skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I did some volunteer mentoring for a while. Burnout was the most common complaint. However, once you dug into each complaint of burnout you discovered that “burnout” has become a catch-all term for a very wide range of feelings.

Before that experience I assumed everyone defined burnout as a severe state of deep distress and lack of energy following extended periods of intense stress, frustration, overwork, and/or lack of control.

Instead, a lot of people used “burnout” more casually, as a catch-all term for any frustrations with their job any or intermittent tiredness. A lot of people would say they were suffering from burnout one week, then everything would be fine again the next Monday after they did something fun over the weekend. To them, burnout could be as simple as being a little tired one week or having to work full 8-hour days for a couple days in a row.

The number of people for whom “burnout” meant a deep and serious affliction that required possibly months to recover from was a lot smaller.

It’s similar to the way people casually talk about their “OCD” because they like to be organized, their “ADHD” when they have nothing resembling clinical ADHD, or their “PTSD” after a mildly unpleasant experience. These terms have become so diluted that they can mean almost anything when you ask people to self-report.

Sure enough, this survey was self-reported. BCG wants to sell you services related to burnout, so maximizing the number of people reporting “burnout” is in their best interests. A self-report survey of unknown cohorts is the perfect way to maximize that number for their headline.
The problem is some need to work to burnout or else they can't pay bills. This is especially true in places like the USA where so many social benefits are tied to employment. Employers understand this. They know a lapse in employment could be devastating, so they can put the screws to employees.
I thought the first example they gave:

>Conspiracy theories undermined global efforts to contain the COVID-19 virus during the pandemic

was maybe ironic. Listening to the people at the start who said it was likely a lab screw up rather than dismissing them as conspiracy theorists might have led to better efforts to contain it.

(for those interested here's the then head of the US CDC talking about being blocked from going over to help contain it and similar things https://youtu.be/oMlhvnMpRU0?t=119)
The study parameters could use some improvement. People who are lonely have smaller worlds, and less access to social information. It's only a conspiracy worldview according to the observer, but to that lonely person, it's what they know. Something feels disrespectful about the analysis in this study but I can't put my finger on it.
As far as I understand, Musk has lost billions of dollars since his acquisition. "Making a quick buck" implies that he has made money.
But isn't part of taking a job in the first place to earn money so that you can eat, live and enjoy it with your family and friends.

Maybe the issue is more that we earn so much and have no life outside of work so the "earning money to live" is not there anymore.

We try to find meaning in the work itself instead of in the after-work part.
AI Work Assistants Need a Lot of Handholding
I must be in the minority. In the early days Teams had some pitfalls but for the most part, it's rather great. I don't understand what all the fuss is.

I regularly use both Teams and Google meet and don't find any significant differences that matter... so at the end of the day, use the one that is bundled with the rest of your software instead of having a different dependency.
What year was this comment written ?

Most web apps these days are single page applications which don't require page reloads for every UI interaction.
Egypt tomb find may shed light on ancient diseases
The janitor in my school was a relaxed guy in his late 50s. He was always joking and seemed to be quite satisfied with his job. All the children respected him - he was the guy you turned to when something was not working right, and he fixed it. He and his family lived on the school campus in a nice bungalow with a nice garden. His children also went to my school. While his salary certainly wasn't great, he did not have to pay any rent (the bungalow was owned by the city and came with the job), and the job was super secure. He was also the person who worked for the school the longest (since the school opened in the early 70ies), and was a walking history book.

In my previous job, we would regularly see a guy with a small truck delivering vegetables door-to-door during our lunch breaks. We all envied him. He was always smiling and whistling, while we were sitting miserably before our food, counting the minutes remaining before we had to go back into a hell of customer tickets and technical debt.
The question of what's fair illuminates the question of what's hard
Really sad to see something so amazing get picked apart for its value.

I really wish Paul set up endowments to continue his projects. I don’t know if he knew how his sister would handle his estate but it doesn’t seem like what he wanted.
I think that it depends on context.

To a significant degree, things like charity and parenting are hard work regardless of reward. Arguably, society is built on the idea of people working hard for the good of the whole.

The problem is that corporate capitalism has become a parasite that exploits these instincts.
Agreed. No company settles on MSTeams because it's good.

They use it because it's effectively free (1), and Slack is not.

It doesn't have to be good. And so it isn't.

1) Free with existing MS Office licences.
Also all the code and data can be easily cached with e.g. Service Workers, so it will be downloaded only once.
I like how the presumably straight sibling comments don't seem to know what the "alternative lifestyles" dog whistle means in context here. There is a long history of saying being lgbt is a lifestyle choice.

I'm genuinely fascinated by what negative effects you perceive of people who are gay, trans, ace being able to live their lives openly instead of being forced to pretend otherwise and ultimately failing at it.

What is gained by society by forcing a lesbian into a straight marriage? You've just created a sexless marriage with extra steps.
I guess it depends on your definition of "hard worker", but I think that people should do the work they agreed to do, to the best of their ability.

I hired a company to install new HVAC in my house, a number of years ago. They spent some time examining the house and came up with a plan. During the course of doing the work, they would occasionally touch base with me to discuss changes they thought made sense (moving one of the thermostat to a location that it more likely to result in the correct temperature, etc). They did a good job and put real effort into making sure I got what I needed.

I hired an electrician to put some outlets in a floor, so that we didn't have cords reaching across the floor from the middle of the room. I described what I was looking to do (plug in the lazyboy, phones, lamp, etc). As he was nearing the completion of his work, I noticed that the outlets were way too recessed; anything with a larger plug (iphone charger) couldn't even plug into it. He pushed back when I told him it needed to be corrected; telling me I could just use an extension cord. I had to keep pushing to get him to spend the time (time that I was paying for per hour anyways) to fix it.

There is a difference between "getting the job done" and "doing a job to the best of your ability"; not killing yourself, but making sure the job is done right, the way you would want it done for yourself. The later is what I consider hard working. I want that from the people I hire and I do my best to provide the same myself.

> the way you would want it done for yourself

Side note, the HVAC system was, give or take, the same system the owner of the company had in his own house. I got everything I could hope for out of their work, and I still reach out to them for anything related (and recommend them highly).
With a ternary system, would we expect 1/3 of the elements to be zero? I kind of wonder about using a sparse MM, then they wouldn’t have to represent 0 and the could just use one bit to represent 1 or -1. 66% density is not really very sparse at all though.
What makes this so difficult is that it would be hard to fix even if there was agreement on the problem.

If governments were to parcel up markets and stop companies from crossing rather arbitrary dividing lines, it would effectively stop all investment in disruptive technologies because any real disruption most likely infringes on some of these laws.

If you stop large companies from expanding into neighbouring industries, e.g by bundling new stuff with their existing offering, you stop them from becoming bigger but at the same time you are reducing competition. The risk is that you might end up with smaller companies but even less competition.

I'm not ideologically opposed to government intervention. I just don't know how to do it. All discussions on how to break up some tech giant quickly reveal how devilishly complex the problem is. And it's different for each of them and for each industry.

What would be a general rule to prevent growing concentration without damaging innovation, ossifying existing market structures and make impossible demands on the political system in terms of keeping all those detailed rules up-to-date and fit for purpose?
It’s hard to know what to make of this when you also read that job satisfaction is at historic highs[1]. One reading is being highly engaged in your job is related to burnout, because you’re more likely to be unhappy when your job doesn’t go the way you want. Whereas just punching a clock you take it less seriously.

1 - https://www.conference-board.org/press/job-satisfaction-hits...
Sargassum for Dummies
Depends on the company. A place like Microsoft or Google, where the company doesn’t really need to try to reap the benefits of their monopolies, a lot of people get away with working 20 hour weeks. Amazon and Meta are known to be harder places to work, so maybe 50-60 isn’t rare - although many just do 40. At startups you have to work long hours but that can be anywhere from 50-70 hours. No one is actually doing the 100 hour weeks they glorify, because it’s impossible to sustain.

The truth is though it’s a broken system. In my opinion even a startup should be able to make it on 40 hours. If they have to put in insane hours for just a slim chance to survive, it’s an indication that there isn’t really fair competition and that the market is too skewed towards existing players.
If I was in charge of our infra automation I would have done this. We opted for jsonnet instead which is an absolute nightmare, or at least the way we've set it up is.
Columnar analytics are slow in non-columnar engines
See - Mcdonaldization of Society - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_McDonaldization_of_Society
Title insurance could be safely eliminated with something called the Torrens title system, it was tried in the US but never took off outside of Guam. The issue comes from the lack of any definitive record of property ownership, raising the possibility that challenges may be raised in court in the future that weren't known to the buyer.
> I happily drive to join friends and family all over the place.

Except you don't.

If you did then you would not be so passive aggressive with your comment. There is no need for that little put down regarding a hypothetical 'skill issue'. Why say something condescending that you would not say to anyone else in real life? Oh, car dependency, the disease worse than a STD.

Incidentally, I don't even walk. I cycle everywhere. I have time to say hello to my neighbours and a smile for other road users, even if they are trapped in a tin box.

Meanwhile, you endanger your neighbours with toxic fumes, deafen them with noise, make the street dangerous for any pets they might have, make the street ugly with a rusty tin box and destroy their climate. You might have a fancy car but you are an example relic from the boomer past, shortening your healthspan with every mile you drive.

Rather than patronise those that see value in active travel, consider joining them. Enjoy physical activity that is not a dumb workout, and, be the inspiration for others that want a clean, green future rather than the vroom-vroom boomer life of anger.
You don't fill out forms or what you imagine. And because it is a credit card, you don't lose your money.

Regarding your last question, about the 15 seconds friction, you should work for a bit in online commerce to see how fast people give up paying if there's even a little inconvenience in the checkout process and go somewhere else they perceive it makes their shopping experience easier. The biggest drop in conversion rates happens at the checkout stage.
I might be. I also commuted downtown from the outer Richmond for years, on the 31, the 38, the 1, and the 5. Oh, I've seen plenty of crazy stuff, but only one assault.
The Paxos Algorithm or How to Win a Turing Award
Homelessness serves as excellent motivation for us to sacrifice our bodies and minds on the behalf of our employers’ profit. Poverty isn’t an unfortunate side effect of resource mis-allocation at the margins of society, but a necessary feature of the institutional mechanisms that burn out generations, keeping the bread and circuses going.
Public transportation is not a true panacea even where it’s seen most favorable. Car ownership increased 14% in Europe from 2012 to 2022, across the board:

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/d...

The future will be a combination of trains, a more extensive robotaxi network for the last mile, which can be cars or vans, and a much smaller percentage of personal vehicles compared to today. Buses as they are today will decline.
Yes, the problem is not the self-reporting, but rather the lack of details on how they measured it.
I don’t think that’s always true. With remote work, flexible schedules, etc, you can reduce the costs of working. In the worst cases, you might have a long commute making your 8 hour work day into 10+. But you still have weekends and probably at least 6-8 waking hours outside of work. (I’m imagining an 8-6 with commute, so assuming 8 hours of sleep, 6-9pm and 5-8am)

Best case, you remove a commute and gain a whole day back with a 4x8 schedule
While managers are whipping them for greater "productivity" and more "velocity". And don't say that there are plenty of jobs for IT workers - that may be true for US but the picture isn't so rosy elsewhere.
This is like a cornerstone of American culture, the belief that hard work will be rewarded is ingrained in us. I think it's a great attitude, but hard to keep up when you realize it's often not true
> “war pigs” by Black Sabbath

War pigs is positively cheerful compared with Titan! At least Titan sort-of avoided another Stephen Baxter trope that annoyed me when it kept appearing: how humanity's first star ship, last-chance rescue ark, etc always somehow gets taken over by a gang of lowlife characters who were included for bizarre plot reasons / sneaked onboard at the last minute / etc. Although in Titan, instead of stowaways, madness due to increased radiation exposure turns one of the crew into the deranged psycho who has to be managed by the others.

Many of his books also include a disgruntled ex-astronaut partnered with some all-knowing alien / robot / immortal / etc that provides exposition / info dumps as required when Baxter decides to 'tell' rather than 'show'.
I haven't had that experience, but then when it comes to audio there can be so many e.g. device (hardware+various OS parts) specific issues that only some of the browsers might have workarounds for that it's quite viable (but AFIK not the norm, and not limited to works on Chrom but not Firefox, the other way around is possible too).

Either way it doesn't matter much because:

- jitsi meet even when they still was a small startup managed to provide high quality video calling on all browsers/platforms

- MS Teams has more then enough resource to make things work, they just don't want to (same for properly maintaining their Linux app, which given that it can be a local deploy of the web-app a very little other code could be a 1.5 person job (the +.5 person in case the first is sick)) and have a good reason not to (they have been pushing edge hard, including using inappropriate means like deceiving windows users into using it when they clearly signaled they want to use another browser)
They have been for years, ever since they stopped allowing for literal string search.
Security is not part of most people's jobs
Swift Playgrounds might be the closest thing, but it’s nowhere near as fun or intuitive as HC once was.
Workbook Ideas as Creative Side Hustles
Paul Allen's Living Computer Museum to Be Auctioned
It's truly sad to see this beautiful place and collection of historic items being dissolved.
Merchants/banks pay for it. It sucks, but with good tools you can lower it significantly, so that its a nuisance.
What did you mean? Where did I even come close to doing that?
Are you sure you mean O(n) instead of O(1), which I would expect for an array?
Karpathy’s zero to hero series on Youtube is considered one of the gold standards for starting out.
Being a nutcase means certain rules don't apply, and others do. Being in power offers the opportunity to apply this discordant world-view on nonadherants.

The solution is regulation. Human rights, formal ones.
This is about a 20,000 person global organization with large EU operations. For smaller EU organizations, I expect Google just doesn't care very much and that may be an increasing trend with US companies to the degree that EU regulations run counter to how they want to operate elsewhere.
> it's 2024

Depends on which calendar. There is nothing more powerful than the human mind when it comes to distorting reality.
If it's an app, you're not in the browser anymore anyway, so you don have to worry about this browser wasm. You can store data locally anyway and don't have to pull it from the sever
aye, at this point desktop linux is pretty dang mature, and doesn't stream telemetry or error codes unless you explicitly tell it to.

the holdout was gaming, but Steam and Proton work practically flawlessly. one or two other occasional challenges -- a big one was MS Access that was needed for Master's program -- but other than that nothing on Windows that can't ignored / discarded
Thanks, we are still building out the collaboration features. Performance on collaboration is a hard problem but there are industries good practices we'd follow.
Okay, so it's more about SQL than the database aspect?

I can see there'd be demand for that, but I'm not convinced the porting a full-scale DB to WASM is the best way to achieve that goal.
People don't need fulfilling jobs. They need fulfilling lives. That means it should be relatively easy to earn enough to comfortably live, having enough time to have a family, spend time wiht that family, socialize, have hobbies, go on vacation, help out in their communities, etc.

What's happened in the last 40-50 years is that productivity skyrocketed but real wages remained relatively stagnant to the point where you need 2 people each with a full-time job and each having a "side hustle" or second job just to make ends meet. And you'll still have a lower standard of living than someone working a basic job 50 years ago.

Some turn this conversation, much like homelessness, into a "personal moral failure", meaning it's your fault if you don't have a fulfilling job. Not all jobs can be fulfilling. But if people earn a decent income they don't really care.

We should instead talk about why the demand for greater and greater profits have concentrated the value created by workers into the hands of the very few and why the workers who create that value don't their fair share of those profits.
The primary negative effect I felt as a gay man came from the preacher, who felt the need to respond to news about LGBTQIA topics and remind the congregation that I basically wasn't allowed to exist. I had to hide this aspect of myself and pretend to be straight so my Dad (a teacher and a youth minister, in an era where I wasn't legally allowed to exist either) wouldn't lose his job.

Once I was able to leave home, and the law was adjusted, and I finally called my Dad to tell him I had my first real crush and was about to ask someone out, he was nothing but supportive and a great weight was lifted. Finally, I didn't have to lie to everyone I knew all the time. I could just be honest.

At no time during any of that was I ever truly straight. But I've learned to wear that mask when required. My aspect didn't cause me to take up drugs, or sleep around, or stay in abusive relationships just because I'd finally found the right orientation in a partner. Indeed, I'm currently single and pursuing a career in computer science, because that's a bit more interesting. The only thing "coming out" changed was allowing me to stop lying all the time. I was just able to finally be me.

That's it. That's all I ever wanted: to stop pretending to be something I'm not.
I think Michael Bolton got it better

Peter Gibbons: Our high school guidance counselor used to ask us what you'd do if you had a million dollars and you didn't have to work. And invariably what you'd say was supposed to be your career. So, if you wanted to fix old cars then you're supposed to be an auto mechanic.

Samir: So what did you say?

Peter Gibbons: I never had an answer. I guess that's why I'm working at Initech.

Michael Bolton: No, you're working at Initech because that question is bullshit to begin with. If everyone listened to her, there'd be no janitors, because no one would clean shit up if they had a million dollars.
I'm not sure what the "it" you're referring to is, but if something is not a secret, you could either encrypt it anyway or use an alternate mechanism to provide the value.
Which is completely different from developing your own platform.

And it definitely isn't something which VW uses to base their own cars on.
Looks like most people commenting didn’t read the article.
> His reasoning is very flawed and this book is responsible for a lot of needless consternation.

Is it? I feel that there is a stark difference between what you say and what I remember what was written in the book.

> We don’t know how human intelligence works.

I think it was addressed in the first half of the book. About research and progress in the subject. Both with the tissue scanning resolution, emulation attempts like human brain project and advances in 1:1 simulations on primitive nervous systems like worms that simulate 1 second in 1 real hour or something.

While primitive, we are doing exponential progress.

> Yet, the Bostrom view is that our greatest invention will just suddenly "emerge"

I think it is quite the contrary. There was nothing sudden in the reasoning. It was all about slow progress in various areas that gets us closer to advanced intelligence.

The path from a worm to a village idiot is million times longer than from a village idiot to the smartest person on earth.

> an entity able to create new knowledge at astounding rates yet completely lacking in other human qualities.

This subject was also explored IMO in the depth...

Maybe my memory is cloudy, I've read the book 5+ years ago, but it feels like we've understood it very (very) differently.

That said, for anyone reading, I am not convinced by the presented argument and suggest reading the book.
Those additional 6-8 hours dwindle down to 1-2 hours real quick when you consider you still have housework to do on top of work, cooking, cleaning, washing, you also need to eat and buy groceries. Also can't do anything exciting immediately before going to sleep.
Swimming dealt with it in 2009 after complaints that suits like the LZR Racer provided too much buoyancy and records were being broken at an unusual rate:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LZR_Racer#FINA_rule_changes