skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Starting as a techlead in a non tech org: What should I watch out for?
Basically the title. I am starting a new position as a tech lead at an organization that is predominantly non-technical. The organization is a media company that holds a special place in my heart. Does anyone have any advice on what I should be cautious of in a an environment like that?
I feel it's essentially what a library is. There is a public or private cost behind it (like taxes to pay for it), but for all intents and purposes, the information inside of it is 'free' from the standpoint of the sheer amount of use and good it can provide for that cost. It is not technically free, but as close as it can be, and the information it provides has undoubtedly paid it self back a countless amount of times to the public (getting inspired, research to create things, relaxation, etc. etc.).
It's about the forensics which don't interest me. Got me thinking about the idea of a classic space murder mystery though along the lines of Agatha Christie's "And then there were none" or "The Decagon House Murders" where it almost has to be someone present in the isolated environment. Would love to read something like that if it's been done.
Analogies don’t really work in arguments, it always just devolves into an argument about the analogy. They are useful in other contexts (like teaching, where it might be necessary to simplify something).

Overuse of analogies is one of the worst things the internet has done to discussion in general.
How do you know everyone is proud of it? For starters, I'm not.
need a few more 9's than that otherwise everyone would be dead within 50 years
I just think there's a bias involved when some people are emotionally invested in AI not being good.
“Only offered to dentists” would strike me as a bigger red flag than timeshares.
Funny thing, excel, which is the most common spreadsheet editor, does not practically support CSV files if you happen to live in countries where the default official convention is using commas for decimal points in numbers. Unless you go around and manually set stuff in how it imports it or you change your default settings. It has reached meme levels at my work.

Tab separated files are much better imo in not getting confused with the delimiter for a sufficiently sane tsv file.
The RAII from C++ is a much larger burden.
The article has weird reasoning. If we remove tailpipe emissions, which are by far the largest, then brake/tire wear emissions become visible and are next in the list to deal with. But we won't deal with the latter before the former is dealt with.
I would love to buy a little Suzuki flatbed truck. I have bad legs, so crawling into the back of a standard American (read: TALL) pickup is impossible, and even getting into one as a passenger is a challenge.
Here in the Netherlands everyone mostly uses short-term live radar tracking of rain clouds and precipitation over actual predictive weather forecasting.

In an urbanized area most "is it going to rain?" questions are short-term, e.g. is now or 30 minutes later a good time to bike home?

Perhaps this wouldn't be as useful in other areas. The Netherlands gets very spotty rain. So even if you've got a 100% chance today it's probably 1-2 hours spread throughout the day, and sometimes very heavy rain followed by a dry spell.

The only time I've seen it to be incorrect is if a moving rain cloud just barely misses you due to changes in wind patterns.
> Neither did AWS when they started. They were just building out data centers to run their little book website and decided to start selling the excess capacity.

This is a myth. It simply isn't true. AWS was conceived as a greenfield business by its first CEO. Besides, S3 and SQS were the first AWS services; EC2 didn't appear till a few years later. And it wasn't built from excess Amazon server capacity; it was totally separate.
sounds like an ideal outcome, honestly
I think it’s always useful to pay attention to the history on stuff like this and it’s a rare pleasure to be able to give some pointers in the literature along with some color to those interested from first-hand experience.

I’d point the interested at the DLRM paper [1]: that was just after I left and I’m sad I missed it. FB got into disagg racks and SDN and stuff fairly early, and we already had half-U dual-socket SKUs with the SSD and (increasingly) even DRAM elsewhere in the rack in 2018, but we were doing huge NNs for recommenders and rankers even for then. I don’t know if this is considered proprietary so I’ll play it safe and just say that a click-prediction model on IG Stories in 2018 was on the order of a modest but real LLM today (at FP32!).

The crazy part is they were HOGWILD trained on Intel AVX-2, which is just wild to think about. When I was screwing around with CUDA kernels we were time sharing NVIDIA dev boxes, typically 2-4 people doing CUDA were splitting up a single card as late as maybe 2016. I was managing what was called “IGML Infra” when I left and was on a first-name basis with the next-gen hardware people and any NVIDIA deal was still so closely guarded I didn’t hear more than rumors about GPUs for training let alone inference.

350k Hopper this year, Jesus. Say what you want about Meta but don’t say they can’t pour concrete and design SKUs on a dime: best damned infrastructure folks in the game pound-for-pound to this day.

The talk by Thomas “tnb” Bredillet in particular I’d recommend: one of the finest hackers, mathematicians, and humans I’ve ever had the pleasure to know.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.00091.pdf

[2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2108.09373.pdf

[3] https://engineering.fb.com/2022/10/18/open-source/ocp-summit...

[4] https://youtu.be/lQlIwWVlPGo?si=rRbRUAXX7aM0UcVO
You said

> the GHZ experiment [1] can rule out local hidden variable models and confirm QM predictions with no statistics at all

However, one needs to use statistics to even show GHZ works. That does sound contradictory to me. The correlations you get in experiments are never perfect and in this case they can be pretty far from perfect.
To be clear for everyone:

USB 3.0, USB 3.1 gen 1, and USB 3.2 gen 1x1 are all names for the same thing, the 5Gbps speed.

USB 3.1 gen 2 and USB 3.2 gen 2x1 are both names for the same thing, the 10Gbps speed.

USB 3.2 gen 2x2 is the 20Gbps speed.

The 3.0 / 3.1 / 3.2 are the version number of the USB specification. The 3.0 version only defined the 5Gbps speed. The 3.1 version added a 10Gbps speed, called it gen 2, and renamed the previous 5Gbps speed to gen 1. The 3.2 version added a new 20Gbps speed, called it gen 2x2, and renamed the previous 5Gbps speed to gen 1x1 and the previous 10Gbps speed to gen 2x1.

There's also a 3.2 gen 1x2 10Gbps speed but I've never seen it used. The 3.2 gen 1x1 is so ubiqitous that it's also referred to as just "3.2 gen 1".

And none of this is to be confused with type A vs type C ports. 3.2 gen 1x1 and 3.2 gen 2x1 can be carried by type A ports, but not 3.2 gen 2x2. 3.2 gen 1x1 and 3.2 gen 2x1 and 3.2 gen 2x2 can all be carried by type C ports.

Lastly, because 3.0 and 3.1 spec versions only introduced one new speed each and because 3.2 gen 2x2 is type C-only, it's possible that a port labeled "3.1" is 3.2 gen 1x1, a type A port labeled "3.2" is 3.2 gen2x1, and a type C port labeled "3.2" is 3.2 gen 2x2. But you will have to check the manual / actual negotiation at runtime to be sure.
> if Europe makes it impossible to make a profit.

Unless they stop them from shipping iPhone hardware or tax the MSRP beyond 40%, I think it's quite literally impossible for that to happen.
It's an extremely new idea to argue that restricting or stopping the imports of some good is "unfair", only becoming part of the dialog once the idea of a global economy in perpetual harmony supplants the idea of national sovereinty and strategic interest.

But the intellectual tide is turning back against globalization and tension among major world powers is returning after the long quiet following the collapse of the USSR.

Even if you think this is unfair, you should be ready to see it happen here and in many other places. That's the way the pendulum is swinging and it's got way more momentum behind it than a few online arguments can resist.

If the anti-globalization movements, protests, and violence of the 1990's couldn't stop the west from swinging towards globalization, and the anti-war movements, protests, and violence of the 1960's couldn't stop Cold War entrenchment and polarization, we're probably not going to be able to stop whatever's happening now -- and if we are, we'll need much more developed arguments than "but that's not fair!"
Product selling is proof of product selling. I wrote he is a supplement shill—-shilling for a supplement is proof enough of that.
cmd c cmd v, definitely not ideal
Just pick a path, doctor, artist, therapist, any path will do. You'll soon realize you're better than the AI, but nobody will give a shit, they'd rather have the cheap AI knockoff.
those things are all made prohibitively difficult without a smartphone. there are people in the US getting kicked off their insurance plans for not having a required smartphone. this isn't some goddamn game here, peoples lives and livelihoods are on the line and you're wondering if it might not be such a big deal clearly never having put more than a moment's thought into it.

And your malware claims are total BS There's been alternative stores on Android for years and the malware situation remains stable to slightly improving thanks to hardening of the OS that Google did resulting from the goal of supporting multiple stores. Far more people in the world use Android and bank on it than iOS so the idea that the sky will fall if Apple opens up is pure ridiculousness, utter silliness.
I don't know. But what worked in my case was typing the whole email address by hand.
This would work in San Jose because it’s a hot Mediterranean climate. Such climates have very predictable hot dry summers and cool wet winters. In Perth, similar climate, we often go month’s without rain in summer but will have several consecutive days of rain in winter.

I imagine using the previous day would have a much lower skill score in more variable climes.
> $72.3B in sales, but given they get less than 30% of that, their cut is less than 21.7B. Put that in perspective of their total revenue of 294B that year the app store represents only ~7% of their total revenue.

If you have a company with a single line of business and they were to lose 7% of revenue that is going to be a large hit. There are many industries where that exceeds the entire profit margin of the company.

But more than that, they don't have a single line of business. Suppose that a conglomerate the size of Apple had totally monopolized the world market for lithium mining. Well, that's a $350M/year industry -- it's barely 0.1% of Apple's revenue! Why should they even bother to monopolize it? The answer is, for the same reason anybody else would. Maybe the CEO of the conglomerate doesn't much care, but the head of the mining division cares about it a lot, and so do all of the customers in that industry. And antitrust violations in service of maintaining the monopoly are just as illegal and just as harmful whether it's a subsidiary of a conglomerate or an independent monopolist.

Or to put it another way, 20 billion dollars is 20 billion dollars. It motivates putting in 20 billion dollars worth of effort to hold onto it, regardless of what you're doing on the other side of the building.

> And I suspect the app store is actually a fairly costly business to run - a lot of effort goes into the decor of the walls around garden. I'm thinking app review, even content serving.

Content serving cost is negligible. Review could be arbitrarily expensive, but the experience of developers seems to imply that they're not spending a lot of resources being diligent about it -- policies applied inconsistently, updates often denied for indiscernible reasons etc. Reviewers seem to be only making a cursory inspection or relying on some kind of inadequate automated scanning tools.

Moreover, they have each developer paying $100/year, which should cover that level of review on its own, if the goal was funding the reviews and not extracting rents. Their policies imply the reverse. If the goal was to cover reviews then apps with more downloads should have lower per-download fees, since the fixed cost of reviewing the app can be amortized over more units. And yet "subsidizing" small developers doesn't fit either, because if that was your goal the first thing you'd do is stop charging $100/year to hobbyists and side projects with little or no revenue.

What they appear to be doing is providing a "discount" to hardly anyone. They continue extracting $100/year from the long tail of small timers who aren't making any money, continue extracting 30% from anyone who actually succeeds, but get to put "15%" in their PR knowing that the eligible people only represent a tiny proportion of their collections.

> I suspect apple's reasons for defending it are not primarily the direct financial benefits of it - it's probably mostly about the indirect benefits.

Which are also an issue, e.g. by thwarting competition between browser engines.
Good to see alternatives coming up to ridiculously complex serverside programming frameworks like SpringBoot, Node, etc etc.
Does your low carb diet have the same amount of protein as your prior diet?
> It's going to be an iOS-like walled garden experience.

It might be even worse. Apparently you can't even add a web app to your home screen on the Vision Pro. Vision Pro users are paying for a native app that loads youtube.com in a webview: https://christianselig.com/2024/02/introducing-juno/
My wife and I did a drive-through Safari park thing in Arkansas a few years back. You get a bag of feed each and can feed anything that's allowed to approach cars, including emu.

There's one spot where there's a bridge over what's effectively a ditch with a small creek running through it. A few emu followed us around the park, but several of them camped out on the far side of the bridge.

When I drove into the bridge, they all moved to the middle of it and boxed the car in. They wouldn't let us pass until most of them got a handful or so of food.

It was quite surreal, and I don't know that I'd enjoy trying to run a farm of large birds like that.
First it's a great way to practice your story writing. Instant feedback, and a way to measure impact.

Second, it's to create fake accounts with real post histories so that they can be sold. There is a lot of strategies and work behind this approach.

Sold accounts then look "real", so when real people endorse product X on r/buyitforlife or AskReddit threads about "what product's quality has gone down?" it looks like actual people and not a targeted marketing effort.

Long stories also make for good consensus building by hammering points that are relevant to socio-political discussions. Like when the Woke was riding high during 2016-2018 there would be constant discussions in r/relationships, AskReddit, TwoXChromosomes, etc. about abuse, to keep people constantly talking and thinking about gender issues.

You can also create "tailing" or "follow-on" accounts that post replies to the obviously BS stories, including those that post "lol what a load of BS", as that builds their history, too, and you can steer opinion by having a few of those supporting shillbots make outrageous claims for (or against) the story, and then disprove them in ways that leads the audience into intellectual positions that the posters want.
Chance of rain is defined by NWS as:

"The probability of precipitation (POP), is defined as the likelihood of occurrence (expressed as a percent) of a measurable amount of liquid precipitation (or the water equivalent of frozen precipitation) during a specified period of time at any given point in the forecast area. Measurable precipitation is equal to or greater than 0.01 inches. Unless specified otherwise, the time period is normally 12 hours. NWS forecasts use such categorical terms as occasional, intermittent, or periods of to describe a precipitation event that has a high probability of occurrence (80%+), but is expected to be of an "on and off" nature."

Source: https://www.weather.gov/bgm/forecast_terms
Look I don't mean to downplay. Or maybe I do. But we're talking about LLM replacing professional problem solvers, software architects, not generating great sounding probability modeled token distributions.
> “I wish we were better at having a standardised desktop that goes across all the distributions. This is not a kernel issue; it’s more of a personal annoyance of how the fragmentation among different vendors has perhaps held the desktop back a bit,” said Torvalds in a TFiR interview in 2018.

Absolutely NOT. I would not use Linux if it forced a desktop environment on me. The whole reason of me not using windows or osx is because they do.

This is the problem with "Linux on the desktop" becoming mainstream. Mainstream users want a company to tell them how to work with their computers. I have my own opinions.
Well, yeah, not every language uses the Latin alphabet.
been a loom user for a long time, this looks very promising

do you plan to add editing features?
Obviously, it sucks that governments are engaged in pervasive warrantless surveillance of everyone, everywhere, all the time. However, the Dutch government deserves minor kudos for not only publicly admitting it but making it a proactive announcement (instead of a vague pseudo-confession buried in some court-compelled legal response). Many other governments have been doing far worse unjustified mass spying for far longer and still refuse to willingly admit anything.
> You're missing the forest for the trees. Apple offers a curated environment largely through the curation of the app store. That curated environment is massively valuable to the average user. That's the asset Apple is trying to protect.

I am a big proponent of curation and one of the reason I'm an apple user is the high number of quality apps on the platform. But after encountering the apple publication process, it definitely feels like censorship and the lack of other options, even for applications I wrote, is stifling. I think it's better to encourage computer literacy than pretend that the outside world just does not exist (especially when there are so many scamming schemes on the app store).
> There are still some holes in UBSan, but otherwise I think you can write spatially memory-safe C more or less today without problem.

I wouldn't call it a solved problem until gcc and clang have an auto-inserts-bound-check flag that does the equivalent of a Rust panic on every array access if it's out-of-bounds, is considered usable on production code [1], and works on most major projects (that care enough to change their source to take advantage of this flag). Overall, the problem isn't so much that we don't know how to write safe C code, it's that the compiler doesn't quite have enough information to catch silly programmer mistakes, and there current situation is juuuuust bad enough that we can't feasibly make code that doesn't tell the compiler enough error out during compilation.

> The bigger issue is temporal safety, so the bigger puzzle piece still missing is a pointer ownership model as enforced by the borrow checker in Rust.

Temporal safety is interesting in part because it's not clear to me that there currently exists a good solution here. The main problem, like existing partial solutions for spatial memory safety, is that the patterns to make it work well are known, but programmers tend to struggle to apply all of the rules correctly. Rust's borrow checker is definitely a step up from C/C++, but at the same time, there are several ownership models that it struggles to be able to express correctly, even if you ignore the many-readers-xor-one-writer rule that it also imposes. Classic examples are linked lists or self-referential structs, but even something like Windows' IOCP can trip up Rust's lifetime system.

Although, at the very least, a way to distinguish between "I'm only going to use this pointer until the end of the function call" and "I'm going to be responsible for freeing this pointer you give me, please don't use it any more" would be welcome to have, even if it is a very partial solution.

[1] Don't get me wrong: the development of the sanitizers is an important and useful tool for C/C++, and I strongly encourage their use in test environments to catch issues. It's just that they don't meet the bar to consider the issue solved.
The other day I thought I had the perfect task for AI and to clean up some repetitive parts in my scss and to leverage mixins. It failed terribly and was hallucinating scss features. It seems to struggle in the code <-> visual realm.
> So many people talking about GPT-4 here, or even 3.5 when the SOTA has moved way along.

I'm talking about 4-turbo, 4-turbo preview and self hosted LLama2. What in God's name is not SOTA about this?
No, I would say that's just life experience until now.

Nothing ever wins against "we need to keep the country safe".
Nice. These guys started up, cashed in, sold out, and bro'd down all in the span of three years.
I don't understand - it doesn't appear to be in a useable state>
There are ways to inform the police, but they need to do "parallel construction" to allow information in court.
The printer. Printers have only limited memory and the smaller the people/printer ratio is, higher the chance one of the printers is stuck.
Fair, but:

Whether or not the tech can actually live up to the hype doesn't mean execs/VCs/etc won't try to get there anyway. That will, at best, result in a ton of volatility, as those trying to utilize AI figure out that it actually can't do what they want, and then have to hire engineers again, etc...

I don't know. Who knows where this is heading.
> a deep pathological fear of the underclasses rising up

At least in New York, support for the police diminishes with income. Manhattan is the anti-police borough. The richest neighbourhoods within it elect the most anti-police politicians (with few exceptions).
What about Epic's lawsuit makes Fortnite invalid?

Fortnite also is not on the most popular store on PC so it is not just about their lawsuit. They want to run a store on all platforms and have said they will be launching an Epic game store on iOS. So I don't understand why they are invalid.

But that is a clear example, they are not on the official store for iOS or Android (which also is not part of Epic's lawsuit).

As far as Facebook goes, I don't think anyone is claiming that Facebook will in fact do it so maybe tone it down a bit. But Facebook is an example of a company that has enough of a user base that they could try to convince users to download a store and likely many would since they are addicted to social media and they own Instagram.

TikTok likely could. Microsoft would be stupid to not be looking into it. Steam could be looking into it.

None of those are concrete and to my knowledge none of them have signaled that they would. But those are companies that have enough of a name and a product that they could likely very easily get users to download the App Store which turns into a gateway for others to use their store instead of the Apple App Store since it is is now on their phone.

Regardless of all of those companies, there is zero reason to discount the fact that Epic is doing this on iOS. They skip the Android Play Store and they are doing it on PC. Fortnite has a ton of market power.

Edit: Also Facebook very much has an incentive to explore this option. Not only would it be another revenue source (and maybe they could somehow tie it into their VR/AR stuff) but they have been vocal about their issues with Apple in the past.
yeah PIPs don't run for years. most of the time it's a very slow termination.