skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It's completely normal to distribute software projects as some form of archive

Again, I think you're missing my point

>> normalizing a requirement to download files that can issue exploits -- when there are easy alternatives that make this unnecessary -- just helps create the exact type of environment that scammers thrive in

Yes, it is "normal" and that is exactly the problem.

Ask yourself this

Is there a reasonable alternative?
Is downloading necessary?

I think you'll find that the answer to both is unambiguously "no." I think you'll also recognize that having the readable source __also__ unambiguously creates higher utility.

So you don't need to explain to me that this stuff is normal because I already understand that (and am actively demonstrating a knowledge of this). I realize communication isn't always obvious, but if someone is telling you that you're missing the point of what they're saying, please consider that you might actually be missing the point rather than doubling down. Even if you aren't, someone telling you that indicates that somewhere there's a miscommunication, and that needs to be resolved.
I thought that non-governmental business association was pro-competition; guess not.

Edit: it was a dig to the pro-competition façade some pro-business people put forward.
You're missing the subtle sarcasm here. OP is implying that companies will deem engineers making $150k+ as making policy decisions in order to continue enforcing the existing non-competes they have most likely signed.
"Prabhakar made search bad"
> Also particularly popular are images of young Black children showing off masterly pieces of artwork they supposedly built [...]

This is like 50% of my fb content right now. Facebook is not doing well.

Have been trying to block a bunch of these accounts, but new similar ones just pop up all the time.

What a wasteland.
Have a nice day.

https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

And that $1.53/hr is per instance. $13,402.80/yr per instance. Now calculate 100 instances. 200. 1,000.

Now find a CFO or CTO who wouldn't gladly cut that in half with Go or even more with Rust. At a small enough scale, all technologies work and are affordable. You could run a very small site from your home Comcast network with a Raspberry Pi and bash scripts invoked by CGI. In fact, a lot of sites could do this.

But we're talking about software engineering. It's the difference between a steel plate covering a hole in the pavement and a highway bridge. Any ole steel will work just by slapping in down as long as it's a half inch thick. Once you're building bridges, you need to be more and more discriminating in your choices as the size/length increases.

Java's advantages in 2005 over C, PHP, Perl, etc. just don't carry the same weight in comparison to alternatives in 2024.
I was subject to one as well, but it was just on my base, not total comp, which was not the majority of my compensation. And while my base was fine, it was more or less explicitly stated that this was meant to make it painful for employees to leave and had almost zero to do with any special information the employee had.
Maybe. Or they could just completely opensource the projects.
I'd imagine that would be considered a role change and a new non-compete, and thus forbidden. That's definitely how I'd approach it if someone told me I was suddenly an exec. "Sweet, sounds good. Send over the new employment contract, then! With a 10% raise, of course."
Total aside, but I think it is ridiculous that CoC larps as a quasi governmental organization. When in actuality it is a Union of Capitalists.
> Sadly, this shouldn't come as a shock to anyone who's done minimal due diligence on the team. After all, they were still hawking NFTs just two years ago.
Timeless Order
What does Goldman Sachs want in a coder? For them to have studied philosophy
Yeah it's the pictures that really bother me, but you're not wrong. On the phone, I turn off "Discover".
You know how a chess player will say something like "mate in 6" because their experience of all the options left to their opponent are both easily countered and will not prevent them from losing? Companies, and tech companies in my experience, get into death spirals due to a combination of people, culture, and organization. Pulling out of one of those is possible but requires a unique combination of factors and a strong leadership team to pull off. Something that is very hard to put into place when the existing leadership has overriding voting power. You can look at GE, IBM, and to some extent AT&T as companies that have "re-invented" themselves or at least avoided dissolution into an over marketed brand.

I have a strong memory of watching a Jacques Cousteau documentary on sharks and learning that Sharks could become mortally wounded but not realize it because of how their nervous system was structured. As a kid I thought that was funny, as an engineer watching companies in the Bay Area die it was more sobering.

If you have read the article, I think Gomes was right and saw search as a product, whereas Raghavan saw it as a tool for shoveling ads. A good friend of mine who worked there until 2020 wouldn't tell me why they left, but acknowledged that it was this that finally "ruined" Google.

Their cash cow is dying, I know from running a search engine what sort of revenue you can get from being "just one of the search engine choices" versus the 800lb gorilla. Advertisers are disillusioned, and structurally their company requires growth to support the stock price which supports their salary offerings. There is a nice supportable business for about 5,000 - 8,000 people there, but getting there from where they are?

My best guess at the moment is that when they die, "for reals" as they say, their other bets will either be spun off or folded, their search team will get bought by Apple with enough infrastructure to run it, Amazon or someone else buys a bunch of data centers, and one of the media companies buys the youtube assets.
I woudl not sign that, and would instead call myself a computer programmer. That is an absolutely absurd set of sentences to sign one's name to.
It's worth noting that the so-called "garden leave" you're describing usually doesn't come with things like bonuses. That may even be a majority of your compensation depending on the role.
The federal government has the constitutional right to regulate interstate commerce, and 100 years ago it discovered that all commerce is now interstate commerce, followed by the supremacy clause which is selectively applied (ie. not for scheduled drugs, but for everything else)

This Supreme Court could be friendly to invalidating that expansive interpretation though

so, big mismatch from the executive branch / agencies with the judicial branch which could completely warp our relationship with the Federal Government and what we find familiar in our way of life

But I dont think its as simple as saying “contract law is part of state law”
I will see if a friend of a friend still has it's copy ;-)
A childhood favorite for many of us Gen-Z HN readers.
I don't know what caused it but I suspected at the time, and still do, that it was simply business people getting more involved in order to drive growth.

The hostility was simply this. One day we had a dedicated high level Google engineer helping us out and giving us guidance (and even special tags) to get the data we needed in a cost effective manner for both Google and us. The next day, he was gone and we received demands to know exactly what we were doing, why and even sensitive information about our business. After several months of such probing, we were summarily told that the access we had was revoked and that there was no recourse.

We circumvented by setting up thousands of unique IP addresses in 50+ countries throughout the world and pointing our spiders at Google through them (same as they do to everyone else). These were throttled to maintain very low usage rates and stay off the radar. We continually refilled our queues with untouched IPs in case any were ever blacklisted (which happened occasionally).

As for what we did, we sampled ads for every keyword under the sun, aggregated and analyzed them to find out what was working and what wasn't. This even led to methods for estimating advertiser budgets. At one point, we had virtually every Google advertiser and their ongoing monthly spend, keywords and ad copy in our database. Highly valuable to smart marketers who were looking for an edge.
Companies this size die several years before the body hits the floor.

They're dead when everyone starts to hate them and someone says "no, look how much money they're making, they're fine." That's the fatal blow, because they think they're fine, and keep doing the things that make everyone hate them.

At that point you're just waiting for someone else to offer an alternative. Then people prefer the alternative because the incumbent has been screwing them for so long, and even if they change at that point, it's too late because nobody likes or trusts them anymore, and ships that big can't turn on a dime anyway.

You have to address the rot when customers start complaining about it, not after they've already switched to a competitor.
Not agreeing, but just posting the other side of the argument from the US Chamber of Commerce. Not a fan of legislation by fiat, maybe this will prompt Congress to do something. USCoC said they will sue...

https://www.uschamber.com/finance/antitrust/chamber-comments...

>The Chamber and its membership are strongly opposed to the Proposed Rule. It would categorically ban nearly all noncompete agreements—regardless of individual circumstances, such as a worker’s skill, job responsibilities, access to competitively sensitive and proprietary information, bargaining power, or compensation—and require that organizations rescind all existing agreements and provide notice to affected workers of such rescission. Such a proposal fails to recognize that noncompete agreements can serve vital procompetitive business and individual interests—such as protecting investments in research and development, promoting workforce training, and reducing free-riding—that cannot be adequately protected through other mechanisms such as trade-secret suits or nondisclosure agreements. For centuries, courts have recognized the procompetitive benefits of noncompete agreements and balanced those benefits against any negative costs imposed by particular noncompete agreements. As perhaps acknowledged by the Commission’s request for comments on narrower alternatives, the Commission’s categorical ban would sweep in millions of noncompete agreements that pose no harm to competition, and in fact benefit the U.S. business community, economy, workers, and consumers.

https://www.uschamber.com/finance/antitrust/u-s-chamber-to-s...

>The Chamber will sue the FTC to block this unnecessary and unlawful rule and put other agencies on notice that such overreach will not go unchecked.
... because they don't need to use maths or physics?

And yes, I'm serious. Can you please be less confrontational?
I agree and it's especially frustrating because it's such a vital topic. Since at least ~2020 the utility of Google Search has declined dramatically and it appears much of the cause is actions intentionally taken by Google prioritizing short-term ad revenue over long-term user value.

There was likely a significant change in cultural priorities inside Google driving this. While one person can certainly contribute to such a cultural change, it would be a better article if it focused on the change in cultural values itself.
Intelligence is...
You could probably have done this layout in a couple lines of CSS with a row-oriented flexbox that wraps and is center-aligned. That would be the more standard way to do it too.
let them
Back in the day I read that Eclipse was based on an IBM IDE for Smalltalk called VisualAge, which they ported to VisualAge for Java, which became Smalltalk.

A while ago, so some details may be wrong.
Interstate commerce is broadly recognized to include just about anything.
It may have the ability to, but it's not really anything to do with trade.
> know Americans have a similar relationship with baseball-specific words, right

I'm not American either but a fairly obvious example is to "knock it out of the park".
> Take the statistic that most published books only sell 99 copies.

No wonder. 99 % in a book store is crap.

"We can't sell books" say publishers

"There is nothing to buy" - me.
> What were these guys up to?

Not losing in court every other month.
A friend of mine had one of these in the 80s in suburban DC, very briefly before the whole project failed. You need to not think of this cable modem as a network adapter, because there basically wasn't anything (except the cable company) that it was connected to. The network basically operated as a shared storage area -- to the end user, that cable modem functioned more like a disk controller.

What it really did for most users was serve as a catalog of software that you could load and run, at speeds that were not inconsistent with floppy drives of the era. So, if you wanted to play Zork I or Miner 2049er, you could do it without "buying" the game -- you were paying a monthly fee for access to a library of software. IIRC, it was a Z80 under the hood, probably running some flavor of CP/M.

As a concept, it wasn't a bad one. In practice, the BBS and piracy scenes of both the Apple ][ and C-64 communities made "a shared library of software" less of an exclusive commodity than Nabu's backers planned for.
i did not have google vs dji world war on my bingo card!
My mom didn't even get one home from the dealership when it seized up on the highway. Something about the solenoid pack but don't take my word for it, I was all of 8.
the FTC regulates options?

it seems like thats a mixture of the SEC and IRS
While, as you say, there have been and there still are other writing systems that mix semantic elements with phonetic elements, or in which what is written does not determine completely the intended pronunciation (like in the systems that write only the consonants), there has been no other dead or alive writing system where these features are so extreme, causing a complexity and ambiguity even remotely comparable with the Japanese writing system. There is nothing romantic about this.

Apart from its writing system, the language itself would not be unusual at all, except for being a mixed language, especially in the technical and scientific styles, with a huge amount of words of Chinese origin that behave very differently from the native words, which is also a consequence of the writing system, through which these words had been imported.
Back in the days my uncle told me about this new thing called Debian that he compiled over the last couple days. That was in the end of 1996. I went on to use it for a while in parallel to try things out, and was quite happy in the endless learning bubble.

Fast forward into my first job, there was a Windows machine with a crashed HDD and my task was to recover as much data as I could. Windows tools all sucked hard, even the ones that we had at the company that cost thousands of bucks per month. That's when the power of the Linux ecosystem hit me.

Went on to being an IT forensics guy, then went into pentesting, then into blueteaming and now I am having my own startup that builds a better EDR software.

I still have to think about that coincidence. Literally nerd-sniped my life, otherwise I probably would have still been a sysadmin or something.

On the way I learned a ton of new things, from programming languages and compiler bugs to exploit techniques and kernel development and even hardware design. If you go deep enough in hardware pentesting, the whole phreaking scene is amazingly welcoming. The CCC chapters are also amazing, and there's just so many opportunities to grow your knowledge and experience in the field. It never gets boring!
It boils down to: there used to be somewhat of a firewall between advertising and search divisions. Search's goal could be best results possible and advertising's goal could be most ads. The head of ads decided that wasn't good enough and said "all goals have to help ad goals" with the implicit suggestion that if a change to search was good for ads, but bad for users, then that was the path that was going to be taken.
I've often wondered how often noncompetes get enforced/litigated.

I had to sign a noncompete once, in order to get a severance package when the company was going out of business. I asked a lawyer about it, who said don't worry about it, there isn't going to be anyone who will ever enforce it.
No sarcasm,

https://web.archive.org/web/20221203132009/https://gama.io/
Quadratic performance is a bit of an exaggeration. It's not O(N_items^2). It's N_tracks x N_items, and basically nobody has N_tracks ≈ N_items. Practically speaking, the upper limit is closer to (N_items^1.5) because N_tracks is unlikely to go over sqrt(N_items) in cases where N is large. And almost all of those layouts will have repetitive track sizing patterns, so they can be optimized to a much smaller N_tracks that approaches O(N_items).
I don’t know why I need to keep saying this, but the point of the pin is to replace phones. It’s meant for you to have access to digital services while staying in the moment and avoiding a screen. Many ppl are addicted to their smartphones, so they propose something different.

You can like and prefer a phone but it’s their raison d’etre.
Like ERCOT is much better. Good luck with the next freeze. And what’s your property tax rate?
Full text of the ruling here:

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/noncompete-rule...

It's not surprising after thinking about it for a minute, but it did startle me to read that the FTC measures innovation by the number of patents issued.

> In addition, the final rule is expected to help drive innovation, leading to an estimated average increase of 17,000 to 29,000 more patents each year for the next 10 years under the final rule.

I've always thought of that as representing a stifling of innovation.
You already cannot use trade secrets from your last job at a new role. That's in pretty much every single employment agreement, spelled out clearly. That does not mean you cannot go work for a competitor and do something new there.
Tones.
That's true, but the problem of long context understanding (say, "summarize each of the situations where the word 'wizard' is mentioned") remains. And that gets much closer to the insurance policy thing.
Only if he really cared about that extra bit of money. I don't know him personally but from the outside he didn't look like he did.
Real-Time Architecture Visualizations While You Code for the Cloud [video]
It'd be a bit like when Google bought Fastlane.
Anyone can have a “strong economy” if they can print $2T a year. The question is for how long.
It'll be interesting to see what happens. It does sound like this clearly falls under interstate commerce, so within the scope of Fed action. Is there something that makes you think otherwise? Beyond court composition, that is.
People would add sites for a particular topic (aka slashtag) to their list. That would build a virtual custom search engine within the search engine. And topic specific searches thrown at it would consistently out perform Bing and Google in terms of search quality. The meta "spam" slash tag (everyone got their own) would let you tell the engine sites you never wanted to see in your search results so if you were tired of your medical queries being spammed by quacks, add them to your spam list and they wouldn't be in your results.
> But nobody does cardio to build muscle.

The heart is a muscle. ;-)

Cardio certainly isn't the best way to bulk up muscles; ideally you want to combine cardio with strength training. Nonetheless, it does build some muscle, and there are various ways to add resistance to cardio, such as with machines, carrying weights, running uphill, etc. In any case, cardio does increase your endurance.
Part of the confusion here is that some people (apparently including you) use the word "LLM" to refer to the entire system that's built up around the language model itself, while others (like OP) are specifically referring to the large language model.

The large language model's context window absolutely is ephemeral. By the time inference is begun all you have is a giant vector that represents the context to date. This means that the model itself does not have the text available to look at, it only has the encoded "memory" of that text.

OP is simply saying that the underlying model is unsuitable for solving problems like this directly, so it makes a bad example for how models don't use their context effectively. A production grade AI agent should be able to solve problems like this, but it will likely do that through external scaffolding, not through improvements to the model itself, whereas improvements to the context window will probably need to occur at the model level.
> Windows vulnerability reported by the NSA

Wait what ? Since Vault7 has NSA changed ?
> But do you know who has? Sundar Pichai, who previously worked at McKinsey — arguably the most morally abhorrent company that has ever existed, having played roles both in the 2008 financial crisis (where it encouraged banks to load up on debt and flawed mortgage-backed securities) and the ongoing opioid crisis, where it effectively advised Purdue Pharma on how to “growth hack” sales of Oxycontin.

That helps explain why Youtube scam campaings in different countries have been rampant for years while Youtube seems to look the other way.
I am 100% for this, but it makes me sad that the legislative branch has nearly completely abandoned its duty to pass laws in favor of granting the executive branch the authority to regulate just about everything.

This is a problem for two main reasons:

1. The executive branch can unilaterally revoke these regulations, making them more volatile. Maybe my non-compete is invalid today, but will it be in 4 years when I actually want to change jobs? Changing a law takes approval of either majority of both chambers plus the president, or a supermajority of both chambers.

2. It lowers the stakes in congress, which I believe causes more misbehavior. When the stakes are actually high enough, congress tends to get things done. When the stakes are low, congress grandstands for reelection.
I feel like at least on Reddit results you'll get something that may be helpful. The Quora results have NEVER resulted in something useful for me.
Even though I agree with what the author is saying, the tone of this article is off putting to me. There are ways to call out people for being bad at their job without resorting to “class traitor” and “ratfucker”.

That being said, Google search is 100% dead. I append “reddit” to every Google query to get actual results from people, and I don’t see it on Reddit, I give up on my query.
Only started 12 months ago though, so it is just last 12 month data
Removing the risk of legal consequence simply for changing who you sell your labor to is a big change for many people.
Lina Khan
As long as the AI companies make sure that the generated pictures of Jesus are balanced across all genders and skin colors...
> I was also way more pessimistic, figuring that they would be having company wide layoffs by 2015 to 2017 but they pushed that out by 5 years.

Well in 2011 Google had just over 30k employees, and now they're doing "layoffs" with 180k+ in 2024. I don't think the layoffs mean much.
Not sure how feelings factor in here.
I think the blogpost spend a lot of time focusing on the uninteresting part. If it wasn't Raghavan, it'd just be someone else, Google (the corporation) wanted more search query metrics and Google is large enough to enforce its will, I doubt 2024 Google Search would be dramatically better if anyone else was promoted to Gomes' position (obviously, Gomes would have been kicked off regardless, because KPIs)
Looks convenient, but another step towards a monoculture internet. :(