skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Naturally. I’m being hyperbolic but barely. It’s middle management’s entire job to squeeze as much productivity out of their reports for as little money as possible. Anything they do in their free time (1:1s, career discussions, etc) is just there to give the reportees the illusion of control in the system. And it’s not my belief - I fight it where I can but it’s literally how companies structure incentives. Nobody gets a bonus for how many of their underlings got promoted last year. Your importance is a measure of headcount (why have a principal engineer when you can have 3 associates?) and products shipped (more hands on keyboards mean more stuff flung to prod, quality need not apply).

Source: am middle management.
Recycling glass is ~30% more energy efficient than creating new glass https://www.palpa.fi/juomapakkausten-kierratys/eri-juomapakk...

I have no idea about glass industry economics, but 30% energy savings would seem significant for any industry.
I use Mermaid[1]. I used to use Visual Paradigm but it seems excessive (to me at least). Good enough for me, especially with integration into Markdown.

[1] https://mermaid.js.org/
Ordering people to say things the government likes is compelled speech. The First Amendment broadly prohibits it and that broadly benefits us.

It's in our interest to safeguard and preserve rights that protect our speech.
What proportion of your trash is made up of mail?
By that definition if I crumple a ball of paper and throw it and it goes 7 feet, I’ve engineered a physical marvel of an object that goes exactly that distance.
Someday our descendants (if any) will wonder how stupid we had to be to allow large scale psychological poisoning for profit.
P.S. Also, I did not tell them to make invisible scroll bars (nor have my CSS rules, as far as I can tell)!
Glass has a lot of good characteristics (clear, impervious to most contents), but is heavy , fragile, (both of which make transportation expensive) and limited recyclability.
Who says we need to fill it up in a reasonable time frame? If each disk costs a comparable amount to a dvd (cents) then the expensive part is the electricity (and maybe the equipment to write to them) and it's ok if most of the theoretical storage capacity goes unused. The important metric here for something like data backup is cost/byte to write and cost/byte/month to maintain.
I think when people call it a scam they are referring to the idea that it is marketed as a way that plastic can be green and good for the environment because it can be recycled. It may be profitable to be used as fuel but it is not green.

Another thing in the article is richer countries with higher environmental regulations just export to poor countries where the pollution is less regulated. Just exporting the problem to you. I have been to Kyrgyzstan most their electric is hydroelectric but in general it seemed their environmental regulations were lacking especially in the villages they just had heaps of waste, in the past it would be mostly comparable but lots of single use plastic means the waste is permanent.
Luncheon vouchers systems are run by private entities that take a fee on it. I believe the fee is pretty high (a shop owner told me 8%, but I am not too confident).

I definitely believe this system is outdated, that the tax-cut is eaten by said companies plus the extra burden and that the world would be a slightly simpler place without meal vouchers (at least as I know them in France).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meal_voucher
Quantifying the diva-ness of national anthem performances
It goes something like this. Well meaning people join government to solve the problem (homelessness). They can't do it on their own so they allocate money to local charities that run services for homeless, like soup kitchens and shelters. Two things happen

1. if homeless didn't exist anymore, these kitchens and shelters would have to shut down. The volunteers are fine with it, they'll volunteer elsewhere. But the permanent employees would be laid off. Understandably, they want to remain employed. So they're incentivised to not search for a durable solution to the homelessness problem.

2. The people in government realise the problem isn't getting solved, so they leave government and form their own think tanks/charities or institutions to solve the problem. They have connections in government (their former co-workers) which they use to get funding. Now there's another company in the homeless industrial complex.
Yeah, I think they fine-tune without a specific window size target to achieve and then keep expanding context until it starts falling over.
I use UML quite a bit but it's never really what I'm after, somnething more modern and fluid and gui driven that more people can use where I don't have to manually input every single thing and it can pull in far more complex information like github repos and things of that nature.

Icepanel [1] looks really cool but I haven't tested it and I'm not sure it really fits my use case. It seems like it's mostly for api driven rpc/grpc/rest services when I kind of want to use it to visualize backend/infra/terraform sort of things in maybe a C4 style. A lot less microservices involved.

Might be interesting to you.

[1] - https://icepanel.io/

ANother cool tool for stuff like this I rarely see is swimm.io for documentation.
Has anyone ever implemented a schema where you define a view to return the latest instance of each resource, and it maps INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE to an append only table underneath?

I’ve done some of this with an event sourcing system, but not the query rewriting. All my reads use the “latest view”, but the app uses functions to write to the underlying scheme rather than doing “simple” DML.

I wondered if keeping the storage as append only under the hood would keep the app layer simple.
"You'll never find a programming language that frees you from the burden of clarifying your ideas." - the well of uncomfortable truth.
Wow! It's incredible how Nvidia has created the dark voodoo magic, and how only they can deliver the strong juju for AI. How are the so incredibly smart and powerful!?

I wonder if it has anything to do with the strategy they used in 3D graphics, where game developers ended up writing for NV drivers in order to maximise performance, and Nvidia abused their market position and used every trick in the book to make AMD cards run poorly. People complained about AMD driver quality, but the actual problem was that they were not NV drivers and AMD couldn't defeat their software moat.

So here we are again, this time with AI. You'd think we'd learnt our lesson but instead people are fooled yet again and instead of understanding the importance of diversity and competition in the lifeblood of their art, myopia and amnesia is the order of the day.

Tinygrad are doing god's work and I won't be giving Nvidia a single fucking cent of my money until the software is hardware neutral and there is real competition.
...and this is why 99% of developers will defend for-profit companies stealing data, enabling mass genocides and foregoing all privacy: because everything must become the next big XXX.
Here are several comments from last time this was posted that completely dispute the characterization this article makes:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32258142

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32259325 (lead designer of Unity)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32259074 (lead of Ubuntu Desktop product)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32258650

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32258035 (founder of GNOME)

This article really shouldn't be allowed to be posted to Hacker News anymore. Anything with this many errors, and is essentially a mickey mouse investigation, isn't worth discussing again.
Shelter beds for half a million dollars a pop and lucrative service contracts surrounding that pile of money. LA county did an audit and some units they paid north of 830k.

https://ktla.com/news/los-angeles-is-spending-up-to-837000-t...
Similar post in this context: Symphonic Metal Bands: Nerdiness vs Kickassery — A statistical analysis

https://medium.com/@WolframHempel_82303/symphonic-metal-band...
Not sure what you mean. Keyboard controls are like Excel. What do you find difficult?
A lot of things will shake out once compute is no longer growing pseudo-exponentially.
I tend to think that this isn't inherent to institutions (or individuals), but rather that institutions that have this behavior tend to grow and last, whereas institutions that do not stay small and eventually disappear. A kind of survivorship bias.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartography_of_Palestine#/me...
She would have to do that due to the defunding of socialized healthcare in many countries to channel profits to private healthcare and make people like you say that 'Socialized healthcare doesnt work' so that they can come up later and say 'Lets privatize it'.

This is called 'strangle it then save it', and its the method that was used to privatize healthcare services in the West since the 80s. Starting with the US one...
I'm not denying anyone's struggle or their right to organize against it.

I'm saying that the groups in question are amplifying the problem 100x, with the goal of angering folks like yourself.

They are the arms dealer in a never ending war.
Sure but that's not the claim I replied to.
Well said. It’s all risk avoidance. Sometimes misguided, but nonetheless.

Couple that with the fact that someone looking to be offended will always find something offensive and, as you say, you can’t win.
> who is? Can you connect with them?

For something like this, usually at the senior executive level, and organizationally.
There's not really one person making the decision,
it's done through the organization's decision-making system.
Nominally there's a responsible person,
but practically speaking that individual isn't completely autonomous.

Large organizations have been making and dealing with decisions like this for ages,
and rarely does dollar cost of usability ever influence.
Products SAP and MS Teams get and retain market share by making the cost of moving off that software outweigh the gains.
Typo, thanks
Yes sure, here are a few truths that never disapointed me:

There is an absolute universal truth.

Absolute universal truth, as a whole, is unreachable even to the most intelligent and resourceful human that will ever exist.
By this definition no nation should need a police force after an initial period of unrest. After all, police is there to solve crime right?
Darn, I didn't read that translation because I didn't need it. But it's a nice pun on how anglophones pronounce Latin like it were English.
I've written all my Lisp in Vim for the past quarter century.

Nowadays I'm experimenting with parinfer in Vim.

It's quirky. First off, it doesn't work well with the lisp mode autonindenting, so that has to be turned off. It doesn't handle some syntax like #; to comment out an object.

I rigged Ctrl-_ to toggle parinfer on and off.
> if you engage in any form of censorship you are not given section 230 protections.

I disagree that governments should punish people who fail to amplify the messages of powerful political parties.
Perhaps it's because of the scroll snapping? Version 3 of the product will have smooth scrolling, which is more natural on mobile.
I am a big proponent of what you imply: the best leaders are massive next exporters of top talent. Once you explicitly compensate for that, the optimizers will destroy your organization by promoting mediocre people.
Counter-counterpoint: it’s not so beautiful (rather middling, IMO) that a well-considered denser design couldn’t achieve both nicer aesthetics and better usability (so much scrolling, ugh).
One year of disappointments.
> Dividing by a string fails during compilation with a type error, while dividing by zero only fails during runtime. In the mathematical sense, there's no fundamental difference between these cases – division is only defined for divisors that are non-zero numbers.

It seems there is a fundamental difference: zero-ness is a value property while number-ness is a type property. That makes the latter trivial to check at compile time.

> That's why we eliminate the border between compile-time and runtime errors – all errors are runtime errors.

That seems like a step back from having an editor type-check your code.

> By crafting high-quality tooling with dynamic analyses such as fuzzing, we try to still be able to show most errors while you're editing the code.

But fuzzing takes more resources than typechecking. I'd prefer to always do the latter, and make the former optional , as Haskell does with QuickCheck.
I think El Salvador has a very well run media-and-public relations department that creates media and guidelines for publications in different markets (countries). It relies on social media, instead of relying on traditional public broadcasting like German's Deutsche Welle, British BBC or U.S Voice of America.

This has given El Salvador lots of "soft-power". What I've seen is that it will talk about (well researched) the target audience's pain points and show how El Salvador solves them.
Yeah sure, really expensive until the accumulated tech debt prevents any productive work from being done. Correct a typo? Sorry boss, takes at least 1 year, shit hits the fan when you change labels like that (the truth). How much is your salary? Oh ok... let's not do that then.

Managers throw more people at the problem to improve productivity, only for the new people to need training. Okay, let's have the new people develop everything from scratch. Wow, that's fast... initially, but they throw code quality out of the window to reach feature parity asap, crippling productivity in the process again. Rinse and repeat.

Or, or... give people the time to improve things. Nobody wants to pay for quality in software until they realize how much it costs them to neglect quality. Unfortunately, some people never realize, cut their losses after a dozen rewrites, and launch the current half-assed iteration. No, it didn't work out for them.
I'm not familiar enough to read between the lines, could you add a little context? Is the issue poor identification, or is cloudflare shielding pirates?
not wrong but - notice that this states a principle from the point of view of a single individual only. Certainly other "lenses", frameworks or mission statements are relevant?
I've heard this stated in a simpler form: that every institution eventually evolves to serve and protect its own interests first and foremost. My dad always used the term "petty fiefdoms".

I like to think it was the awful "Type II" people who insisted that "wasn't a thing", but it was probably the innocence and naiveté of the Type I's.
I have been using the 1 second a day app from 2016. Today will be the 8th year of my journey, and it feels very nice to look back at the compiled videos. I don’t remember life in 214/15 because of much stress, but 16 onwards is a colorful memory.

Shout out to the 1se app! Its been great.
True, but then how do problems actually get solved? Perhaps only by agents that would benefit if the problem were solved.

For instance, send UNICEF into nations with extreme poverty, and you will get back a bunch of sad stories, a bigger UNICEF, and a larger population to feed. Send a cigarette company, and magically the people will find a way to create an economy to fund their nicotine addiction. There are other solutions to the plagues of poverty, such as civil war, narco-states, natural resource extraction, and refugee migration.

Not your intent? Well, you probably didn’t actually want to solve the problem; you just wanted to feel good about your intent to solve the problem, and now I ruined it for you, so I’m the problem.
The Bretton-Woods paradigm was already in collapse at the advent of bitcoin due to the corresponding growth of the US trade deficit as the US stopped producing/exporting and began massive consumption from the east.

The USA is in a debt spiral spending $659B on interest on debt annually (13% of tax revenue) while running larger and larger deficits. This cannot really be escaped, and it's impact on inflation is becoming unavoidable.
What products/companies have a great premise?
"A premise is the foundational belief that shapes a user’s behavior. A premise can normalize actions that people otherwise might not take, held back by some existing norm.

A good premise gives you context. It sets the stage to make you more comfortable doing something that can be hard to do.

A great premise gives you permission. It tells you it’s ok to do something that you otherwise aren’t even sure is ok to do."
We're talking about a hypothetical product anyways, so how would you know how much time it took to write?

When you're trying to figure out a format to archive all your source footage in once you're finished with a project, ultra-high capacity optical media could be fantastic -- it's not going to fail catastrophically like hard drives do, and the assumption is that it's far cheaper too. As well as taking up less space.

And for archiving stuff, who cares if it's a bit slower, as long as you can just leave a copy operation running overnight or something? And scratches are a non-issue for archival. Discs are kept in cases or caddies. And basic scratches can be fixed anyways. We're not talking about teenagers throwing loose CD's in their glove compartment here.
How is that relevant to the current discussion?

Besides, I hate this sentence. It is very wrong, or true for any OS, whichever you prefer, and I'm seeing it more and more often. This kind of falsehoods doesn't need to be spread like this. Linux just doesn't get in my way and it has just worked for how I've been using my computer for years. To the contrary, the desktop environment and tools it lets me use are very efficient for me.
I think it’s due to the WSJ piece on this program, comments here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39491968
It’s the same reason a demonstrably racist person can’t make racists jokes, but a demonstrably not racist person can get away with racist jokes.

Where the statements are coming from makes a huge difference in their reception.

“The earth is greening” is a popular argument from climate change deniers as “proof” that we’re not currently living in a catastrophic upset of species diversity (we measurably are).

The problem with “the earth is greening” is that, while it is true that the earth is green for longer, and that the brown is around for less time, this is measurably not a good thing, and it also completely ignores that desertification is also measurably occurring at staggering rates.

The green parts are more green than brown, but they’re also shrinking. Extreme weather events are increasing in frequency.
I’ll bite. Your first linked study does not say what you hope it does. In fact, it’s hopelessly lost and irrelevant. Here’s a passage that makes it clear “remote” is conflating multiple unrelated concepts and that the quantitative metrics are like Elon asking me to print out my code to determine “programs written per month”. A remote New Zealand vs Seattle worker is very different than a 1000 head site deeming two people organizationally distinct enough to plop in separate campuses.

We find that distant teammates impose negative externalities on the mentorship of teammates sitting together. These externalities can explain about a third of proxim- ity’s impact. Furthermore, before COVID-19, adding a new hire in another building reduces feedback among proximate teammates (who predate the new hire), while adding a new hire in the same building has no such impact. Teams’ attempts to ac- commodate distant teammates by, for example, moving in-person meetings online, have substantial negative externalities.7
Our findings indicate that additional mentorship has an opportunity cost: engi- neers who sit near all their teammates write fewer programs. Our difference-in- differences estimate suggests that proximity reduces programs written per month by 23 percent (p-value = 0.008), with similar effects on total lines of code and total files changed. The effects on output are present for both junior and senior engineers but are particularly pronounced for senior engineers, who do most of the mentoring.
The mechanism has not evolved to "curtail life". The changes that happen in the body with activation of the HPA axis and SNS are beneficial in times of stress. They shift glucose towards the muscles, reduce energy use by the digestive system a, and shift the immune system towards innate immunity in order to deal with immediate threats to the body.
Do white people had right of self determination in apartheid South Africa? Did that give them the right to treat black people the way they were treated?
> Competition isn't a panacea that makes everything bad go away.

Nobody said it did.

I'm not making a moral claim, i'm saying that it is a matter of reality that nobody can predict the future perfectly and that effort from any individual is a limited resource. So it makes sense sometimes for an individual to just press on in the direction they've chosen, and not "waste" time reevaluating too often.

You can either have one central authority that dictates a single direction, and forces all effort down a single path. Or you can have a more diffuse strategy that explores the solution space in multiple directions simultaneously. Competition, in the context I was referring to it, is basically just the difference between breadth first, or depth first search. I wasn't making a claim about what motivated the search in the first place.
> mitigate the risk of public meltdowns like Tay [0], which now serve as PR case studies

Isn’t this current affair a public meltdown?

At this point, anyone who doesn’t think that Netflix and Google aren’t involved in a Nazi-level propaganda is either misinformed or part of the plan to erase White people from History.

All of the kids know.

There’s been countless memes about Google rewriting history with falsehoods, and Bing branding itself around giving the straight, dark answer. Everyone’s sharing screenshots of Google’s absolutely blank homepage on November 19th. Everyone’s sharing those pics of Google today, whether or not they are true, Google is getting a bad rep escalating by the day.

If given the choice between being criticized either way, wouldn’t it better to be on the side of the truth?

Google has chosen the alternative path.
I would say that a lot of the economy feeling bad is due to shrinkflation and jacked prices which happened during Covid that will never return to “normal.” Even if inflation is normal this year, it will still feel bad compared to recent memory, because in the last couple of years it increased by much more.

There is another aspect where most people I know (including low income in low cost of living areas) can often live comfortably, but some things like buying a house are absolutely less accessible.
I think aspects of big tech employee evaluations are to blame:

- competitive or zero-sum performance evaluations (aka stack ranking)

- short evaluation windows (3 months or 6 months)

- two consecutive bad evaluations get you terminated

- KPI-driven evaluation: if you can't show numbers, you didn't do it

This basically means:

1. Someone investing time in creating long-term value will always lose out to someone focused on short-term value and may actually get fired by this system.

2. Certain types of projects will never be worth doing in this incentive model. Quality improvements that can't be quantified are not worth doing. If it costs 10x more effort to quantify the impact of some work than actually doing it, that work will never get done. Any project that spans longer than the evaluation window (either to execute or to show results) is not worth doing. Small arbitrary quality improvements in different parts of the system are not worth doing.