skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is extremely important to remember, especially when Tesla describe their neural net approach as being easily fine-tuned to different jurisdictions.

I’ve seen the “human-like” behaviour of FSD 12.x praised a lot by channels like this, particularly where the car is breaking the rules in a way they consider “normal”. And it’s a fair argument that predictable behaviour improves safety.

However, behaviour that is common in the US - like making a turn into a side street while a pedestrian is beginning to cross - would be considered exceptionally aggressive and reckless here in Australia. It’s a cultural difference I’ve adapted to when moving back and forth.

At the end of the day though, when I walk across a street, I don’t want to have to worry if Tesla has fine tuned their model correctly to match our local expectations of yielding. I’d rather they just followed the law as closely as possible - because that’s the most predictable behaviour of all.
“Oh yes, we value work-life balance. We’re like a family here!”

Both parties lie in an interview. It’s a dance.
I think a big part of this is what happens before that. Google hires lots of people because they think those people will create more value and growth. The reason it's under pressure to fire them and return money to shareholders is because shareholders no longer think Google is good at creating growth with these investments. Arguably they're right, you could take a look at Google's Ads business and say "Hey! This is fantastic, fire anyone not working on this and just give me a great dividend", it would arguably be better for the shareholders.

Now in reality, that swing from "Invest and grow" to "Just return cash" is driven far more by fickle market sentiment than a real solid basis in fact, but that's still the pressure they respond to.
There are tons of solar and wind projects everywhere held up by permitting.

We can build. We just can’t get out of our own way. Same story for everything else.
The point is cost of his diet has gone up, which happens with meats - immigration has permenantly driven up up cost of many offcuts because now they're used in more recipes now. But still pretty telling when "medium" cuts prices are going through the roof. There's still "economical" carnivore diets considering how much industry is subsidized, not as economical as just hammering beans, but if one eats a lot of meat, one notices.
Company loyalty was already mostly dead in big tech before the layoffs. It was also the fault of the companies, but more to do with the ability to get raises via job hopping versus internal promotion, not job security.
As if companies were straight with you lol, they're experiencing their own poison
The people entering the workforce with $250k in debt are mostly physicians. It’s mosrly people with $20–60k in debt that are stuck in underemployment (or didn’t graduate, so never got the salary bump to pay off such loans).
Google is an advertising company - why do its employees seem to think they work for Doctors Without Borders?
>The Friedman Doctrine ( what you are espousing, that business are only set up to make money) is a relatively recent social construct, having been first articulated in 1970.

What were the robber barons of the 19th century doing then? Or do you think that companies like standard oil were not "only set up to make money"?
You’ve got to have a local core of people to bounce ideas off each other.

I moved from Austin to Appalachia to care for parents. The lack of any entrepreneurial spark here is just jarring. People just keep their heads down. They want better - but there’s zero intellectual infrastructure.
The US has had extraordinarily high mass immigration (both legal and illegal) for decades.
From what I understand though, it’s often possible to just “look” busy without actually being productive. Seems like cranking out design docs and scheduling meetings to make yourself and your work appear important can push one up the ladder a lot faster than making improvements to the codebase will. Optics matter most in organizations the size of Google.
> if it's an actual, viable business

Maybe one in ten vc backed startups will find a viable business model eventually.

If you don't take vc money maybe it's easier to find a smaller viable business, but then it's harder to pay yourself.
> I mean, if it's an actual, viable business, shouldn't one be able to just do it from 9 to 5 like it's a normal job?

Do you have an example of a reasonably successful business that's a 9-5 job when getting started? Forget startups... let's say you want to open a dry cleaners, bakery or hardware store... none of those seem like they'd be 9-5 jobs. The one exception might be a consulting business if you already have lots of relationships in a space, although most independent consultants who I know tend to have periods of feast and famine.

The issue is that getting your first customers is hard. And then once you have traction, but don't have enough money to hire people, that's hard again. And then once you grow larger, you have more responsibility yet again. At some point, the gears start turning themselves and I've seen many owners who can take a step back, but at that point it's no longer a "startup" but a "business".
+1 I don't understand why people work hard for such corporations. Doing the bare minimum, and quiet quitting should be the norm. I think if the execs can pay themselves $200M for taking the responsibility and being so horribly wrong about the direction they took the company in, then why shouldn't the rank and file employees do the bare fucking minimum that they are paid to do. Treat intellectual work the same as bagging groceries, do it from 9 to 5, only when sitting at the desk, and only for bugs that have been assigned. If the bug don't say "add an extra debug log" then don't add an extra debug log.

<Rant Over>
The Future of Lisp
How can you be so confident when nobody has managed to convincingly beat GPT-4 yet, including Open AI themselves?

All evidence is the throwing even textbook qualify data at a model of almost any size just approaches an asymptote just a tiny bit above GPT 4.

A better model of some data starts to look increasingly like then data, not like something else beyond the data.
There are some questionable parts of this anime as it's old and a lot of anime from that time is like that, however, it's one of those anime that got what being a hero is about. Only one that I can think of in recent times is My Hero Academia. If that doesn't sway you to watch it, I think Gigguk included Onizuka as one of the top 20 most badass characters in anime a few years ago.
Also it’s public so a lot of those shareholders are pension funds and your 401k.

Buybacks are just time boxed dividends.
ROI of whose investment?? The parents? The federal loan forgiveness program that puts social workers in poor neighborhoods? In general, the student is not providing most of the investment, and the investors (parents, government) are probably happy with their choice.
It not only _is_ the obvious choice, it is _exactly_ what has actually happened in Debian: https://salsa.debian.org/debian/keepassxc/-/commit/7d6d16e3f...

The original post is just a badly written clickbait. Nothing was removed, it was just moved to the keepassxc-full package.
Yes and they even use quantifiable things like revenue per engineer, it’s palliative right?
I'm not sure I'm familiar with that one.
As someone who supports Java apps, I don't think the errors have improved. They are completely nonsense to non-programmers, and they rarely ever have good documentation. Most only show up in old SO post, or application specific forums, and you have to sift through a ton of crap just to hopefully find an explanation or fix.
> Because the whole thing is literally made up out of their money.

No. Waaaaaast majority of it is made of employee work and customer's money. Owners merely started it in the right time and place to match the demand.
It wasn't "good" when Google hired a ton of people during Covid, and it isn't "evil" when they have subsequently let some people go. The people who are being laid off are generally given very generous severance packages, and I think it would be hard to argue that Google treats its employees poorly in general.

Google should employ a workforce that they think meets their needs as a business, and when that involves letting some people go, they should do their best to treat those people fairly, which AFAIK they generally do.
> being sucked off by shareholders and execs without adequately compensating the people who built it

Who built it?
Yes, and in doing so suggesting that the relationship between companies and society is immutable and that companies acting this way is inevitable. Neither is the case, since companies are a legal construct created by societies that can be regulated as those societies choose. And, indeed, other societies have chosen to regulate companies differently and don't have companies doing this sort of thing nearly as much.
Still, kinda sad to be spend such a big portion of your time on earth doing something nobody gives a shit about, not even you.

Me, I’d sooner take a job where I’m contributing positively to society, even if I could make a bit more in adtech.
Never address the elephant directly.
I'm taking that into account in my runway estimate
> absolute bare minimum

Doing the bare minimum for a "Meets Expectations" rating after performance review and calibrations still means working a lot and delivering on the projects you've committed to, drafting design documents, doing interviews, actively improving existing codebases, and mentoring junior ICs. If you do all that, then the company's happy.

(Just to dispel the impression that you can join Google/FAANG by acing the interview, and then coast along. Fake work with zero impact is very obvious.)
I tell the interviewer that "I will go above and beyond to fulfill my duties". For me "Above and beyond" means that I will try to show up for work and will at least pretend to be interested.
Apples vs oranges
> For example, try arguing that the USA should try to find a diplomatic solution to the conflict in Ukraine.

The US did try to find a diplomatic solution. Before the war we saw Biden talking about talking with Putin extensively. Since then we've heard about attempted negotiations by US diplomats, and I would expect those went deeper and longer than we get to hear about too.

I think the push back is the idea the the US should negotiate something with Russia that ignores the position of Ukraine and her people. And also I'm sure that a lot of us really don't like the idea of invasion being rewarded with territorial negotiation because we don't want our own countries put into that position, or have the threat hanging over us.
Could it be because everyone was laid off and needs a job? Could it be unprecedented amounts of layoffs are an orchestrated measure by large corporations to "ensure" they are not "monopolies", as anti-trust season kicks off? Could it be that those same large corporations will end up buying or strategically killing these same start ups because they inevitably engage in anti-competitive practices? Could it be that lobbying dollars will shelter these large corporations from enduring legal ramifications?

I think we've done this before...
To anyone curious I'd also really recommend reading the original piece

https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctr...

The argument made here includes not just that the company should not spend it's resources on things other than profit for the sake of shareholders, but also worries about employees and customers. At least in this article Friedman was advocating for something much more positive than the situation we found ourselves in today
If the price was lower, people would use more. Supply and demand aren't fixed.
I used to live in Brazil, and I saw a similar situation: a significant chunk of very intelligent and competent, high-earning, IT workers were very much into those theories.

I also know a huge amount of conspiracy theory believers in the medical area. Also otherwise competent.

If anything, the correlation with loneliness or low status was reverse: the richer and high-status, the more blatant and visible those beliefs were. People in low-prestige professions, or poor? It was very rare to see them talk about it.
I was looking over some data from a similar article and I found it striking how many of these new business application increases were in the South, Mid-Atlantic, and Mid-West states, rather than the West or Northeast. (At least for 2020 vs 2019.) One interpretation could be that these were places where stay at home orders were for “un-Zoomable” jobs (retail, manufacturing, machinists, construction, services), and thus workers were taking the plunge on entrepreneurship to create their own work. Map visualization here:

https://www.datawrapper.de/_/xv4ys/
If latency is critical then you might want to consider a memory-in-pixel display instead of e-ink. They don't go down to zero-power on static content like e-ink does, but they are very efficient, very quick to update and don't suffer from ghosting like e-ink does.

If you've seen the Pebble smartwatches, Garmins non-OLED watches or the Playdate console, those are all using MIP displays.
i tried pop os's new DE recently and they use sysext as well
In fairness, I think pg mostly concerns himself with start-ups whose goals are to become a unicorn or be acquired by one.

I think there are plenty of boring, sustainable businesses built on good, logical sounding ideas that have found their niche in the industries they find themselves in.
Yes but most people work at least eight hours a day each weekday (Monday through Friday) and it’s incredibly painful for those that don’t want to waste 40 hours a week of their life to have to deal with people that do the absolute bare minimum to get by at work.

If people don’t like the job they’re doing; they should quit and find something else to do.
Unlikely. Though in the case of Unity, this can happen if you fail to uphold memory layout expectations when writing C/C++ code (or if you do something really bad in C#).

There would also be a debugger allowing to reproduce and catch this in an easier way.
Ask HN: Why do you write comments/tweets/posts?
I personally rarely want to comment articles or videos. Most of the time, I cannot find anything interesting to add; and a lot of time when I read other people comments I do not think most of them add any value.

I am interested to know why you write those comments, tweets or posts. I am specially curious about heavy writers commenting at least once a week.
Having done some work with epaper, my advice here would be to prototype with an LCD display first. You can waste a lot of time on epaper and it won't get you meaningful data around how the device works.
I wouldn't say I'm upset, but as a (small) shareholder, it's generally in my best interest to compensate executives less. I can't do anything about founder equity.
A job interview isn’t an exchange of true statements. It’s a game with each player having different goals. Whichever side you’re on, your goal is to win.
the key is an atom called foobar, and the value is being extracted to a variable called foobar. The variable's value is not shown in the example.

You do this quite a bit in Elixir, unless you use the . syntax, e.g. somemap.foobar which is marginally slower.
>I asked "Why can't the company buy back stock to increase value ?". He was shocked at the question and explained in detail why doing that is bad. It was something about doing that does not create real value.

As opposed to paying dividends, which does create value? Buybacks and dividends are both ways of returning money to investors.
Well said. As someone who has worked with Google consultants throughout his career, I always felt they were overpaid for the value they brought to the table. A few years ago, one of my clients wanted some advice on what Google Cloud products to migrate to their high traffic website while keeping costs at check. Our backend systems were fully SQL based. We may have met 3 consultants from their HQ at least and none of them even had any idea on a) the offerings that were available and b) which product should be used when. One of their consultants just kept throwing product names at us hoping it would stick, but it got really bad when he recommended a very expensive NOSQL offering for our completely SQL backend. We both walked out of the meeting mid-way after being annoyed with them.

Their lifestyle is quite luxurious - you can roam around their entire campus without being asked questions, there's gaming rooms and places where you can take a nap at work and half the time people were barely at their desks doing their actual jobs. I always thought this was also one of the reasons why many clients started moving off their platforms (apart from also becoming more expensive over the years) to the point where Google is almost considered a laggard now in the AI space.
World will not change meaningfully.

From first principles (or something)

- People form hierarchy (required for coordination)

- everybody want to take more for them self

- ones at the top have means to take more for them self

From other side:

- in hierarchy there are more people bellow, than on top

- coordination is easier among fewer heads

- motivation is dilluted below (1000 employees getting +100¥, vs one at the top getting 100 000¥)

Also I have a feeling that most devs are quite well of compared to other professions and can even own stock of companies and be the ones benefiting from company optimisations (layoffs)
I hope your wife recovers well.

But my argument is about broad statistics, single case does not prove anything.
> The right to be forgotten does not mean you content has to be taken down

As with almost anything GDPR: it really depends on the content, on the website, on the situation. There's no clear cut answer that applies to all cases.

And copyright law also enters into the picture here, which is why I added the second paragraph.
As a solo-entrepreneur with no VC money, I work 12 hour days way more often than I should. I work weekends. I even made a bunch of commits on Christmas eve. Big reason is honestly that it's just that much fun. It's hard to put down the work and take time off because I want to do more. It's the same stupid reason I've poured 1200 hours into Factorio. Building stuff is fun.

Took last week off from work. Just did nothing. Slacked off. This is the first vacation I've had for over a year. According to my fibit, my resting heart rate went down 12 points. I have so many new ideas and plans for what to do next. I feel more inspired and honestly like a new person.

I think a lot of small startups and entrepreneurs work too much. Working 12 hour days is strictly worse than 8 hour days over time. If you skimp on rest and recovery, you gradually transform into an idiot. Do you want an uninsipired idiot for a CEO for your tenuous new business? Because that's what you're turning yourself into.
Feats and famine is actually not that bad. When I did freelance I had high intensity periods and then low intensity periods. I found that much healthier than the constant never ending medium effort often meaningless grind in the corporate world.
A little, but I’m not going to heat my house to 90f in the winter or install floodlights simply because electricity is cheaper.

States have wildly different prices without changing climate and urban normalized consumption that much. https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/ Oregon and Washington have nearly identical per capita electricity usage despite a 10% cost difference etc.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m very much an optimist when it comes to things like fighting climate change, fixing the ozone layer, etc. and I take plenty of personal responsibility. More than the average person does, I think. The point of my comment was to call attention to the pessimism and doomerism that’s rampant any time you try to discuss saving the planet — case in point, the comments in this very thread.

I think those kinds of comments can be discouraging for the layman who wants to help the planet but maybe isn’t well versed enough in the topic to argue with the doomer. More sinisterly, I’ve often wondered how much doomerism is pushed by oil companies and other businesses that stand to benefit from the status quo.
Appalachia’s a big place I guess, but the thing I found most remarkable in the North Carolina portion of it was that damn near every rural-road mountain driveway seemed to have a sign marking that the house was also home to a small business.
Or they felt that investors wanted them to have layoffs.

From talking to people in the know, the layoffs don't even seem to make sense. Why layoff all the developers in a project and keep the program managers, product managers, and engineering managers (and not even cancel the project)? Why kill the Python team and ask the Flutter team to take over their work? Why do projects seem to have more managers than individual contributors?

I don't think this is part of a coherent long term strategy. It's just a reflexive reaction to demands to from major investors to reduce costs. Nevermind that Google is still hiring for the positions that they are laying people off for.
> to have to deal with people that do the absolute bare minimum to get by at work.

Not my problem

We designed a system that's actively hostile to life and well being to profit the top 0.1%

No contract states you have to give your best, and there is no way for anyone to enforce that anyways
If it's an startup, AKA a business built to grow at a huge rate and become a giant from nothing, then it's necessarily risky and anything you do in it has a larger than linear impact. So the one startup where the owners put an extra hour/day will probably win the market and the others will fail.

If it's a business built to be sustainable, sure, you should be able to run it 9 to 5.

I can't actually see what the article is claiming, due to the paywall.
Thanks. This blog is very interesting
SearchGPT
Yep, at least in my case. My wife is able to pursue her fiction writing career full-time right now because I'm still working a corporate job. Just before deciding she was too burnt out and had to quit she was working a 130k/year proposal management job and self-publishing a book a year on the side.

Right now she's making a little over 1k/month with her fiction writing (and just recently started offering editing services on the side, which she's gotten a few customers already), so it's definitely been shock to our finances ($140k -> ~$12k), and our emergency savings have been steadily draining every month, although we have been able to tighten the belt on several things so it hasn't been as steep as it would if we had maintained the same lifestyle.

But she's a lot happier, and she's very talented, and she's had multiple millions of page reads on Kindle unlimited already and her books are highly rated, so hopefully this takes off (there are writers in her genre making hundreds of thousands, including a couple writers she's friends with, maybe she'll become one herself, although I'd be happy if she can get it to the point where it's like $60k/year).

I also wouldn't mind a break from my own corporate job so I can hopefully work on my own creative works fulltime as well (I code video games and design board games in my spare time), but obviously we can't both afford to do this at the same time, we'd be homeless pretty quick.

But yeah, in the meantime, I'm 'swallowing the trash' in a corporate job.