skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
RTO mandates are sometimes a simple action to a difficult issue that the company is not able to face.

In my case we now have a RTO mandate to work from office at least 2 days a week, which means staring at a screen and attending Teams meeting from office instead of from home (there has been no thought beyond "you have to be in office")

Why?

Management seem to think that there is a productivity issue and that employees should work harder. But apparently, it's due to WFH and the fact that management has been horrible, that the company has gone through several rounds of layoffs with massive reduction in headcount over the last few years, and that salaries have essentially been frozen for 3 years has nothing to do with it.

So, yes, CVs have been sent out.
I’m not refuting the point. Just giving kaba0 context that they are explaining how a library works to its author.
>It is not necessarily even a goal to maximize happiness, because being too happy for too long causes problems.

Reminds me of the experiment with rodents pushing the morphine button until death, and of the recent opioid crisis.
Genocide as a legal term isn't just reserved for killing the entire population. Destroying the culture of a population is also genocide, and there is a greater argument that has happened given how much of Gaza has been levelled. The food situation could also constitute genocide if Israel is purposefully preventing aid supplies. There could be an intent to make Gaza unviable.

> If Hamas had the capability to up-scale it's operations, it likely would have attempted to fulfill these aspects of its covenant and eradicate all jews.

Both sides are perpetuating the hate for the next generation.
This is my experience in very small companies (think a <10 person startup). The value of everyone knowing a lot of what's going on from immersion is immense. You can have very little processes around information sharing (which takes time to set up and fine tune!), very little time to convince people what needs to be done (it's obvious from the conversation the other side of the room is having), and all the nuance of in-person communication is kept.

Once a company gets a little bit bigger, the processes around information sharing, planning and other communication has to be in place anyway. Teams need to collaborate, work needs to be tracked, there has to be meetings for planning. Once you're already doing that you might not lose anything by going remote.
Many are not available in the US. Audi have a leading system and Mercedes have the highest rated system available in the US and are officially at level 3. The problem is Musk sucks up so much air marketing Tesla as leading people have come to believe it. The leading systems aren’t super impressive yet but Musks lies about his system which doesn’t work aren’t proof of anything but hubris. He’s just pumping stock to the ignorant.
>I’m still stunned that the NSA contributed to the public for once

They contributed SELinux too and sponsored the TrustedBSD Project.
"People don't like analysing the non-monetary fuzzy aspects of all this; rewardingness of the job, social relationships".

I guess the bosses don't know how to put those fuzzy numbers in Excel yet? :)

Should not be too difficult though, since an entire country actually found some way to do it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_National_Happiness
You tend to only hear about the systems where security was successfully broken, not the systems nobody managed to penetrate.
PWA would have being better with sqlite in WASM.
> Paris is very complicated underground. Besides the quarries there are the sewers, catacombs, some underground lakes, reservoirs, etc. It is definitely a complicating factor when planning new metro tunnels.

I wonder if the French are considering digging underneath all those obstacles? Seems to be the way London has gone with the Elizabeth Line. Although that may still be shallower than Paris' quarries and lakes.
One thing I have never seen mentioned is how organizations are dealing with IP theft such as source code. You could share IP with non employees such as a spouse by simply sharing your screen. It’s one thing to sign an NDA and another to have signed it but then inadvertent or intentional screen sharing is another.

I work in a highly regulated industry so not sure how this would work.
But why would you become anti-nuclear energy because of this? The cleanup is obviously professionally handled and it doesn't appear to be an issue for nature and nearby population.
I wasn’t refuting anything and in fact I’m onboard with these changes. I do not like Lombok and _in my opinion_ it’s for the laziest of devs. I just wanted to give you context that you are explaining how a library works to its author.
Directional mics were a toy 30 years ago, but an AI that can pick out a single voice and isolate it for you is quite the contemporary achievement.
> I don't think that complaining how articulate a board member was has any relevance to the outcome of a vote

The lack of articulation didn't have any relevance to the outcome of the vote.

The lack of articulation meant the vote didn't have any impact on who was the CEO a fortnight later.

If people want history to repeat, they are free to not learn lessons from this.

If they want success in the next vote to oust a leader deemed undesirable, they should learn why this one was undone despite the board having the theoretical power.

This is also why I take a dim view of those who can't see why an LLM could be a risk given "it's just words": the right words in the right ears can undo almost any human institution.
But the reason people believe QM is because of overwhelming empirical evidence, not because it seems right.

You can't just go "QM has many surprising aspects" to "this other theory also has surprising aspects, it's probably true".

If we had been having this conversation before some of the more bizarre quantum effects had been observed it would have been a fair comparison, but we are way past that point.
I guess you’re not old enough. This sounds like a feature for hearing aids.
I agree with you. Too many of us developers tend to forget that the customer only looks at the features. Clean code, unit tests, rigorous processes... they are only as valuable as the rate of features they make possible.

Complexity and technical debt are our problem, and the customer could not care less about how we solve it, or even whether we solve it. As long as we are struggling with an old piece of sh*t, that's good for us: it means the product is selling and the effort to maintain it still makes sense!

Selling without complexity and technical debt would be much better, I think we all agree on this, but it's a receipt whose success I have never personally witnessed.
I'm sure there is a truth to it. But as soon as Sam Altman & Elon musk get mentioned this entire forum gets highjacked by hating on them instead of having an interesting discussion.
That's because you have the wrong mindset. And the more beliefs you have like this, the more complicated your life will be.
There were people who wouldn't put up with the absurdities of office "culture" before universal remote work. They'd end up going into academia or entrepreneurship.

My guess is Zoomers are less willing to tolerate this because they didn't "get used to it" in the pre-2020 world when nobody else was questioning it publicly and those who did question it would be gaslit into thinking the insanity was normal. They see a critical mass of older people rejecting these ridiculous norms and that removes the fear of saying what they actually think and the ability of those who've given up hope of anything better to just shut their questions down.
> The LLM is like another user.

I like to think of LLMs as client-side code, at least in terms of their risk-profile.

No data you put into them (whether training or prompt) is reliably hidden from a persistent user, and they can also force it to output what they want.
The only advice on hearing aids is if you need them, get it diagnosed and intervened early. That way you get the cheapest and most reliable hearing aid that's going to work well for you.

Otherwise the stuff you described in your comment around attention filtering starts to happen because of the sensory loss. Therefore the longer you avoid hearing correction once your hearing starts to become impaired, the more complex and expensive a hearing aid you need to re-do. This is because these expensive hearing aids do a poor approximation of the things your brain/auditory cortex was doing prior to the sensory loss.

BRB - better go book a hearing test.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_...
> the biggest advantage of working in person is high-bandwidth communication?

Pointless meetings, constant interruptions, overhead noise, watercooler talk? Those types of things have zero advantage.
Koheesio: Nike's Python-based framework to build advanced data-pipelines
> they are not even technical

Sama is also not technical.
> My experience, is that communication propagates better in group-chat environments like Slack, that meetings are faster and more productive on Meet, that my work-focus is magnitudes better in the quiet of my home

I think this is super dependent on the person and circumstances.

I found "meetings" which are just doc reviews or low involvement group updates are better via slack or meet. Active discussions from a few participants are better in person (esp. if using a whiteboard). I think this speaks to the waste of "this meeting could have been an email" culture more than anything.

I found that some people are better able to "focus" by ignoring junior employees when WFH, increasing their own productivity at the expense of the junior's productivity and growth. Some of my most "productive" coworkers are also the least helpful to the team, and the least active on chat too.
> the key to keep things in order is to remove things

As soon as you are ready to give up the income for those things you want to trim, please go on!
Um...because Microsoft offered to take on all staff at existing pay rates if OpenAI imploded? That was the pivotal point IIRC.
But exactly that is the issue especially something like Jenkins shouldn't use the default docker setup, but one of the multiple ways it can be hardened (mainly rootfull using user namespaces or rootless using user namespaces).

also to quote that documentation:

> By default, the Docker Pipeline plugin will communicate with a local Docker daemon, typically accessed through docker.sock.

which means that iff they do it right it will just work frictionless. Rootless docker still has a local socket and in a proper setup $DOCKER_HOST is used to point to it. $DOCKER_HOST is used the docker command, and any other application which communicates with the docker socket instead MUST handle it or it's a pretty big bug even in the absence of rootless.

And again you don't need rootless, you can also configure user namespaces with rootfull docker. Which isn't fixing all issues for all use cases, but fixes the ones which are an security issue for Jenkins.

In general the only place where a default docker setup can be security wise acceptable is where it's acceptable to always explicitly use sudo, e.g. no developer setup. Which mainly leaves use cases like using it for long running manual managed services, but then using podman instrumented through systemd (systemd directly supports OCI images as services) is still most times preferable.
This is somewhat off-topic, but here goes:

It seems to me that English TTS is already extremely good, even if you're looking at implementations that are far from being the best ones for English.

...and sometimes I wonder, if it's really economically efficient for that many players to compete on making English TTS yet another hair's breadth better than the next guy's, while TTS for languages other than English is this vast field of unmet market demand. At least these guys are doing Chinese, so: good for them.

Last time I looked into TTS systems for German, Google was the only game in town. What I wouldn't give for a viable alternative! It doesn't even need to be open source, I'd be quite ready to pay top dollar.
Huh, its Roko's Basilisk all along
It seems to me your argument hinges on the ratio between the surface area and the volume dropping to zero as the object gets bigger.

This is only true if the object enlarges in every direction equally. If it spreads out along a flat plane then the ratio is essentially constant, for example.
You are correct that monetization need to celebrated in OSS software. This being said, when your open-source version is but a shadow version of the enterprise version, then you're doing something wrong. That's what op was hinting at.
I'd add if you want people to use and promote your software, you also want to make sure the documentation is usable.
Though regarding Odoo, I would say the situation is somehow better in this regard than it used to be a 5~7 years ago.
Chargeblast
For reasons I won't get into, after the pandemic our local office ended up with desks for 75% or so of the employees. So if you wanted to come in, you reserved a desk, if you wanted to stay at home, that was fine.

Then the diktat came down from corporate headquarters: Everyone must be back in the office, unless their contract specifically said remote work. Pitchforks! Loads of objection from all the people who had gotten used to working from home and quite liked it. And of course there was the problem that we didn't actually have space for everyone.

Then an opportunity came up to get rid of our sub-lease on the current property, which could potentially simplify the process of getting a newer, larger office that could accommodate everyone; so word went out that everyone was going to go back to WFH for a period of time. Pitchforks again! This time from all the people who didn't enjoy WFH for all the reasons you mentioned.

In the end corporate has had to be satisfied with people coming in at least one day a week; and we're squeezing more people into the current office while still looking for another office to move into. But it's interesting to see the dynamics you mentioned -- lots of people prefer to WFH, lots of people definitely don't.

FWIW I've never had much trouble "turning off" work, even when I was using the same computer for work and personal things. Now that I've got a corporate laptop, it's even easier -- unplug it from the external monitor, close the lid, and forget about it until it's time to open it again, be that overnight or over the weekend or over the holidays.
Ghidra is powerful. The only thing I miss is the ability to actually do versioned (=Git) collaboration, or at least to publish stuff to Github or whatever without needing to either host Ghidra Server myself or depend on someone else.
Showing a page of code do your wife is one thing, but stealing source code files is a complete other. Orgs are installing tools to track what you do and when you do it so that they can audit your actions. They might not be able to prevent you stealing the code but the evidence of your actions will be usable in a court of law when they make an example of you.
Anybody want to crash a couple of passenger jets?
:-), it's a good problem to have. If you have figured it out, it would be genuinely useful to hear how you did so? Thanks.
So, NanoGPT took 1.8 days on 8xA100 for 124M model training on 30.7B tokens using flash attention. This would translate to 14.4hr for 10B tokens. With llm.c it is ~1.5 hr which is almost 10X speedup!

Does this look ballpark correct? Is there any summary of where majority of this improvement comes from?
I don't understand what you think depends on how threads were started.
Is anyone using DSPy? It seems like a really interesting project, but I haven’t heard much from people building with it.
at the very least I would appreciate the sincerity of this approach. We can start having the real discussions without cosplaying as fungible hyper competent leetcode machines, and start asking which of these problems would benefit from having a weaponised sociopath at the helm.

Are we working too hard on the wrong yet interesting problems or do we just need a sufficiently amoral person to manipulate, harass and cheat their way into partnerships, sales and general interest? Do we accept such behaviour is noble if we make enough success and money from it?
To a certain extent, but if you try to force change on an org which by unilateral mandate by using a limited job market as the breaker then you need to be prepared for the backlash once the job market picks up. Employees remember.
Wasn’t that Matrix Reloaded?
I've always found it weird that it's often called "work from home" and not "remote-first".

It's not only about the location, imho. I don't want to stay at home. I want to work where I'll be most productive on that day. This can be my dedicated desk, my sofa, a Chinese buffet, the coffee shop around the corner, or one of the remaining WeWork offices.

There is also a whole different aspect to it, which imho is overlooked and underappreciated: asynchronicity.

When you build your organisation under the paradigm of remote-first, you can tap into a beyond-regional (= worldwide), distributed talent pool. Once you tap into that beyond-regional, distributed talent pool, however, you will get people with very diverse individual realities:

People who located in different time zones. People with kids. People with disabilities. People with second jobs. There are also people who are more productive in the mornings, others who just bang out amazing code late at night. People for whom this might change over time, sometimes during the course of the week. Other people who take Wednesdays off, but work Sundays instead. All kinds of things which happen at different times and are not entirely plannable.

To capture all these flavours of productivity, you need to also build an organization that works well with asynchronicity. Ideally, an organization that is async-first.

This means: as an IC / manager you need to agree on deliverables and time lines, overshare information, submit actionable requests to your people, not require/expect immediate responses, and make explicitly stated assumptions when needed.

With this in place you have an organisation that is truly resilient, high-bandwith (as @paulgb said), and works like a global mycelial organism instead of a rooted tree, independent of location or time.

That's much more than to just "WFH" from 9 to 5.

Source: Have worked with and lead teams from San Francisco to Manila.
German intelligence spied on White House: https://www.dw.com/en/german-intelligence-spied-on-white-hou...
> An org might have e.g. a CI with a build environment that’s not as well-sandboxed as the test environment for the built app, because a Java compiler isn’t generally expected to (and other than through annotations, usually doesn’t) expose arbitrary code execution abilities to the payload of code being compiled.

Is that kind of setup common though? I’ve never seen anybody running sandboxed tests but non-sandboxed compiles. In my personal experience, either one has ability to sandbox and one sandboxes everything, or one lacks that ability and sandboxes nothing

I have seen compile and unit tests run directly on a Jenkins agent (with a lot of ability for the job to mangle the agent config), but then spinning up a Docker container for integration tests - but in that case the motivation for the Docker container isn’t sandboxing, and the Docker container is often given lots of privileges (like access to the Docker socket)
> Sodium ion batteries are mass produced at a comparable scale today

Since we were talking about economic viability:

"The global Lithium-ion Battery Market in terms of revenue was estimated to be worth $56.8 billion in 2023 and is poised to reach $187.1 billion by 2032" [Source][1]

"The global sodium-ion battery market was valued at USD 0.5 billion in 2023, and is projected to reach USD 1.2 billion by 2028" [Source][2]

Please explain how a difference between 0.5bn and 56.8bn constitutes "comparable scale".

[1]: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/lithium-ion...

[2]: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/sodium-ion-...
This. If your company is on two floors, you have a remote company anyway.

In my experience, it's not _entirely_ that simple though. For some people, chatting and video calls feel super awkward and makes them avoid communication. For other people, in-person is super awkward and has the same effect. There are a lot of nuances. I suspect RTO happens in companies run by the former type, and remote happens in companies run by the latter. As a CTO (did that for more than a decade), I always tried to give the team what they need. But even then, when in doubt, I suppose I often went for what I would need, if I was them.
I think from a utilitarian perspective, getting the minority who want to not work from home to find a cowork space or alternative solution is better than mandating working from the office. Won’t fit everyone, but neither does forcing everyone into the office.
Que?
First of all, Mesopothamia is a geographical region, not a culture or society.

Second, places like Babylon had a very sophisticated legal, financial and administrative system, with tons of written evidence preserved in the form of clay tables surviving.

The Code of Hammurabi being cited as one of the most important pieces of written evidence of a code of laws in ancient times.
> you are sending a signal that days worked at home don't count

The majority of c-suite execs believe this to be true (except when they are out of the office or working from their summer rental for two months of the year) - why would you not signal it?
You might be familiar with NSA as an offensive agency interested in subverting security systems, but it's actually composed of two separate and often warring divisions, the second of which is defensive in nature and is interested in securing systems. It is this second division which has a history of contributing in good faith to security projects, public and otherwise.
The issue with this, and most of articles on the topic of WFH, is they fail to recognize that different people will have different preferences (the horror!) and different situations. They start by putting everybody in the same bucket whatever that is, then argument from there. Luckily smarter companies don't rely on journalists to decide that the best approach is "whatever floats your boat" and keep both options open no questions asked.
> I have no idea how normies put up with this.

Remove the pinned ads for apps once, never open the widgets, shut down every night so updates are transparent.

Sure Microsoft could make a nicer product. But it doesn't really affect users in their day-to-day.
It's totally fair to criticise it for being a horrible, ugly technique. But in terms of fragility, it's no worse than bundling the same DLL as a file along with your app.

(In fact, it's less fragile than a loose DLL, because you don't run the risk of your DLL failing to install/being moved/accidentally loading some other random version of the same DLL etc)
> what is the civilian to combatant death ratio, and what level would it have to fall above to count as "indiscriminate"?

I accept the ICC report which says Israel not only killed indiscriminately, it used hunger as a weapon of war. Those accusations were investigated and proven beyond doubt by the people we most trust to investigate such matters.

However, in my humble opinion, any innocent's death caused by war is unjustifiable. I thought so when the Russians started killing civilians in their war (using the same justifications as Israel, by the way), and I still think so when it's Israel killing Palestinians.
Toyota is one of the few, truly global car brands. And let's face it, a majority of the world is not ready for self-driving or EVs, infrastructure-wise. It would be better if more companies would start designing products for the "other" 6 billion people.
Improved refrigeration could save half of the 1.3B tons of food wasted