skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is what is fundamentally missing from most talk about "tech" startups by VC types these days. They're not actually interested in the nerdy stuff, just in the "disruption" stuff.

L&S were, and they hired other people who were. They didn't start with a business idea, but with a technical one. They filled in the blanks on the business side after they survived the .com crash.

I didn't get to Google until 2011, but it became clear to me after joining that in the past they had gone on a very nerdy mission to hire all the nerdy people and collect them into one place to do nerdy things.

(Unfortunately that nerdy thing ended up being selling ads really efficient, but that's another story.)

My fundamental point is that the Google story is very unlike the kind of stories that YCombinator or a16z like. It started, like you said, as a set of intellectual/technical interests. The other stuff, that VCs today like, came later.

In a way they did the opposite of the usual advice. They started with the hammer (the tech) rather than the nail (the business problem.) They certainly didn't start with a "Like X but for Y" statement like seems to be desired by VC today. And they didn't look like the typical .com story at the time (which was usually: give us lots of VC $$ so we can sell something on the web that is currently not sold on the web, but we'll just use the $$ to buy customers and make no profit...)

I would posit that if today's Google came to YCombinator today they'd be shown the "no thanks" door.
Have you tried disabling the compositor (Shift + Alt + F12)? I've found that sometimes fixes graphical issues. No guarantees, but if you haven't already, it's worth a shot.
Between this and the Mistral deal (that’s currently under investigation by the EU), Microsoft looks to be really trying to get back into the monopoly business with AI.
Yes they do and I actually think it is a fair way to hire.

In other professional areas if you want entry level salaries of 150k that can get you up to 500k you have to take extra education like masters, mbas or whatever, which means time and money. In software engineering you have to spend hours in hackerrank or leetcode and I would personally prefer to spend that time in a big company as an intern, even as a grown professional in the same way you take management programa. I think that time would be more profitable than doing brain teasers and for sure we (the company and I) will get to know each other.
Ask HN: What is your experience with ZeroSSL?
Last month, Let's Encrypt made some changes to their certificate chain in order to reduce traffic exchange during a TLS handshake and also their operating costs; the details are explained here [1].

As a result, any certificates issued (or renewed) after Feb 8th will not work on older Android devices (< 7.1.1), unless the ACME client has been configure to request an alternate certificate chain. The "alternate chain" workaround will also stop working on June 6th.

I need to support these older Android devices so I am looking for alternatives. I have seen ZeroSSL mentioned a few times; it is also the default CA for acme.sh (the ACME client I am using nowadays) [2]. They have a number of paid plans but ACME certificates are free [3].

I'll be testing this over the next few days, but I would also like to ask if people here have experience with ZeroSSL (good or bad :-). Any feedback would be helpful.

[1]: https://letsencrypt.org/2023/07/10/cross-sign-expiration.html

[2]: https://github.com/acmesh-official/acme.sh

[3]: https://zerossl.com/documentation/acme/
Natural Input for WebXR in Apple Vision Pro
> Our default state as humans is pretty awful and materially deprived, so I think making technology to improve our conditions is good.

It's not a dichotomy! When I rail against technology, I am not saying that everyone need go back to the stone age. But don't you think there might be a happy medium?

At least personally, I've found that giving up a fair amount of technology in many cases has actually improved life in ways that I didn't think possible. Not everyone needs to be ascetic, but we seem to be headed to a life very tightly integrated with technology, and I think it's arguable that THIS POINT is past the point of that happy medium.
Call a contract organization and bring in a few people for a 6 month contract. At the end of the contract offer jobs to the good ones.

6 Months is only because that is what contract organizations want - you can buy the good people out sooner, but they need 6 months from people to make their budgets work. 6 months is plenty of time to ensure you know if someone is bad or just slow to get productive, but not too long to pay someone who is not worth it.
The contract to hire contracts I've worked as a developer the past 30 years were either 3 month or 6 month periods and 40 hours per week.

No offense but I'd be highly suspicious of someone offering contract to hire only 10 hours per week, it doesn't sound like the company has much skin in the game.
This seems like a non-sequitur. I don't see that there's any way to interpret the title that doesn't imply there are new discoveries in the laws of physics.
Good questions! You made me check the docs because those seem like very legitimate issues. So firstly, DiskCache by default just checks the function name, not the source code, but you could hack it to include the source code. I personally usually just deleted the cache if I knew the function meaningfully changed.

And it does support ignoring certain args yes.
Best not to use the default browser on any device.
Lightweight Search in Eleventy
Poker is actually a good analogy. It is luck in the short term but skill over the long term. You can't confidently predict that you will win any specific upcoming hand but, given a particular set of opponents, you can reasonably predict whether you will be up or down over a number of hands. I may beat Chris Moneymaker on a hand or two but he's going to take all my money over the long haul.

The insight here is to only play in games that you have the advantage (or are at least evenly matched) and be very, very careful not to put yourself in a position to go bust on any one hand.
After rejection, how do yo move on?
For the non-technical founders around here, I have a question:

Who recently faced rejection from a popular startup accelerator? (Y Combinator, Startup School, 500 Startups, etc.) I know it is a tough pill to swallow.
I'm eager to learn and grow from this experience. I'm reaching out to this community because I know many of you have been in my shoes before.

I'm interested in hearing about how you handled your rejection, what steps you took afterward, and most importantly, what you learned from the experience.
Did you apply again with the same project or pivot to a new idea? Were there specific aspects of your application or pitch you changed that made a difference the next time around? Any insights or advice would be greatly appreciated as I navigate this setback and plan my next moves.

Thank you!
Yup, syndrome versus disease.
Wouldn't a personal AI help you live a more well-balanced life, allowing us to offload tasks to it so we can appreciate the world around us and simplicity, rather having to do it all ourselves?
For the uninitiated, can you explain like I’m five? Why are GaN chargers worse?
I beg to differ. An uncle purchased a beautiful lot for me right next to the Sea of Tranquility decades ago. Part of the selling point was that there isn't imminent domain on the Moon!
Knowing that worse case you get to go back home to live with mom and dad or ask them for money is not having a “high risk tolerance”
I think more aggressive use of probationary period, and more narrative interviews would probably work fine and be less stress on both sides of the hiring
Is tech hiring great? No. Is it the absolute worse it can be? Also no. Internship or apprenticeship instead of tech interviews are just take home tests that last multiple months, and that is a huge waste of time.

Yes, broken interview system currently rewards people who interview more, but when you combine it with other signals like resume, project presentations and other things, the chances of hiring bad candidates are low. Yes, you miss out on a lot of great candidates, but that is not a problem that big tech companies need to solve. Besides, not knowing the status of your employment 3-6 months down the line is not a great thing for candidates.
> In addition, many applications within Google have switched to more database-like storage systems such as BigTable and Spanner.

And where do BigTable and Spanner store their data? ;)
I think the concern is the endocrine system that does work on the high side of ppt
Everything is trivial compared to the Moon. This is a rather obvious hundred billion dollar boondoggle, tailor made by lobbyists for milking the US taxpayers. It’s still better than spending $150B a year on wars, but not by that much, and it’s not like it’s “instead”. It’s “in addition to”. They do need to figure out the AI angle for this though, or I fear it could have difficulty in the pork barrel department of US Congress.
LLMs are the reason everyone is suddenly taking seriously the ideas that machines can be intelligent. Government officials, non-tech pundits, C-suite inhabitants, average people, everyone is now concerned about AI and its implications.

And I would say that's because of LLMs ability to predict the outcome of an experiment really well.

As for the "pretending", I think that comes from the fact LLMs are doing something quite different than humans to produce language. But that doesn't make them unintelligent. Just makes them not human.
The biggest thing missing from this talk -- something that would have been easy to include, even for a younger audience -- is that the majority of startups fail, and even many startups that do well enough end up making their founders less money than if they went to work for another company.

It feels irresponsible to tell kids how they can build the next Google, without also telling them how likely it is they won't succeed at it.

Granted, most people in their early 20s have very little to lose, so a failed startup may not be much of a problem, outside of the stress and emotional effects.
and what about accounts that never furnished an email address? unassociated/orphaned/duplicate/etc. datapoints?

full disclosure: i have not seen the raw dataset.
I'd like to think this is kind of just the cost of discovering that 1 pattern out of many thousands that is actually useful. I am going to guess the Gang of Four didn't just sit down and bang out the entire catalog of design patterns in one extremely productive programming session. They likely battle tested hundreds of different patterns, most of them being thrown out as not useful or a bad abstraction before arriving at the set they published in the book.
Seems you’re assuming this premise. Who exactly do you think would or should muster economic decisions? On what basis would they act?

The line of argument you’re developing is a well-explored garden path. I encourage you to continue developing the idea but do not embrace advocacy, for that is where you will lose your way.
Can AI Create a White Painting?
An old timey electronics person just might say, "gray."
Been pretty happy with my GaN Anker brick, which is 150W and smaller than not only the 87W Apple brick, but also the 140W Apple brick and can charge up to 4 things instead of just one. It packs into my laptop bag nicely and makes it unnecessary to bring any other bricks.
GaN is just the transistor technology, how does that translate to bad for batteries?
Yeah I too try to avoid positional args as much as possible, huge source of bugs and time wasting especially when refactoring code

Re inspect.getsource, I'm not sure if it'd be a huge performance impact, but if it's in the wrapper fn it will get called every time the function gets called, while if it's outside it will be called only when the decorator runs (eg when the module containing the function being decorated is imported).

eg: https://gist.github.com/mpeg/ff1d99fde06f39916b5aaadd76b534f...

EDIT: on a quick test, over 100k function calls, with inspect.getsource inside the wrapper it runs in 2.7s on my Apple M2, and that's not even including the md5 hash, so I suspect this should dramatically improve performance for you
No, for the same reasons Northrop was even allowed to bid on this: rail roads are solved technology with plenty of experts, but the US values original research over getting things done. (a railroad on the moon should have Northrop as a subcontractor to the likes of Siemens or Hitachi to make the passenger compartment airtight and verify cooling of things normally air cooled - but those are not US companies so we pay Northrup to attempt to figure out what experts already know.)
Great question! Quite often in financial models, you're dealing with "dimensions" (e.g. your revenue is broken down by product, geography, and time). To model this in Excel you have to write complex SUMIF/INDEX/MATCH formulas. Then you have to drag these formulas over 1000s of cells (if you make a mistake you're screwed, see https://eusprig.org/research-info/horror-stories/).

Causal's building blocks are "variables" and "dimensions" which makes it much more powerful to work with dimensional data.

This video explains this in a more visual way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WELP2A5IzF4&ab_channel=Causa...
Am I slowly damaging my 2020 M1 MacBook by charging it with a cheap 5V 1A USB-A to USB-C charger at night? What's the actual risk here?
The article says he wrote the hiring guide at Microsoft.

Anyway, transpiling to a widely deployed scripting language has become awfully popular in the twenty years since FogBugz did theirs. (TypeScript, JSX, etc.) Maybe they were onto something the critics didn’t see at the time.
This was a great read when I was an edgy 14 year old, now it's just kinda cringe.

It introduced me to rationalism, and appealed to the transhumanist streak in me, which is cool. But rationalists in my local area are kinda culty. They all live together and think similarly and have similar practices, very strange.

The fundamental failing with HPMOR and rationalism in general (as I have seen it) is the assumption that we can meaningfully apply Bayesian logic on-the-fly.

We as humans simply are not equipped to compute the probability or utility of choices on the fly, for any decision that would be nontrivial.
$1200, won't cover rent. Most people can't cover a $500 expense. That is the real problem.
> There is no franchise value in our industry and the work and product innovation we drive at this moment will define the next decade and beyond.

So no bird in hand, but the two in the bush are worth more?
And when you're a small company, you can be very picky, because you're hiring only a few.

Walmart cannot be so picky, as they need to maintain a workforce of 2.1 million.

You see the same thing in Google employees from nearer to its start date vs now.
And it just happened that they found this thing right before the IPO.

I don't buy it.
Well you for sure know what's it like here. We live on a ridge above a horseshoe bend on Bull Shoals lake and are surrounded hundreds of acres of public land that's forested.
This blog changed my life. I was on a path of going into research in physics, and I remember somehow finding this blog as an undergrad. It was like I was a soviet reading western news. After another year of courses where I began to notice exactly what the author mentioned, string theorists controlling purse strings and research directions, I gave up and left. Finished in applied math and went into programming. Everything I've seen has made me happy I made the switch. I'm boggled that string theory is still as big in the public's mind as it was in the 90s. I'm boggled that instead of listening to Ed Witten himself, now I'm hearing a lot of requests for AI driven applications to help researchers "make sense" of things. I help build tools for them to do these things, but I'm nervous. It reminds me of maps from the not-so-great-ages. No new real detail or information added, no new territories or topographical data, but they certainly became more elaborate and difficult to actually use and understand...but boy did they _look_ impressive.

Anyway that's awful and bad analogy is something I wonder about when i look at some modern physics...and math actually but i'm just some dumb guy. Maybe Grothendieck's ideas will save us, maybe we need another, either way it sure feels like we are in a dead zone intellecually and has for about 15-20 years to me.

All that's to say, I loved this blog and it had a bigger influence on me and my mind than about 90% of the classes I paid a bunch of money for which I now think were a waste of time, capital, intellectual effort, and overall energy.
Roadmap to WordPress 6.5, set to be released on 3/26
> I personally wouldn't have enjoyed being that kind of programmer as it was a tedious and very slow process, where the creativity of the developer was rather low as the complexities of development would not allow for just anyone to be part of it (my own assumption).

I think your assumption is incorrect. I remember programming using punched cards and low-level languages, and the amount of creativity involved was no less than is involved now.
Pretty mind-boggling how ChatGPT wrapper apps built by dev houses in Poland are absolutely crushing it, while Pi failed to gain any traction despite raising billions.
> it charges my M1 MacBook at full speed

MacBook Pro models are able to fast charge at 140W (M1 onwards). Even the original M1 MacBook Air can charge at 45W[0]. I don't think it's accurate to say that the 30W Anker charger can charge your "M1 MacBook" at "full speed".

0: https://www.reddit.com/r/macbook/comments/kdpxmm/psa_m1_macb...
Everything is securities fraud so this is a low bar.
That's probably true and my association of the two is probably subjective since at the time I was learning about Chern-Simons and saw it used in both contexts https://www.math.purdue.edu/~ebkaufma/RMP.pdf
I'm excited to introduce Dreamspace.art , a web application for experimenting with AI models on an infinite canvas. This tool for artists, engineers, and researchers is built for rapid prompt development: quickly generate hundreds of outputs, try variations, find nearby concepts, and chain outputs into new prompts.

Read more: https://www.dreamspace.art/blog/introducing-dreamspace

Let me know what you think!
I think the flexibility that Weinberg was talking about was the expansion and expression of flexibility within a narrow domain. And I think we have an immense proclivity in modern society to approach problems like climate change with a very specialized, algorithmic mind (optimize along one variable like reduction of CO2, design specialized batteries), all within a given system.

If you look at some indigenous cultures who had a more holistic viewpoint without exposure to machinery, they are much more about relationships between all living organisms and the emotionality behind those relationships, rather than using analytic methods to solve things.

So, while I understand where Weinberg is coming from, I do not think his view applies to the greater discussion. Moreover, I think he was confused about what others meant by dehumanization, especially when he talked about personalities. It is not the personalities that become rigid, but the problem-solving approaches.

My 2 cents....
I would also add ineffective onboarding. Two places I showed up 'we will not have your computer for at least 2 weeks'.
Well, someone has to run the LLMs.
Erm, comparing a 30W charger to a 90W charger is a bit like asking why your local UPS driver doesn't do a day's work in a VW Golf.

Wattage aside, I'm sure there's more to it than meets the eye. Afterall, Apple are not stupid, smaller charger means less plastic casing and less packaging means simpler manufacturing ... no doubt the Apple ones are the size they are for a reason.
Tends to? Absolutely not, but nor is it required to? Though I'd definitely give "the government" some credit for net neutrality here; I heard the term in govt spaces well before it was much of an issue.

As for "doesn't affect the people around it."

Oh, sigh. So I'm pretty familiar with local governments and the work they do, and one thing is abundantly clear; very very many people have no clue "what affects them," until the thing they're used to changes.

A TON -- probably the overwhelming majority -- of local government work is "invisible stuff that the people never notice precisely because that local government is doing its job correctly."
I understand that viewpoint (and agree with it way more than not). My governing beliefs are similar to "I'd like to invest in companies with strong leadership. Strong leadership tends to be rational. All else being equal, rational leadership tends to do things that are optimal under the taxation scheme in place. Therefore, strong leadership is somewhat more likely to be using share buybacks rather than dividends. Therefore, I'm happy/willing to invest in companies doing buybacks."

If you want to allow something like 1031 exchange for dividends or let investors decide when to withdraw dividends from their investment account and only tax them on withdrawal, you can fix the tax difference, at which point rational leadership would be more likely to pay dividends, which I think would be more transparent for all and better [at least no worse] for long-term investors.
If you’d like to try something else, RunsOn supports any type of account (https://runs-on.com). No MacOS though.
But just think of all the value created for shareholders
In the context of this article we're talking about the difference between the kind of rich you become from founding a hugely successful ("unicorn?") tech company, vs working hard for a salary for years and saving hard. It's more a qualitative thing than a specific number of dollars saved from a salary.

I'm well aware that the definition of rich can be very different in other contexts. I'm talking about the context of this article.
Yes, we all know how great countries with no free media do.

Absolute dreams.
So you're opposed to mentorship?
Calhsr would like a word