skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Expectation: As a senior, I'll get to play with the latest tech and build amazing projects!

> Reality: This legacy code isn't going anywhere, and neither am I. Let's fix some bug that happens once every full moon.

I still get to play with the latest tech to evaluate them — do I adopt them? Usually no, but that’s my choice.

Sorry man, I tried building real
projects with new tech as a junior and the tech always went to shit then too. Except for the occasional unicorn, new tech has never been fun.

Plus I don’t know about anyone else, but I sure worked on legacy code too as a junior… I’m talking fucking ColdFusion at one point.

> Expectation: Being senior means I can avoid all the boring tasks.

> Reality: Endless meetings, documentation, and code reviews… Oh, and did I mention debugging legacy systems on Friday at 6 PM?

I love meetings. That’s where I set everyone straight and tell them that they should consider this second option and it may save them (and me) a ton of money and time. There are the occasional overly-long meetings but I speak up and nip the problem in the bud.

There are some boring ass meetings that have to be done like standup but I’m not even lifting a finger. It’s like being paid to do nothing.

I also enjoy documentation personally.

Code reviews are kinda boring, no cap. But whatever, it’s not that bad. I could be cleaning a kitchen at a restaurant or fixing a stripped screw.

I’ve had to debug systems at inopportune times before but it’s happened like 5 times tops in my career.

But overall, I get way fewer shitty tasks as senior.

> Expectation: Has a million ideas on how to change this company 180 degrees! Let’s improve everything!

> Reality: Knows that nothing will change without management approval and the necessary budget.

I guess I don’t disagree with this one that much, but I never had much friction as a junior dev either.

Honestly, the problem is that most people barely have a handle on what’s going on the company and they might suggest building a bridge when we’ve been breaking ground on a tunnel for four years — no shit your idea is not going to get any traction.

Maybe read the room first?

> Expectation: Once I become a senior, I will have more time to relax.

> Reality: It’s fine, I’ll finish the work on Saturday.

Can’t say anything other than I’ve never had to work weekends in my life at a software company.

> Expectation: Once I become a senior, I will lead big projects, have a big impact, and tell others what to do!

> Reality: I miss the times when people told me what to do.

Sorry I just can’t relate to this one at all. I just love engineering, all my past projects have always worked out very well.

Right now I’m building a DIY pressure-activated water pump system in my garage and I just bought all the parts while sitting in a Target parking lot, put it together in 15 minutes, and it just worked.

I have all this knowledge and experience from doing this for 10 years and I’m still learning new things all the time and challenging myself, and when I put shit together, it works.
Ask HN: Fighting back against Roku's forced arbitration?
I received an email a few days ago from Roku telling me that they've updated their dispute resolution terms to require forced arbitration:

https://docs.roku.com/published/disputeresolution/en/us

The new terms are obviously skewed entirely in Roku's favor. They say that consumers can't sue Roku in court and can't participate in class-action lawsuits.

You can opt-out, a detail they conveniently omitted in the notification email, but it has to be in writing within 30 days.

It irritates me that Roku and other corporations are allowed to force millions of customers into spending an hour or so to read these new terms and send a letter in the mail.

Are there things that I can do as a consumer to fight back against this bad behavior by Roku? In the long term, I'll support candidates and federal bills that make forced arbitration illegal, but in the short term, what can I do to discourage this behavior by Roku and other companies?
Anything within 30minutes of PRC theatre missile range doesn't add any geopolitical security to US semi supply chain. Further extending semi supply chain to SKR/JP if anything is potentially worse than TW because US provides them with security guarantee, in region where US is weakest relative to PRC, making them even more enticing targets along with US security infra in those countries. The maximally secure supply chain one is on CONUS, and not because it can't be hit, but due to escalation risk of targetting CONUS.
Ah, I just assumed you were agreeing with the parent given the context.

Glad we agree. :)
So, it means “put it somewhere in a way that you still know which is which”?
Related:

Faster A fast concurrent persistent key-value store and log, in C# and C++ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25741670 - Jan 2021 (8 comments)

Faster – Fast key-value store from Microsoft Research - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17785002 - Aug 2018 (76 comments)

Faster – A key-value store for large state management - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17267403 - June 2018 (34 comments)
Can you find one example of an activity (outside porn) that is beneficial to all people?
> The percentage of cobalt in modern lithium ion batteries (ie: tesla/panasonic's nmc-811 cells) is only 8% of the battery material

Worth pointing out that with LFP batteries, it's actually zero percent. There are a few more cobalt free battery chemistries. But this is so far the most popular one with a rapidly growing market share that is closing in on 40% of the market. Lots of Teslas and other vehicles use them. There are a few more cobalt free battery chemistries of course. Sodium ion is getting some usage in China lately and does not involve cobalt, for example. And some of the solid state batteries don't use it either.

Cobalt isn't actually controversial because it's rare but because the way some of it is mined in Congo (i.e. with children). Most of it is actually fine and mined in a more humane way. Using children is not a hard requirement. And as the article points out recycling it is pretty doable too. And it's not all that rare either. It's by no means a rare earth.

And never mind about the other things children mine. Like copper, coal, diamonds, gold, etc. Or the fact that a lot of cobalt is also used in other industries. Like the oil refining industry, for example. Cobalt is somehow only controversial in the context of batteries. Any other form of cobalt usage is apparently not worth reporting on, scrutinizing, etc.

A lot of crocodile tears get shed over the poor children in the Congo. But only when it concerns batteries for EVs. I wonder why that is (rhetorical question with some obvious answers, I know) and whether those people actually really care. Because they sure are being awfully selective with their outrage.
I noticed this as well, but to me a mall is less like a casino and more like a simulated city - with notable exception of a clocktower, which is nowhere to be seen.

Early designs show this in detail, as they were more like sections of cities with skylights between the buildings:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galleria_Umberto_I
You know, I never really understood why ViewModifier exists at all. How is it different from an extension on View?
Love Boat Trams
Building an E-Commerce Product Recommendation System with OpenAI Embeddings
VSCode and WSL makes Windows awesome for web development
Hmm, i’m speculating but I’m thinking even the entry level software engineer has a lot of room to possibly fuck something up. Even if your architect/staff engineer comes up with a fantastic system, there’s still the possibility of the jr engineer screwing up their tiny piece and implementing a 2^n solution and then the whole system crumbles.

Conversely, there’s room for (constrained) creativity from the bottom level as well.

This sounds quite different than say, chip manufacturing where I imagine there’s more or a binary “you did the thing” or “you didn’t”. However I have very little insight into the process so I’m likely over simplifying.
Can you bear the Vision for 10 hours?
Can rewilding help save planet and not harm farming?
To be perhaps overly detailed: Hbase is an open source approximation of bigtable. Bigtable _uses_ leveldb as its per-shard local storage mechanism; Rocks is a clone+extension of leveldb.

Bigtable and hbase are higher level and provide functionality across shards and machines. Level and rocks are building blocks that provide a log-structured merge tree storage and retrieval mechanism.
Docker is literally doing nothing there but getting you a qemu binary. There are countless better, more efficient ways to do that. Namely nix.

If "running a VM" is somehow simpler with docker, you should really think about what Docker is supposedly doing for you.
Like that new search engine that's better than googly?
I mean, the ticket quota doesn't involve giving speeding tickets to people driving under the speed limit. If the sign says 35, drive 35, and you're good.
Interesting, I have had a different experience with Gemma 7B in being able to be generally useful for basic questions after a couple prompts.

It frequently gets stuck and starts outputting grammatically incorrect sentences and answers unrelated to the prompt.

I also found it answering everything with "Sure, " and wasn't able to stop even if prompted. Another thing was that every response was a list of items.

Feels like a temperature issue, but not sure. With mistral or llama I get a better session in every case so far (Only about 5 conversations with Gemma).
Not disagreeing, but see also Long Term Capital Management. These "smart" bets often work great until they don't.
I don’t think so. Karpathy is incredibly productive, I’m assuming they’re referring to obsidian being open but Karpathy having worked for OpenAI on closed source AI.
Joe Btfsplk
The thing is, the usefulness of a question answering system is in answering questions people don't generally know. We don't need an answering system for things that are common knowledge.

And it's not uncommon that certain knowledge would be, well uncommon even among experts. Experts specialize.

Since the usefulness of ornithological examples is getting exhausted, let's say one out of a hundred lawyers works in bankruptcy. If you ask a million lawyers about the provisions of 11 USC § 1129 and only ten thousand know the answer, is the answer untrustworthy, just because bankruptcy lawyers are far rarer than civil and criminal lawyers?
That's an artifact of HN's second chance pool system. The system is described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 and links back from there. About the timestamps, there are past explanations here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

Sorry for the confusion—I know it's weird but if we don't do it, then the threads fill up with other comments about timestamps, like "why is this old post ranking alongside all the new ones". The current system is imperfect but seems to be the available optimum.
My definition of understanding is not meaningless, but it appears you do not understand it.
Paul Werbos: Design Challenge for Global AGI [video]
Apparently that is not what the regulations say? I don't think us employees / employers are able to go against the regulations without legal consequences.
Lol, friend. The "mark" I was trying to hit wasn't any point about arsenic or sickness. The entire point of that post was to use "violent" as a flavor word in an attempt to be clever to show that words are wibbly wobbly. Calm down and take a breath.
Which is called text shaping.

????
I quite like this style of blog entry, it flows well once you get used to the structure.
My dislike for OF does not mean I women. I do not like host clubs as well, does that mean I hate men?
tacit programming means you don't use argument names to direct your data to the desired output. what's interesting to me about that is the unexplored possibilities of how data could be directed without names.
You will not acknowledge, in your casestudy of one, that you have not been at all impacted by pornography? In any form or fashion?
I edited the title because the original was too long, but it is not very descriptive, so mods, feel free to make a better one.
This isn’t exactly a big of a deal as you think. Sure of course China will sell older stuff to Iran and Russia because corruption and money, but they don’t actually like each other. They also don’t have 2 giant oceans to protect themselves, so they have to be careful.

China and the US have fundamentally the same goals of free trade and making sure nobody else gets nuclear weapons, there are just disagreements over spheres of influence and governance.

Russia and Iran are criminal syndicates with an enslaved population, they don’t give a fuck about the ramifications of what they do because their geopolitical strategy is just enriching oligarchs, not enriching the population. China knows the population only puts up with their shenanigans because their quality of life is getting better, so that has to keep happening and that means working with the west.

That’s why China’s “no limits” relationship with Russia ended when Russia wanted Chinese weapons in Ukraine. China just wants to shake things up, not create a new world order like the other “anti-west” countries.
One of my mentors was Steve K. at Sun who I consulted with about how badly Sun did changes. It really pissed me off that Sun wouldn't put NIS+ into SunOS because they were allegedly worried it would "reduce the incentive to migrate to Solaris."

I would say I was not particularly successful at being a 'change agent' there.
I prefer Hanlon’s razor.
I always wonder is the "safe to eat" level something that says it's not going to do you any harm, not seriously debilitate you or not kill you?
I absolutely don't buy this defeatist attitude toward technological advancement. There are plenty of things that can ruin human civilization, and AI seems like an unlikely one to me.
I have seen a lot of failed connection attempts in my logs, but never noticed substantial resource usage. Is SSH DoS a serious concern? I get the impression people are suggesting it to protect authentication, which makes basically zero sense to me.
> Rust is renowned for imposing a high cognitive load on all but the most trivial tasks.

By whom exactly? I think it's actually the exact opposite. It completely frees you from having to think about entire classes of bugs.
Was he Saul Goodman?
We really are the most invasive species.. reading about the abundance of octopuses makes me sad that 1 monkey-derived species got smart enough to invent tools and is now on its way to killing its host...
I’m curious to know if the author has spent any significant time in any place that is going to feel the brunt of the climate catastrophe. I’d invite them to spend a couple months in Delhi or Dhaka and then take another pass at this think piece. Or maybe they’re cool with taking in a few hundred million climate refugees into the US and just didn’t mention it, as many parts of South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa will have wet bulb temperatures that are unsurvivable in the next few decades.

Also, some parts just are off:

“A bigger society has more cuisines, more architectural styles, more types of fashion, more sub-genres of entertainment.” Then why are tons of languages on the verge of extinction? Why do so many apartments around the world look like IKEA exploded in it? How come the weaver I visited in Lombok is making patterns and cuts for westerners rather than their traditional stuff, and he himself was just wearing basic tshirts? How come the clothing store across from the spot I stayed at in south Goa was selling Jack Daniel’s t-shirts rather than traditional crafts? How come every gen z person is wearing what I wore in middle and high school? It’s not like SHEIN is making new niche styles for people.

“Better matching to careers” Tell that to the young men in Algiers that asked us for directions to any consulate that would maybe help them get a work visa to leave since there’s no work. Or any of the migrants getting on dangerous boats to cross the Mediterranean to do whatever work they can find. Every cousin of mine that can leave has left. There are plenty of geniuses sitting around without many options just because of where they were born, we don’t need more population to get more geniuses if we’re not even working with what we’ve got.

I’ll give him the niche markets one, though that’s more a function of communication via the Internet than it is about population numbers go up.

I don’t know, it’s hard to take a think piece like this seriously. It just reeks of privileged guy in tech that lives in a major metropolitan region of the US that hasn’t really experienced much of the world outside that niche. Living in a luxury Airbnb in Canggu doesn’t count. Happy to be wrong though.
Not that I'm in the habit of expecting worthy speculative fiction from a literary journal, but even by that standard...
>> And the problem is more - how can an LLM tell us it doesn't know something instead of just making up good sounding, but completely delusional answers.

I think the mistake lies in the belief that the LLM "knows" things. As humans, we have a strong tendency to anthropomorphize. And so, when we see something behave in a certain way, we imagine that thing to be doing the same thing that we do when we behave that way.

I'm writing, and the machine is also writing, but what I'm doing when I write is very different from what the machine does when it writes. So the mistake is to say, or think, "I think when I write, so the machine must also think when it writes."

We probably need to address the usage of the word "hallucination", and maybe realize that the LLM is always hallucinating.

Not: "When it's right, it's right, but when it's wrong, it's hallucinating." It's more like, "Sweet! Some of these hallucinations are on point!"
We use "confabulation".

It is a feature, not a bug.

"confabulation" could be "solved" when LLMs realize they are uncertain on a reply and making things up. But that requires the LLM saying "I don't know" and rewarding that more than a wrong guess. That requires a change in loss functions and not even sure if all users desire that.
Vim's model of modality and mnemonics is a beautiful, powerful, amazing paradigm. Here's the thing though - there's no such thing as the "vim-mode". None of the IDEs and editors like IntelliJ, VSCode, XCode, Android Studio, Sublime, etc., can properly emulate Vim navigation. The one exception is Emacs.

Pretty much every other IDE fails to comprehensively replicate Vim. Unless it's Vim/Neovim, vim-mode in all of them is just that - an emulation. However, Evil mode in Emacs feels much more natural. Sometimes, you forget that it's an afterthought, an extension, and not a built-in functionality.

Just that alone speaks volumes about the extensibility of Emacs.

While Evil-mode (the Extensible VI Layer for Emacs) obviously is not the most important or even built-in feature of Emacs, as a nerd and a computer programmer, if I discovered that there's a civilian plane that can perform a vertical landing, yet never actually needs to use it, I would still love that model over any other planes, even if the feature is purely accidental. The fact that it can do so alone would be great evidence of amazing engineering.

And as a die-hard Vimmer, one day I had a revelation - I realized that Emacs vims better than Vim and Neovim. While also opening possibilities for many, many other things.
And with self-driving we're moving back toward that lessened liability because who knows how the damn thing works.
If you think this is some C black magic, try reading this by the same author on creating arbitrary control structures with macros: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/mp/
> For last few months chrome devs surely been pushing some disgusting updates to UI.

In order to maintain their employment, UI designers have to make changes and push out those changes. If they stopped making and pushing any changes, eventually some bean counter from accounting would ask "why are we paying all these UI developers to do nothing".

Accordingly, you get changes just for the sake of change, all so that the UI designers can continue to receive their paychecks.
Seconded. I've read through the entire archive. He gets on some very interesting tangents and I've learned a lot of weird things.
>"in what world are you senior if I'm better at everything that you do? I can learn nothing from you."

Whoa, sounds like they are better than you at some things! Marketing themselves, excuse-making, getting others to do the hard parts of their job.
One huge reason why effect sizes are small is that you're comparing the well-being of users vs. non-users, when we know that social media harms the well-being of both groups.

It's like estimating the health effects of automobile pollution by comparing the health of people with driver licenses against people who don't have driver licenses. Since automobile pollution harms both groups, you might not see large differences between the groups, even though pollution is very harmful to everyone's health.
LTCM was flawed because it was effectively short-volatility with huge leverage and downside risk, the opposite of what this guy is doing. Those type of funds tend to eventually fail. This guy already took $10 million off the table and only bets with 1-3% of his account.
> It was only slightly slower. (Netty vs virtual threads) that could easily just come down to implementation differences.

I think this might be it. After my post I thought about it and guessed that maybe the workload was potentially not an optimal netty workload, or there are aspects to the workloak that are not well suited for netty. I am unsure, however.

> That said, it's definitely possible for the reactive libraries to simply use virtual threads whenever they do anything in parallel. That'd allow the model to avoid potential issues when calling into blocking code.

Definitely would be a great enhancement for the elastic thread pool.

> The benefit of virtual threads is making things even simpler so you don't need to understand those complicated constructs. You just spawn new threads whenever you need to run things in parallel.

Once you get used to it, in my opinion, those constructs are simpler and easier to use than the standard multithreading options in java, specifically flux and timed operations. However, some items like request scope or session scope is a problem and harder (impossible?) to do right.
Oh, don't even blame the machines.

Blame the complacency of the people who, instead of using technology for a leg up on Maslow's hierarchy, opted to join the livestock operating at the base.

Tech could liberate and support improvement, but we see this ersatz "Progress" setting up a techno elite presiding over a global plantation.
Isn't this already resolved? Those who didn't tolerate enshittification left. The passive stayed. The ones who left turned out to be relatively few. What reason is there to expect a different outcome in the future? The same pattern played out with Twitter. It really seems like the incumbents got too big to be disrupted. And now they realize they don't have to feign customer friendliness.
Erm (2011)