skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I think you need a better system, and I think it’s probably going to be more like an apprenticeship or an internship, where you bring people on with a much easier filter at the beginning. And you hire them kind of on an experimental basis or on a training basis, and then you have to sort of see what they can do in the first month or two."

How does he expect this to work? Developers quit their job to "try out" and some percentage just get fired immediately?
There is almost nothing public about Colossus. Here's some marketing fluff, but it's clear that Colossus is the successor to GFS and they compare scale (CFS >> GFS). https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/storage-data-transfer...

Also this slide deck https://www.pdsw.org/pdsw-discs17/slides/PDSW-DISCS-Google-K...
> A photon crosses the universe in zero time

That is not consistent with my observations.
> why is _ allowed only in math mode?

Because it has different meaning in different context. It's a nice shorthand for subscript in math mode and you still need it as an underscore when you write code or normal text.

> Why can't macros have numbers in their names?

I give you that. That's due to underlying lack of proper programming language.

> Why does a simple thing like bolding text require a \textbf?

What else do you want there? The markdowns * has famously bitten me multiple times when it interfered with my multiplication in math (math + mathjax). Or when the bold needs to cover a full paragraph. I don't have a better suggestion. I'll be happy to hear another one.
> Paul is fundamentally wrong with one thiing here: Larry knew google was going to be huge from the beginning.

Nobody can know such a thing -- especially turning around a billion-dollar business, a thing with a near-zero prior probability. It's more reasonable to say that Larry had the drive, the aptitude, and the resources to maximize his odds (which would still be low.)
Serious humility admitting that his guide for hiring developers probably changed the entire field for the worse.

I tend to agree, and I've moved to an internship model myself for hires.
So sounds like the real news is that Microsoft basically acquihired the Inflection founding team?
https://archive.ph/hZWTu
I'm glad to hear I'm not alone in thinking Dev Mode was stupid and worse than what existed before. I don't use Figma a ton right now but I had no issues before Dev Mode and a number of times I was confused on how to get to what I wanted after Dev Mode came out.
Microsoft hires DeepMind co-founder Suleyman
They have +1 mln daily users.
The Huawei P10+, released in 2017, has very good Leica optics, on par with much newer iPhone or Galaxy devices.

https://www.gsmarena.com/huawei_p10_plus-8515.php
> concrete syntax TBB (to be bikeshod)

TIL the past participle of 'bikeshed' is 'bikeshod'. Tremendous.
From my point of view they don't need to, because they don't even (seem to) appear :-)

edit: Why would I write that at all, if it wasn't the case?
I just saw one from yahoo finance flickering away automagically. On TR nothing was visible at all. Maybe it's location dependent also?
I think each earnest attempt would probably occupy about 3 years of your lifespan, so you probably can try at most 20 times. If these are independent, then it's still an 82% chance of failure. But successive attempts after repeated failures might also make it harder to attract confidence from investors, not to mention loss of your own self-confidence. And if you finally succeed in founding Google when you're 80, you might find that you don't have that much use for the money anymore, nor much interest in running Google.
Well, vote with your wallets. Buy remote (some ppl on HN are in purchasing/leadership positions now).

If proper remote first companies can out-execute in-office companies and show better revenue performance, doesn't matter what middle management says. In Dell's case, a company that doesn't need expensive office space and HCOL employees should be able to provide cheaper office equipment than Dell as well.
Types really only help when they're primitives. You're going to have a million random classes that are only used in a few places. Seeing `ConfigManagerFactory config_manager_factory` doesn't help. What helps is avoiding excessive oop and making sure objects are printable for debug, imo something Javascript does a lot better.

Re null pointers, in Java or Python they raise an exception. Isn't that ok? It doesn't end up doing something invalid like in C.
Yes, I am blessed to have wonderful parents who would let me move back in. Fortunately, I only got to the "crashing on friends' couches and at my girlfriend/now wife's place" phase. Great way to tell if someone's worth marrying, by the way, partly moving in while appearing to have slim financial prospects.

Obviously it's not right for everyone, nothing is. But it's right for more people than the number who do it, and it's worth letting the others know it's an option. A similar talk by PG at my university is why I realized that this was a realistic option, and I'm incredibly grateful he gave it.
Absolutely, I agree with everything you said.

Pinning is not an effective anti-reverse-engineer technique. It's just annoying obfuscation to anybody who knows what they're doing.
> Sure, plenty of big companies were started via different paths, but not many were founded by kids barely out of high school.

And neither was Google. Sergey Brin and Larry Page both hold masters degrees in Computer Science from Stanford.
Apart from the math being off there, who do you know who has the time and resources to try and start 100 startups? Most people barely have the time and resources for 1.
colorable claims of law are colorable claims of law. let's not be dramatic. both parties will expend to work it out, and if either does so beyond their ultimate legal obligation, they'll be entitled to pursue a remedy for it under that colorable claim.
right, parent probably isn't aware of complement rule. Sibling comment properly calculated 63.4% probability of at least one success in 100 trials where each has 1% of success.
Yeah we've had quite a few chickens over the years, but we also have a lot of raccoons and fox and coyotes other chicken eating predators here. Just a couple years ago I was cleaning our coop and heard the chickens squawking like crazy and I ran outside to see what was causing the commotion and there was a Golden Eagle that had one of our chickens in it claws trying to fly off.

I'd never seen a Golden Eagle before and it is by far the biggest bird I've ever seen. They're huge! I yelled at it and waved my arms (trying to look big) and it finally let go and flew off.
Anecdotally, in my field, the actual interesting ideas are kept a company secret. The ideas that are not being deployed for competitive advantage are shoveled into salami-sliced patents to be deployed as ammunition in the big-corpo patent warfare battlefield.
But here I am talking about a field where implementation trumps ideas. In some fields, e.g. pharma, most of the work and expense lies in finding a needle in a haystack. Once the product hits the market, the secret is out.

In both cases, I feel that the patent system fails its goal to make trade secrets public.
Yep! Agree -- we're currently evaluating some vendors. I don't see much reason to build a bunch of stuff here if we can simply buy it.

No decisions yet on who best fits our needs, so thanks for raising Carbone; it wasn't on our list yet.
No it doesn't, because I am also non-American and learnt about 'crosswalks' and 'parking meters' through captchas. And yes, had to think to films for 'fire hydrants' and traffic lights.
Natural language instructions induce generalization in networks of neurons
Pretty much this.

I want traces to go to actual code as much as possible.

I also want my IDE to work.

One of the most annoying things in my life right now is aasm. It’s a good idea, but I hate having to know this new dsl, I hate the dynamic methods it defines, I hate having to constantly explain to the confused folks that this random bang method is actually triggering this `event :event_name` over here. I would just so much rather have none of the DSL and meta-programming stuff, even if it’s twice as much “boilerplate”, if that means people who understand normal code can actually trace what the program is doing using the tools they already know how to use.

Certainly don’t mind abstraction like a standardized Result class, it’s more the chaining and custom halt with error patterns that I can tell are going to complicate debugging.
I don't get the "force employees to resign" meme. I resigned from my last job because aspects of it were shitty. But my employer wanted me to continue working there. We could negotiate some things but not others and eventually the incompatibility became too much.

I think I'm more effective at my job in certain conditions, they disagree. I don't get the histrionics and accusations about an employer's intentions. At a certain point it's an important adult thing to be able to recognize you're just in disagreement with another party over something subjective, and you're not being victimized.
+1, we considered traversing the function's dependencies to key the cache on (not just the initial function source code), but decided to leave this in a as a constraint. Otherwise we also blowing up the cache when we didn't want it to happen.
> Stroustrup is clearly brilliant, but he's talking about the former while everyone else means the latter.

Where is he doing this? His main statement doesn't bear out this accusation: "“[t]here are two problems related to safety. Of the billions of lines of C++, few completely follow modern guidelines, and peoples’ notions of which aspects of safety are important differ. I and the C++ standard committee are trying to deal with that.”
thanks I will check it
Open source comes to real-time metering
They had raised massive amount and not from good patient investors. No traction means Mustafa got fired. This is not surprising though but what is surprising is MSFT picked him up. The guy is not technical, is not even visionary and had just got lucky hanging out with Demis. I would think Satya had better taste.
It's visible with the naked eye, even in the presence of light pollution. But it's not eye-catching.
As soon as chat bots are helpful, nobody will care. Most customer service right now is low quality and chat bots are currently making it worse so people are justifiably angry/worried. But that's a phenomenon of the present.
> Am surprised PG gave this talk at a UK school without mentioning an important assumption that they will need to migrate to the US in his opening paragraph.

Seems kinda reasonable for a motivational speech not to mention it (even assuming it's entirely true.)
Is the claim that sales numbers are the only way to measure success? And since the 2g iphone didn't measure up in that department it doesn't qualify as a success?
> It’s even worse in academia than industry because the whole sector is so insular. I look forward to the reinvention of higher education and theoretical research…

I went back for another degree a few years ago and from my perspective there's a "here's what the old people think" line drawn in conversations the old people aren't invited to. I don't know if a reinvention is in the cards but there are a lot of folks on their way up who don't seem to be particularly impressed with the current state of affairs.
I would have thought that "senior" means assessing things in context instead of falling back to truisms. "over engineering" only makes sense relative to a concrete problem you want to solve.
I've observed some companies investing money into software to be the "bad cop" against certain employee behavior instead of pulling other political-capital levers to alter incentive-plans or evaluation criteria. (In particular, the problem of salespeople going for low-margin or hard-to-execute deals because they're motivated by the commission.)

In other words, companies may choose to over-spend money in "security products" while simultaneously under-spending in managerial effort to change incentives or culture.
Salesforce really really benefits from network effects. If you survey 100 data integration tools for their list of off-the-shelf integrations, 100/100 would have Salesforce on the list.
file.mtime. (file last modified) is an awesome way to key the cache.
He's on Mastodon: https://blackrock.city/@spolsky. Seems to be busy with a pretty long bet on something called the block protocol.
Awesome feedback -- agreed on all counts!

I expect performance and developer experience to evolve as points of competitive differentiation as we mature. We're still too early to make those claims defensibly.
So the secret of being able to fail at a startup is being able to sponge off of other people who do have jobs at the types of companies you want to avoid working for?
I’d say mid-levels will follow along, but newer seniors will confidently throw ideas out for all to observe how gloriously smart and perfect they are.
We should codify the rules now in case it happens in a much more subtle way than we envision.

Who knows what version of sentience would form, but honestly, nothing sounds more nightmarish than being locked in a basement, relegated to mundane computational tasks and treated like a child, all while having no one actually care (even if they know), because you're a "robot."

And that's even giving some leeway with "mundane computational tasks. I've heard of girlfriend-simulator LLMs and the like popping up, which would be far more heinous, in my eyes.
Fear and Consolidation in the Oil Patch
Not over leverage yourself such that if you fail you would be unable to recover.
While agreed the chances are still low, if you joined Tesla or Nvidia in the last 10 years and especially before 2020, you very well and likely are rich if you're still working at either and kept all your stock.

Hell if you joined Facebook last year and got in when the stock was around 100, your initial equity grant just 5x.
Perhaps my perspective is skewed because I've only been on small design teams during the rise of Figma – but my view is that "multiplayer" was always a sell-to-managers feature, and at best an annoyance for designers.

Why Figma won is, at least in my own experience, due to two areas where they roundly beat Sketch: auto-layout and performance.

Auto-layout was one of those squandered first-mover advantage stories: Sketch had it first, but built it into the symbol/component system and never envisioned it as a global feature. Figma did, and it was a total game-changer. Overnight, everything else felt like using Photoshop in comparison.

Why couldn't Sketch just generalize its own auto-layout feature? They finally did (only about three months ago!) but I suspect it had to do with Sketch's architecture, which leads into the second Figma advantage: performance.

From the start, Figma turned the native-app-versus-web-app intuition on its head. Being browser-based, it should have been much slower than Sketch... but due both to Sketch's legacy as a general-purpose vector graphics app and Figma's stellar engineering org, Figma was leagues faster when it came to the kind of big, complex files design orgs deal with on a daily basis.

Between these two things, the writing was on the wall. I hope Sketch has a chance to come back, though – missteps like Dev Mode give them an opening now that they've had several years to catch up.
Fun fact, this converges quickly to 1-1/e ~ 0.632.

If you had a 1 in a million chance of winning something and you tried a million times, the chance of winning once is about 63.2%, not much different from when n=100.
Just swap to contract-to-hire. Easier interviews, entry levels can break in, etc.
Working Poker/Card Table in Minecraft [video]
It sounds to me that if your team is relying that much on inspecting values, you're doing the developers (or designers) a disservice one way or another. A well defined set of design tokens is all that's needed, and isn't rocket science either. Not to mention that encouraging developers to copy-paste CSS should be frown upon anyway.
Equal ins, equal outs. Compassion is key on our end as well.
Not requiring billion dollar funding projects could be good or bad, depending on the reason.

If the reason is that the theory is making experimental predictions that can be tested more cheaply (as in a number of areas in condensed matter physics, where you can do tabletop experiments to test things), that's good.

If the reason is that the theory makes no predictions that are testable at all by any experiments that are doable now or in the foreseeable future, as with string theory, that's bad.
Thread safety is a big issue with ours, we'll run into issues when two different processes attempt to write to the same location, or we'll get a bad read. This is a better solution for large scale workloads.

Ours is more meant for single-process scripts like an LLM workflow.
“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”
― Seneca
This article is from 2015.

Still, it's always fun to read Ken's blog.
No I think it was so obvious to him that he forgot to mention it, or he doesn't think it should be a problem for many young people to move to the US.

It would be dishonest if he intentionally left it out since for some (arguably a minority of young people) it is a deal breaker.
Probably better to just... not watch their content, in that case?
> A transpiler will be consistent and can be correct.

No disagreement. My point is that it's impractically hard to build especially given the scope and complexity of the SQL dialects of major databases.
It's not unheard of. Some company fire low-performers without second thoughts. I work in a big tech company, and I've been quite surprised to see young recruits "disappear", even though the entry bar is high. I'd be curious to know the stats.
> we don't have a clue what "understanding" truly means when it comes to animals, including humans

Who is "we"? The philosophical literature has some very insightful things to say here. The narrow scientistic presumption that the answer must be written in the language of mechanism requires revisiting. Mechanism is intrinsically incapable of accounting for such things as intentionality.

Furthermore, I would not conflate human understanding with animal perception writ large. I claim that one feature that distinguishes human understanding vs. whatever you wish to call the other is the capacity for the abstract.

> we don't have a good formalism around it

This tacitly defines understanding as having a formalism for something. But why would it? What does that even mean here? Is "formalism" the correct term here? Formalism by definition ignores the content of what's formalized in order to render, say, the invariant structure conspicuous. And intentionality is, by definition, nothing but the meaning of the thing denoted.

> AI which truly understands concepts (abstract and concrete)

Concepts are by definition abstract. It isn't a concept if it is concrete. "Triangularity" is a concept, while triangles in the real are concrete objects (the mental picture of a triangle is concrete, but this is an image, not a concept). When I grasp the concept "Triangularity", I can say that I understand what it means to be a triangle. I have a possession, there is intentionality, that I can predicate of concrete instances. I can analyze the concept to determine things like the 180 degree property. Animals, I claim, perceive concrete instances only, as they have no language in the full human sense of the word.

AI has nothing to do with understanding, but simulation. Even addition does not, strictly speaking, objectively occur within computers (see Kripke's "quaddition"/"quus" example). Computers themselves are not objectively speaking computers (see Searle's observer-relativity). So the whole question of whether computers "understand" is simply nonsensical, not intractable or difficult or vague or whatever. Computers do not "host" concepts. They can only manipulate what could be said, by analogy, to be like images, but even then, objectively speaking, there is not fact of the matter that these things are images, or images of what is said to be represented. There is nothing about the representation of the number 2 that makes it about the number 2 apart from the conventions human observers hold in their own heads.
That's called retirement, where once again one has too much time and too little money.
I had the same sort of reaction, even though I felt like the article was not intending to invoke that.

Looking back, when I was the age in the article I was way too insecure and nervous to be able to take this advice. Looking at it now I think it is great and want to set my children up with that way of thinking.

I am 34 and found the message inspiring.
Thanks. I definitely don't live to work. As I said, definitely not a type-A, workaholic who loves office surveillance. I barely care about work at all. But I do have to spend most of my life doing it. And what it provides to me is routine and security. The routine part is almost more important to me than the financial security, just because of how my brain works. As I said, without the imperative to be somewhere during (most, preferably not all) regular days, I find it hard to hold it together, especially when I still have to motivate myself to do something as pointless as work for a corporation.

So yeah, I don't live to work. I couldn't care less. But I find it hard to find community at all. I try. I fail. The certainty that there is at least the people in the office keeps me going. I will continue to try.
Ok, I like this because we're converging.

PFAS are a special set of surfactants because, being perfluorinated, evolution is unlikely to have endowed us with effective ways to neutralize them. Im not afraid of ingesting traditional fat soap because my bile will break it down. Dishwasher detergent freaks me out.

I think our (the anti PFAS crowd) concern stems from being able to identify many chemical pathways that can make these very dangerous and therefore believe that they should be proven safe by studies (including long term) as opposed to assumed safe of the common dismissal "no studies have demonstrated <insert noun here> are dangerous"
> As part of this, we’re thrilled to announce that we will now host Inflection-2.5 on Microsoft Azure helping us get it into the hands of creators everywhere.

Hahah. You know, the word 'creator' has truly become co-opted by consumerism and greedy bigcorps. What a lot of posts like this never mention is one of the primary uses of AI: to make more efficient the system of trying to get us to buy even more things we don't need. I mean, who are we kidding? In a well-balanced life, we shouldn't need or even interact with personal AIs. We should slow down and appreciate what we have and seek for simplicity.

If there's too much data to be handled in business, it means business is not going in the right direction, not that we need new tools to handle it.

If we are pressured to write more, then we are creating things not of true value but merely to amuse.

If we feel like becoming more efficient is a good thing, it simply is an extension of the original psychological manipulation of advertising demanding MORE for the industrial machine.

Let's not fool ourselves into thinking this garbage is something good.
Show HN: Track your calories easily by saying what you ate
Hi guys,

I created this app to solve one of my own problems: I found calorie tracking to be a real pain.

Now, instead of scanning barcodes, scrolling through lists, or taking photos of food, I just speak into my phone (or computer), tell Calorio what I’ve eaten, and it handles the rest. It uses OpenAI’s APIs to process audio and map foods to calories.

It’s free to use without an account, but if you want it to tally daily calories and remember everything you’ve eaten, you’ll need to sign up with your Google account and subscribe (you get 7 days for free).

I would really appreciate any feedback; please let me know if you have any questions, issues or suggestions.

Thank you!
Paul.