skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> 5. Excessive time on making agile work such as time on Jira story points, backlog grooming, retros, meeting minutes, agendas, scrums (designed to again, make management appear like they are doing something)

I lose so very much time to not just the ceremonies, but to wrestling-with/losing-things-in all these bafflingly complex tools like Jira or Asana or "Azure Devops" and such.

Most places I've been use Github or Gitlab. The issue trackers there are fine. They're close to the code, and in a site I'm already using. They're easy to have conversations in. They work well with built-in review processes, and with pull/merge requests. They don't permit enough strict structure that one worries about smashing some PM's carefully-constructed sandcastle by just trying to use them, but have enough filters and tagging and such that you can apply every bit as much logical structure as I've ever seen in Jira and friends, if you want to, it just won't also make it horrible to use when you do.

I wonder sometimes what % of productivity companies are losing by letting PMs pick where tickets & communication about tickets live. Plus the extra cost of the tools themselves.
Copyright says this has been around since 1988...

M-x spook
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Ma...

"The idea is that if lots of people add suspicious words to their messages, the agencies will get so busy with spurious input that they will have to give up reading it all. Whether or not this is true, it at least amuses some people."

I guess the theory was solid.
Some aquatic insects fly around sunset because the polarization of the light makes it easier to see bodies of water to land on
I know someone who has two regular sized dish washers. They are super happy about it.
As a breakfast replacement, well over 12 months, I would not try it as a 100% food replacement.
That's a US thing. in the EU we use periods and currencies go after the value.
difficult isn't the word as opposed to "hilarious", "waste of energy", "deaf ears", "lack of focus on what can be controlled"
I've had required breaks at part time jobs and minimum wage jobs (which will never give you >35hrs/wk and your schedule is definitely not consistent). My understanding is it is state law and the 3 west coast states all have unpaid 30min breaks (if you aren't on call during break) for >5hrs work.
> The same way we look at ancient Greece philosophers thinking they had some pretty good ideas, a non trivial amount of people look at a century ago's society thinking some of it should be restored or expanded.

I think far more is that a few people want power, and they are adept at manipulating the 90% who follow a herd (and are far less informed than your theory seems to imply). The bad people sell a vision of power and contempt; not long ago many other leaders sold a vision of freedom, universal rights, opportunity, democracy, and fundamental equality.

Nobody sells the latter any more, seemingly dumbfounded by their opponents - Biden, unlike every president pre-Trump, seems silent on it and sells infrastructure legislation. Progressives now sell despair - they can't get enough of telling everyone how despairing they are.

Not seeing an alternative, people follow power and hate.

We are biologically the same as every human who has followed every cause; we didn't evolve biologically; we evolved culturally. Unless someone stands up for that culture - unless we do - then it's not hard to predict what will happen to it.

> I think it will fundamentally be a tough battle.

Every battle has been tough - really much tougher than the ones we face now. Imagine being an abolitionist or for women's rights in the early 19th century - that's a tough fight. Yet they fought, and eventually prevailed. Our only real foe is us - our predecessors developed all the tools we need, the public hasn't forgotten about freedom and human rights in the last 8 years; we just need to stop despairing and whining and get to work.
> It is notable, however, how both the smartphone and cloud computing revolutions of the 2010s coincided with the start of this long ZIRP period:

Nope. ZIRP really had nothing to do with the start of the cloud computing revolutions, since the industry was already moving in that direction with outsourced IT, and outsourced SaaS-like stuff (Application Service Providers was the old term for it).

I think the reason why IT & Software engineering benefit in most types of rates has to do with efficiencies and profitability.
Janet Yellen: It's still too hard to be a working parent in America
Is it even possible that they can live up to that evaluation?

Are they just doomed to fail at that point?
The ZIRP thing makes no sense, very few tech companies were funded by loans besides a bit of convertible notes here and there. Funding for small to medium companies was from VC and acquisitions, bigger tech was funded by stock appreciation and massive profits.
I don't think bitcoin was designed to be impervious to government influence. The intention was to not be limited to a single controller, not that no controller be a government. Despite what some people think, bitcoin is not a "stick it to the man" invention

Ultimately if bitcoin is to reach the peak of a standard currency that some feel is inevitable (and some feel is futile) it would necessarily require government involvement. It wouldn't be a single government however. Monetary policy would have to be driven by a consensus of nations. That would possibly be the best (or least worst) way do do things.

None of this has any particular bearing on today's Bitcoin, if it's going to replace money it's not going to be in the next few decades. If it's still working in 50 years time, there might be a chance.

If you eliminate the noise of speculation on day-to-day levels of bitcoin, the underlying value difference between the current usefulness of bitcoin and the current trading price represents people placing bets on the likelihood of that success condition.
Well, "seize" = court order or a police action.

If police shows up to seize something then you can either cooperate (hand it over voluntarily) or risk additional penalties (fines, prison time, ...).

I read this story as "law enforcement was able to figure out that they have bitcoins, so they knocked on their door, and the criminals opted to hand it over instead of prison time".

So yes, they transferred it, but I wouldn't call this voluntarily. It's just that the applied force is as visible as the seized bitcoins.
I wonder if there is any r&d around using cheaper/abundant (finer desert sand) for construction. Or if the sand racket is preventing that (feels ridiculous to write that but all this about black market sand is new to me). Way outta my wheelhouse so I'm not even sure why it would be bad for construction in the first place.
Tech does well enough in most economic periods in the US.
But ZIRP was like the juicing era of baseball homerun record setting. The valuations, and therefore level of employment and particularly the compensation all got very distorted and is slowly coming down.

Why? Interest rates are the cost of money. If money doesn't cost anything/much, you don't have anywhere else to park money, and you can take longer bets!
VC funded startups going a decade with no revenue or no profit is something you can tolerate in that environment.

What else are you going to do, put the money in a bond paying 0.5%? After a decade your $100 is now.. $105 in nominal terms, and a loss in real inflation adjusted terms assuming essentially any inflation.

So you gamble that 5% of the 100 companies you invest in will be worth 25-50x what you invested, in 10 years.
You end up with $125-150 in nominal terms after a decade for every $100 you started with. A lot better than $105!
It is 5-10x the safe return.

Now, when you run the math again with available no/low risk investments yielding 4%, you suddenly need a much higher hit rate and/or much higher return.
Simply putting the money in a 4% yield for 10 years gets you $148, the top end of the prior ZIRP era VC return example.. uh oh!

So what do you do, as an investor who still wants to get paid for taking VC risk? To get 5x the safe bond return, you need 25% of your book to return 25-50x, or 10% to return 62.5-125x, or 5% to return 125-250x.

Everything is much harder and you need more of your investments to work, and for the ones that work to return far more.

So tolerance for profitless unicorns for a decade is dramatically reduced.
Parent comment poster here: I also use disposable vapes at times, but in the last year I have made a concerted effort to dismantle and reuse/recycle what I can from them. (Yes I have a fire resistant box of many different types of lithium ion batteries taped up inside that i’ll get around to using in a project or recycling someday…)
We can set whatever rules we want for the government. Whether the information is available on the open market doesn’t matter. Government isn’t a force of nature. We could say the government is only allowed to buy data on a Friday the 13th during a full moon if we want.
Fla. Man Charged in SIM-Swapping Spree Is Key Suspect in Hacker Groups Oktapus
Correct. If risk free return is 5% there is less need to take more risk on risky VC or private equity bets. Those allocations would necessarily be smaller overall. In addition the same effect on term sheets - the VCs will expect MORE return on their money for taking the investment risk which will be reflected in the terms.
Surely the real problem here, to my non-American eyes, is having easy access to a firearm, no?
As much as I agree with the high-level message, I disagree with the specific list.

The list makes sense from the bottom, where the goal is to get stuff done. The list makes no sense from the top, where the goal is to make sure the right stuff gets done. Without a lot of those, you end up either with:

- 1000 employees moving in 1000 directions

- 1000 employees working from home doing nothing

... or similar pathologies.

Organizational alignment is hard. I would have written a similar list to yours two decades ago, but right now, I see just how much effort it takes to make sure things don't go in the _wrong_ direction.

The good stuff on your list to eliminate are management layers, excessive features, and promotions / performance reviews / stack ranking.

Most of the things designed to provide communications, alignment, and transparency (e.g. documentation, spreadsheets, blog posts, many types of internal tooling / dashboards, backlogs, retrospectives, minutes, agendas) are very much necessary evils. There might be better ways to accomplish some of those same goals, but if you just cut them, organizations break, and break very badly.

You definitely can (and should) do without those at 1-5 people, and possibly up to 30. It's worth noting "people" here often includes external stakeholders, such as investors.
Your language of "some HN dude" and how "he didn't see why I didn't give a shit" was condescending and borderline rude. It tends to suggest you think that everyone who cares about this is beneath you and stupid. I know you didn't say those words, but it's the impression everyone gets.

> Do you own a smart phone? If so everything I said applies to you. Those are surveillance devices.

The vast majority of people don't understand what data is collected or how it is used. Most probably wouldn't care because they've been conditioned to not care and don't have much imagination for how bad a dystopia can result if we continue to get this wrong. Most of them believe it won't affect them.

I really don't understand the motivation to loudly proclaim "I don't give a shit" and draw attention to yourself as a distraction from a very serious issue being discussed by people who actually do give a shit. Do you also show up at funerals and loudly declare "I didn't know this guy!"?
Formula 1 applies for Chicago Grand Prix trademark
> I also know that it would take approximately 10 seconds to look up the definition of the word (if they often get it wrong) and that if they aren't willing to spend 10 seconds to use the correct word

But how does one know to look up the definition of the word? How does anyone know whether they're using every word correctly, without obsessively verifying _every_ word? I'm pretty sure I'm using "obsessively" correctly, but I'm not sure if I've ever looked up "obsession".

Silicon/silicone seems more egregious to a technical crowd, but some of us will obsess over "click/clique," "decimate," "begs the questions," whatever.
I've had the LiDAR on three Neato Botvacs fail over the past 7 years. In Norway robot vacuums have to last for 5 years, so I essentially got a new robot every couple of years for free. Probably the reason they went out of business.
Weren’t CoronaCheck and CoronaMelder open source? I would have assumed plenty of people would audit them, but I don’t recall seeing any negative news (jokes on their availability aside)
Thanks for this. Will fix.
Honestly, I probably would have stuck with Paramount + for quite some time if they had their own freaking show on their streaming service. I got Paramount + because I wanted to watch Yellowstone, which is a show created/published by Paramount (so I assumed that it would most certainly be on Paramount +, silly me). I found the two prequels 1883, and 1923 but no Yellowstone itself. So I watched the prequels, but now that I am done with those, I want to watch Yellowstone, which appears to be on Peacock for some ungodly reason, instead of on the Streaming service that made/produced/published the damn show.
Is this an issue where its just too low on the priority list of enforcement agencies?
Rent has never been less affordable, especially for the middle class
I wonder what proportion of HNers have played minecraft. I've never gotten around to it.
> But for some reason social media is different?

Correct! They are completely different things. Cheap unhealthy burgers != social media platforms. Just because you can draw an analogy between two things does not make them the same, and so having different opinions about them does not make one a hypocrite.

But the better point to make, as the sibling comments have, is that saying "HN thinks X" is entirely meaningless because HN is not one person.
Roughly, we poured ungodly amounts of capital into building out internet infrastructure for nearly fifteen years (fibre optics, data centres, and yes smartphones count as infrastructure).

Just like railway boom and others before, there is a ton of railways going to wrong place, or too much to same place.

Businesses will pay good money to

a. Find out what they actually have running where

b. Move the core in house where it’s cheaper

c. Have sensible ways to scale up if needed (that month end report run etc)

The work is still there. But demonstrating how much is currently spent on what and how that can be better spent is the real win here.
Faster text only version: https://lite.cnn.com/2024/01/30/us/rep-brandon-guffey-instag...
As long as it's still gimped by not having a true productive OS like macOS, ie making everything go through the app store so as to not cannibalize Mac sales, it will be relegated as simply another form factor for the iPad. The iPad could've been a true Surface competitor, where I could run VSCode on it and compile applications natively, but instead it's just become a media consumption device for most people.
Nitpick: lithium isn’t rare, per se, but it is somewhat expensive (environment and capital, though capital costs have been going down) to extract/mine/distill.
All such systems are hated by most users. Source: I work in the industry.
The novelty is that they tested this one theory instead of just proposing it as an explanation.

The introduction of this paper lists some other explanations that you may or may not have seen in the past and it says some have been disproven and some have not yet been tested.
Why scientists are killing Chinese mitten crabs
Okay sure? I never said otherwise, you asked me for forks and I gave them to you. What's your point? I get that open source needs people to complain less and contribute more, my point is just that while it might be valid for tons of situations, it just isn't make sense for the file picker thumbnails saga.

As for the Mr, again there were a few of them and it's very easy to find. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/233#note_106497

The whole thread is full of people actively writing, fixing, rebasing code, creating MRs for years
How many temperature readers now log the information to the cloud?
Even though it is a bit of a PITA to maintain self hosted runners, it is the reason we do it.
The first human has received a Neuralink brain implant
Having the baseband modem crash on you is incredibly bad, and reminiscent of the early 2000s (when I was doing radio testing) What chipset are they using?
Interest rates have many 2nd order effects, including VCs getting more funding from their LPs, and future-looking stocks becoming a more appealing investment class. Its not just about loans.
People live incomparably harder lives in Nigeria than in Japan, and yet they have plenty of children. It's about values, not circumstances.
The Oxygen Bottleneck: Astronomers Find New Problem for Alien Civilizations
Tiny Essay Editor
Media group Sky to cut 1,000 jobs this year
>How would you distribute that over the Switch

I wouldn't, I don't. The game is a PC game.
Yeah, but then there are the stories to tell and recount. My friends and I started to play with Dry Ice that we would buy from a local butcher. We basically made bombs, and I almost blew my hand off. NOW, survivor bias for sure, but that story cracks us up every other year.
>It can't be that hard to homebrew some sort of extruder to remake the filament, can it? Who needs tolerances?

OK, it can still be disposed of cleanly. As in, dump laundry basket of PLA scraps into washer, add magic PLA enzyme detergent, push "PLA Dispose" button, and all of it stays out of a landfill.
Why don't you set an example for everyone and go into a trade then?
> while bootstrapping becomes more fashionable

The idea that bringing in revenue and bringing in more revenue than you spend was something that fell out of fashion cracks me up and shows the fantasy land we've been living in
I have a feeling the stars are used by insects to navigate in pitch dark environments. And the lack of stars may be causing a large decline in insect population.

Making a road trip in the light polluted northeast america, I was looking for stars in the darkest of forested of environments, and I could not find any stars anywhere. I am not sure if the clouds were there. But I realize I have not seen stars in a long time.
Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees
I left my career as an agronomist 25 years ago. That was around 8 years into the precision ag revolution. It was great to view this video, we only dreamed of this sort of control while planting back then. Everything was manual and getting everything calibrated was a dusty job for the farmer, setting something climbing back into the tractor, going a couple of hundred feet and then getting out to make another change.

Once you got everything dialed in you rarely made many changes, The ability to change field by field or even in a field to adopt to different soil types is nothing short of amazing. Lots of times an individual row would stop planting and you wouldn't notice.

I worked a lot with satellite infrared photos and it wasn't uncommon to look at a field and see an entire row missing or planted at a half rate. I predict in time though a lot of these screens will become less important as your AI agent will be making all these sorts of adjustments for you.
You may actually be hourly and not salaried. That said, it's not uncommon to be forced to log when you work, especially when there are PTO and things like that involved and that need to be accounted for.

Are you paid for the hours you work in the internship? If so then you are not an exempt salaried employee.
Chronic unwellness due to a lifetime of sedentary activity and lack of consistent exercise on the other hand... that can often break the bank. Habits that define us for our entire lives start as children. Wont happen for literally everyone, but the majority of kids who are force to spend unstructured time outside will eventually figure out how to enjoy it, and will be that much healthier their entire lives as a result.
Many VCs get money from LPs who play different kinds of leverage games with various time horizons.
RAII mutex locks are a pretty good tool. But like all "modern" c++ features still require programmer diligence to use correctly. Though there are likely other tools outside a compiler error to help enforce this, like static analyzers, or even thread sanitizer to help detect possible issues on a running system.

And just like rust do little to protect against general race conditions, deadlocks, or the many other logic issues you can pretty easily hit around threading. Looking back at my experience around issues that involve threads, I suspect the vast majority of issues I see aren't data races.
Ah yes, rogue quality enforcement, I've done it too. It's all fun and games until some nosey manager questions the overeager developer who naively lets them in on the scheme and thus exposes the whole team for the bunch of non productive rebels that they are and then it's back to square zero.

Quality conscious management doesn't impose strict rules themselves but rather maintain a climate of mutual trust between business and technical where constraints and problems can be surfaced, discussed and addressed openly. Respect for technology is sorely missing from the business class curriculum, yet so much depends on it.
Something that may help defend against #2, if perhaps only temporarily, is to move to niches of software engineering that are more difficult to automate and have higher bars to entry. Things like kernel code, GPU drivers, embedded work, etc are much less LLM-friendly than say Wordpress plugins.
In my experience... kind of. Light isn't the only thing they're attracted to so you'd have to optimize distance and cover different variables for different bugs.

One fun thing you can do is relocate small swarms of bugs with a torch to another light source. So if you're being pestered, turn on a torch... and slowly walk the bugs to a different light source (a distant lamp for example). Then turn off the torch and walk back to where you were. The light will keep them there.
> The US government had ppp loans that were forgiven completely that effectively paid companies per employee.

The US government also has federal prosecutors actively investigating fraudulent PPP loans, so don't expect this gravy train to come round again.
It's basically a laptop on your head, so a meaty 60w charger could be needed to power and charge it.
Ask HN:Founders that use B2B APIs:How do you get responses from API sales teams?
Hello HN

I'm building a web app/app that requires us to connect to users' payrolls. Existing solutions for this exist - Plaid, Atomic, Pinwheel, Argyle.

But we're having a hard time connecting with the sales teams at these companies (except Plaid).

How we're reaching out to them: filling out the 'Contact Us' or 'Request Demo' forms. I reached out to one Sales person on LinkedIn who I share a connection with.

The response we got:
- Plaid has a straightforward sales pipeline and onboarded us.

- One company set up a time to talk, then sent us an NDA, countersigned the NDA, and then basically ghosted us.

- The rest have not responded yet. Its been around a week now.

How do you work with this? Is there a better way to get attention from Sales?
Nice, congrats!

This must have been a huge lift – when we launched support for browsers/bun/deno/node/etc along with CJS & ESM from the same npm package, it was a surprising amount of work.

(disclaimer, we offer a similar service: https://stainlessapi.com)
You could still see it as a desire that is being highjacked by our artificial lights. It's an unintentionally wire heading, where our desire for light defeats the insects desire to trust it's 'instruments'.