skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is really the key. Grinding something you don't actually enjoy or find useful is pretty deathly, even if you get actively paid for it. "Low level", as others have said, is a very, very broad field and if you have an general interest in lower-level stuff, home in on what specifically interests you by trying to achieve some actual goal of use or interest to you.

It doesn't really matter what it is, it could be porting FeeeRTOS to your toaster, writing a kernel driver for something, reversing some device protocol, implementing something on an FPGA or building some embedded device or hacking another one into something else. Just get stuck into something and feel the gravity of your open interests.

Nothing you learn along the way will be a waste.
Whats the issue with Secure Boot? That's an actually good idea security wise.
Thanks for making me check, I was off a bit. It's actually more like 1400 TW. Must have dropped a digit when I remembered that.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00382-023-06775-x

> the total radiative forcing (RF) by human activities of approximately 2.72 W m^−2 (Masson-Delmotte 2021)

(with the radius of the Earth of 6.4e6 meters and surface area = 4 pi r^2).
My flop partition is very agnostic about understanding that sentence, as things go.
But Iceland has decidedly not been stable. They gained de facto independence in 1918 and completely lost their sovereignty only 22 years later when Britain occupied them (that is despite them still having armed forces in 1940). Since WW2 things have obviously been stable-ish (things were really bad in 2009). How long do you think that would last once Iceland tried to exercise their sovereignty, for instance by leaving NATO?

Analogously, how long did the Shire last against a motivated attacker with comparatively little resources?
Unfortunately (as I really like(d) Windows OS), I agree with you. Once my LTSC is end of life, I'm finally swapping to anything but Windows.
What does the "bunting" key under each event denote?
It will end like Apple, an M3 Pro has up to 36gb of memory and an M3 Max from 48gb of memory.

You get getter performance/watt but you can't upgrade. It depends on what you want.
Yeah when a company says one of their responsible disclosure rules amounts to "just don't ruin our prod system, or reveal or steal data pls" they basically invite you to try and break in - responsibly.
You (and probably a lot of tech nerds) need to remember democracy is a social challenge, not a technological challenge. What applies to technology does not necessarily apply to society.

The more opaque and complicated you make so-called "democracy", the less the electorate have faith that it is fair and representative. Simplicity and transparency is security, security that democracy is working in a way everyone can and must agree with even if they don't necessarily like it.
I worked at a large Healthtech company before. I get the sentiment. But, in the forest of software based on poor decisions, there were definitely a couple of valuable gems made by very knowledgeable people. Generally those were the people with an "opensource mindset" (as opposed to the "my ultra-crappy code that is just some FOSS glued together is super valuable IP and you need to read 100s of QMS docs before you can lay your eyes on it"-people). Don't measure the whole org by the same yardstick.
> The problem is that losers cannot pass the test, but winners can.

Citation needed
I recently had to install windows on 2 computers after some years without doing it.

Had to spend an entire day debloating the thing. Had to use a handful of tools and powershell scripts to do it.

I still can't imagine how they managed to make a context menu open in almost a full second. In Windows 9x on a 200Mhz it was instant. A useless one too, because all the options that matter are in the old one.

The only thing holding me from Linux is ThrottleStop and MSI Afterburner, which are a must for gaming on my laptop
At all the companies I’ve run we’ve used a simple whiteboard example for this reason. Don’t worry about typos; how does the person think.

“Trick” questions are dumb, but you want to get an idea of if the candidate knows their stuff (and let the candidate know what we’re like — interviewing is a sales process in both directions). If someone asks a question like “is it ok to modify the argument” (or says “I’ll assume I can’t modify the argument”) that’s great (or says “I can’t remember if strlen includes the 0 byte so I’ll add 1 — normally I’d look it up”) - again, no trick questions.

When I say “simple” it’s something like atoi or “shuffle a deck of cards”: basic, but not 100% trivial like fizzbuzz.

On of our best hires was a guy who made a fundamental mistake — when we asked him if it world work as intended he said “I’m a fucking idiot” and fixed it. You’re not supposed to talk like that in an interview I supposed but we read it as a strong positive signal.

We had one candidate who insisted that parsing a string and returning an integer was an unreasonable question because there was already a library function for it. “But what if you have an embedded system and no library?” (an actual situation for us, for part of our system). He was adamant — honestly that was a failure of the phone screen: had it been caught it would have saved us, and him, from wasting time.
Managed to solve this problem by going into business for myself. Have applied to some potentially interesting positions, but got batted away as not good enough at coding quiz questions. If I ever feel the need to be treated disrespectfully by people with two or three decades less experience then maybe I'll put my resume out there again. Probably not, though. Kind of interesting that I know many like me who have decades of proven experience but little interest in modern interview games and end up going different ways. Lots of value being left on the table, but there it is.
It really seems Microsoft is trying hard to push users to Linux (or other alternatives)
Here are the correct links:
https://careers.auroraer.com/
Senior SWE: https://careers.auroraer.com/en/postings/47ac7fa5-0677-4f59-...
SWE: https://careers.auroraer.com/en/postings/ccaf9e07-1206-49e5-...
I'm genuinely curious if people still think gov.uk is a good example - or I guess, as good as it was.

I'm slightly biased from past experience but my feeling is a lot of the critical thinking that went into gov.uk has been lost. I just can't see the original form of GDS having an cookie banner on gov.uk for example. These were the guys that rightly pointed out that there is no actual need for people to have user accounts to access most govenment services and that no one cares about what govt department they are forced to interact with and yet, I reccently had to create a DVLA account to get an updated drivers liscence (something that happens once a decade).
>Did you go out and cut the wood, too? Haul it home? Every day?

I've cut tree branches with a saw but just for "gardening" maintainance. More often we used to do it with a chainsaw, but for special purposes, not cutting down trees to get the season's wood. In the village there were people who cut the trees and sold the wood. So didn't have to personally cut down trees. Probably that was the case in any larger village in the 19th century too.

I've hauled wood though - the bulk storage happens a few times a year (and it's just offloading what the guy brought), but from the storage to the woodstove/fireplace happened every day. Not a big deal. And if you have a carriage, which they did or someone in their village did, the former is not a big deal either.

>Consider why they had to work so hard, and still died young and malnourished.

Another common misconception. Birth/Early childhood death aside, the life expectance wasn't that different than today. And some of these rural communities even are in the "too many live to be 100" blue zones.

Depends on the place I guess. People in some midwestern half-desert like New Mexico or Arizona probably fared differently than people in places full of green, fertile land, and running waters, like in many areas of rural Europe. Or people under some nasty feudal lord working them to the bone, versus independent villagers. For those, the main thing that did did them bad, was adverse weather messing the crops some years.
It's worth noting ChromeOS doesn't let you do that either, while MacOS doesn't require an iCloud account. iOS doesn't either, but is pushy about having an iCloud account. Don't know about Android.
Yeah I apologize, I fell into that rabbit hole purely by accident, but it is really really interesting and considering the current prices to get a home built, maybe even practically applicable some day :D
Ask HN: Who else is trying to connect their CRM with their Support tool?
We built a v1 that connects your Intercom with your CRM, consolidates all your customer feedback, and adds a dollar value to each insight. We’re engineers, and want to make this engineering friendly. Previously, we had to rely on PMs to give us context behind certain insights, often incomplete or subjective. We’re trying to build a solution that holds all relevant context and we’re starting with account information, i.e. which specific user made the comment.

We’re early and want to build a solution that helps. If you’re also trying to hack this data together, we’d love to chat with you (https://cal.com/shrir/15min).
I've found ChatGPT 4o (the voice one) to be useful, I just need to prompt it first by saying `Whatever you hear in Chinese, say in English, whatever you hear in English, say in Chinese`. It refuses to cooperate if you tell it to be a live translator.

Anyways, it seems to understand context really well, I tried it out with a Chinese person and they said it worked really well.

It even works for Croatian which is awesome as it is a really small language that anything voice-related usually does not work with.
There’s a way around it. It’s specifically made by MS. You invoke cmd with special shortcut and execute bat-file bundled in installer which adds one key to registry and restarts an installer.

I don’t know if it’s an officially supported way, but given the fact that MS put all the necessary scripts and implemented it, it can’t be a coincidence.
One example was buying up fraudulent unemployment insurance debit cards.
I love the idea of Hotwire and I'm already using it in one of my production project. Overall it saved me a lot of time and frustration having to deal with a separate frontend project, and the frustration having to manually manipulate the DOM with JavaScript in traditional MVC project.

However I faced some other new frustration, such as when trying to make a dynamic nested form (similar to cocoon gem) but only with hotwire stack (turbo frame/stream). It is also hard to think of each hotwire controller as a component, you might face some problems when trying to do some nesting.

I think Hotwire will be a perfect fit if you want a traditional websites with a few dynamic, interactive features. If your website is too much app-like, you should consider switching the frontend part to SPA entirely.
Chip design is SUCH an advanced topic. It's potentially one of the most advanced human disciplines at the moment.

I have a friend[0] that is doing his Electronics Engineering masters in Germany (very prestigious engineering university) and they're studying a freaking Pentium 4. Even for them the cutting edge chip design is black magic.

[0] Ultimate frisbee teammate.
CUDA programming (writing CUDA kernels) might be a good direction too.

GPU race is getting really hot and there is a lot of work being done to squeeze every ounce of performance especially for LLM training and inference.

One resource I would recommend is “Programming massively parallel processors” [1]

I am also learning it as my hobby project and uploading my notes here [2]

[1] https://shop.elsevier.com/books/programming-massively-parall...

[2] https://github.com/mandliya/PMPP_notes
Hong Kong is a special case where English still has higher prestige to begin with. Locals sometimes code-switch to English even if everyone present would understand Cantonese.
Other than being able to gobble up user data and being able to associate it with a person (or at least an email address) and later sell that information, what is Microsoft reasoning for refusing local accounts?

This whole obsession with forcing users to create a Microsoft account is really weird. It may provides some features for certain types of users, but I really don't see any reason for forcing a Microsoft account. Apple also REALLY want you to have an Apple ID, but you don't have to.

I still fail to see why Microsoft doesn't go all in on privacy, do they really need the extra profit from advertising?

Microsoft doesn't give a shit about the desktop anymore and at this point they're also stopping to care about the business customers, unless they can move them to subscription based services in the cloud.
This is a nasty side effect of capitalism - it's misaligned with the best interests of society and, sometimes, completely opposite to it. Where all you measure is capital flows, you are not serving the humans.
Abstract :

Between 2000 and 2008, access to high-speed, broadband internet grew significantly in the United States, but there is debate on whether access to high-speed internet improves or harms wellbeing. We find that a ten percent increase in the proportion of county residents with access to broadband internet leads to a 1.01 percent reduction in the number of suicides in a county, as well as improvements in self-reported mental and physical health. We further find that this reduction in suicide deaths is likely due to economic improvements in counties that have access to broadband internet. Counties with increased access to broadband internet see reductions in poverty rate and unemployment rate. In addition, zip codes that gain access to broadband internet see increases in the numbers of employees and establishments. In addition, heterogeneity analysis indicates that the positive effects are concentrated in the working age population, those between 25 and 64 years old. This pattern is precisely what is predicted by the literature linking economic conditions to suicide risk.
I have a theory, which I have no way of backing up or testing at all, that the entire slump in the laptop segment is driven by the fact that Windows is just utterly user-hostile garbage, and there aren’t any alternatives really, other than MacOS, which is too tied to Apple.

Like any reasonable tech savvy person I use Linux of course, but I’d have trouble suggesting it… lots of people just don’t want to use the terminal at all.
Not so sure about you being behind me - one minute ago I had little to no idea what I2C or SPI even mean :)
https://www.jstor.org/stable/27212328

Falun Gong and Epoch Times receive funding from Congress via the National Endowment for Democracy. I guess the USA promotes them since they're a thorn in the side of China.

And yeah, they get up to some weird stuff.

https://www.npr.org/2021/04/14/986982387/falun-gong-steve-ba...
Leetcode style interviews are not great, but I much prefer them to take homes. However, some FAANG+ companies have a nice system (for internship), where they give a very small codebase (~100ish lines) to work on with some errors / possible improvements and you go through those in the interview.
The Identity side of GDS has definitely been the worst. I wonder if due to the politics around that service, the thinking has stopped and the Just Get It Done, Even If It's Silly crowd has replaced it.
Let's not forget payusatax dot com and all the other IRS "partners" that you somehow need to go through.
Completely unintended side effect, but coal and oil might have created the need for massive rewilding efforts that might, ultimately not only save the forests, but winding cover back to pre-industrial levels.
I interviewed at a company known for consistently asking one of the same four questions in a specific interview round. These questions were widely shared on forums like Blind, Leetcode, and Glassdoor. The recruiters also provided strong guidance on the type of problems to expect.

I prepared thoroughly for all four main questions and any other plausible ones I could think of. I practiced writing solutions to ensure I was fast enough for the interview. Additionally, I pre-prepared ideal answers for each question in case I got stuck.

When the interview came, I got a total curveball: a question that was significantly harder than the usual ones. It didn't fit the round's theme (it was a DSA question, but I'd already aced the DSA round), was obscure enough not to be on LeetCode, and required writing a solver for a hard variant of a known algorithm. I panicked, copied the prompt into ChatGPT (despite being instructed not to use it), transcribed the result, and pretended I had recently studied the relevant algorithm.

I passed the round, nailed the other interviews, got the offer, and accepted. Later, I found out that interviewers are instructed to pick one of four specific questions for that round, and the one I got wasn't in the list.

I'm left wondering if the interviewer was trying to sink me or was just bored with the usual questions. The whole experience raised several questions for me:

Is it cheating if I already had pre-prepared answers for the questions they were supposed to ask? What's the difference between using pre-prepared answers and using Google or ChatGPT during the interview?

If the interview had gone according to plan, what was I actually demonstrating? My ability to use Google?

When the interviewer asked an impossibly difficult question, I would have failed if I answered it legit, even though I'm a good engineer. Failing such an unfair interview round doesn't serve the company's interests.

What is this interview process meant to demonstrate? My true value as an engineer lies in my ability to communicate clearly, think outside the box, identify and address technical tradeoffs, mentor juniors, and propose technical solutions that meet requirements while minimizing risks. Yet, I'm expected to solve a hard variant of the Traveling Salesman Problem in 45 minutes or I don't get the job? Why?

The whole process seems broken, but I'm not sure how to fix it.
> Hydro, wind, and solar backed by batteries looks like an ~90% solution to grid power / ground transportation reasonably quickly

What? Currently, electricity makes for 20% of our global consumption. We're not remotely talking about replacing the 80% of fossil fuels with electricity, even with fission + hydro, wind and solar.

Batteries only work to store energy for a few days, not between seasons.

The reality is that we don't have a 90% solution to power. Not in the short term, not in the long term. Except if new technologies that do not exist yet appear. Have a look at all those huge boats that enable globalization: how do you propose we replace fossil fuels there? Or aviation.

The solution to the energy problem is to prepare to have (much) less energy. And a good way to prepare for that is to try to produce as much electricity as we can. And that quite obviously involves fission.
>But isn’t it also common sense that, if it’s already in high transmission then you wearing your mask isn’t going to budge the dial.

No, that isn't common sense at all. It's the opposite of common sense. Yes, you, yourself wearing a mask "budges the dial" ever so slightly. And the people in the house next to you wearing masks when appropriate also "budge the dial" just a tiny bit more. And thousands of others that wear masks "budge the dial" - well that dial is now spinning. That's how these things work. It's a group effort. But if the group is filled with morons that "think for themselves" (aka selfish assholes) then the dial will grind slower, because everyone's in it for themselves and don't believe that their actions have any effect on anyone else, which is pretty dumb.

>Thing is, at those times, responsibility needs to shift back to the individual to take care of themselves.

Yes, take care of your self. Wear the mask. Don't get sick so that you can't pass the sickness on to others. It's really that simple.

>Most people judged they didn’t need substantial protection

Think about the most average person you know. Half the people in the world are dumber than that. Most people are fucking stupid.

There's nothing rational about not wearing a mask in high risk situation during a global pandemic.
The thing here is - around the era of GTK2, when themes (and widgets) were mostly bitmaps, there were a few things you couldn't do that adwaita is great at, but changing your accent color? Hell yes, just set the accent color in a .rc file and you're good, because that just changes the color at a particular index in the palette of the bitmaps used to draw a window.

Earlier still, there was a lot you could do with `~/.Xresources`.

Theming back then was much more a negotiation between "designers" and "users": if I like someone's general style of buttons but I'd like them in red instead of blue, I can easily do that, no coding required. You didn't even have to edit the bitmaps by hand most of the time. Want the widgets from this theme but the window decorations from that theme, but with a different font? Config file, or a few clicks in the settings GUI.

The code of the window manager/desktop environment was written to make this kind of thing possible.

In theory, you could develop a CSS-based theming where you can still factor out some key settings like "accent color" or "roundedness of corners" into variables that are easy to set or edit. Then the OS/DE would ship a default theme that works well, and if the user wants to change those settings to something that works better for them, it's on them not to mess it up.

It seems to me though that adwaita is doing everything short of DRM to make it maximally hard to disagree with their design choices.
We've been moving our fleet to OSX, I am so tired of dealing with Windows and Microsoft in particular.
My first forays into making neural networks used replacement rules to modify an expression tree until all the “D” operators went away, but that takes exponential complexity in network depth if you aren’t careful. Finite differences is linear in number of parameters, as is differentiation by Dual Numbers
Status Update, May 2024
This is laughable, an ideological trope with little bearing on reality. Governments spend and also waste far more money than is not only hidden from tax obligations but also more money than is also collected through tax receipts of all kinds (all that sweet, sweet deficit spending at work). And they do indeed waste vast amounts of it, on military plans, boondoggles that go nowhere, bullshit drug wars, bloated bureaucracies that perpetuate themselves to never solve the problems behind their original purpose and so forth, but the blame for no Jetsons future is really with people hiding a fraction outside what's already taxed and keeping it from more of that same public spending waste?

If governments wanted to spend on long-term tech and energy investments, they most definitely could find the funds to do so from among their existing budgets. These budgets are in many cases at record levels anyhow. However they don't because, well, see wasteful spending causes listed above, none of which go away since they benefit so many entrenched institutional interests...

Money hidden by tax evasion is in any case not dead capital. It gets moved around, invested, reinvested, and through different means, channeled to the kinds of things that legitimate investments funds and VCs also spend their money on (presumably as a good thing, since you're not also blaming them for no Jetsons future).
He doesn't. His solar city acquisition was nothing but a bailout and solar city was gutted down to nothing. Tesla hardly does any solar installations except on their own factories.
Ironically, I've been avoiding learning Lua for quite some time for some reason. I guess it's finally time to give it a try!
So what would be a good laptop for Linux these days?