone else is looking at Big Tech and wondering just what the goals are these days. There seems to be a lot of effort directed towards establishing monopoly power, avoiding the rise of market competition, ensuring a future of lucrative government contracts, including a big move into military AI contracts... whatever happened to 'don't be evil'?
Neither of these pages show a "click to start" message for me, but they should. In TFA I had to hover over the "silent gif" to see a volume control, and in the acid banger I had written half of this comment before I figured out you could just click anywhere to unmute.