skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> One notable feature is the slide locking mechanism used in place of the usual UNC 4-40 screws. It is my personal opinion that the design of this mechanism is a bit daft.

I saw these slide-lock connectors used with 10BASE-2 coax Ethernet, on some Unix workstations I worked on as a teen intern (Sun, etc.), and I always wondered whether I was doing something wrong.

For starters, it'd often be a headache just to push the slide. (See the photos, and imagine the transceiver box up against a recess in the back of a heavy workstation chassis, and now you're somehow going to have to get your fingers into there, and with enough strength to push the slide the full travel, while holding the transceiver on firmly. Sometimes I'd have to use a screwdriver to push.)

Then, if you manage to slide it, it usually wouldn't hold. For reasons unclear, since it often wasn't very visible. Some of them were surely bent. Others mysteriously didn't look bent, but didn't hold, even though you got a click of the slide, and the slide seemed to be in the locked position, with the transceiver seemed to br pressed on.

Contrast with the many D-sub connectors on PCs at the time, of both smaller and larger sizes, where they'd just press on, and usually tight enough to stay in place. Or you could used the screws (thumbscrews, or the tiny screwdriver heads), which held very well, with less effort than the slide-lock.

Thankfully, every place since then, we've just done the still-familiar twisted pair with RJ45 connectors, fiber, or WiFi.

Did anyone like the AUI ("owie") transceiver slide locks, or know how to make them work?
Investment is about growth; Apple is already huge. When you've already cornered your respective market niches and you have big competitors it's hard to grow more. That said I think there are less reliable investments, so Apple's probably fine.
You’re good
Hint: it works just as well if you replace the acos argument with 0

value = sin(repeated) * acos(0) * (10 ** repeat)

(keep in mind that that acos(0) = pi/2)
> A study conducted by consulting firm Korn Ferry found that by 2030, there will be a global human talent shortage of more than 85 million people, roughly equivalent to the population of Germany. That talent shortage could slash $8.5 trillion from nations’ expected revenues, affecting highly educated sectors such as financial services and IT as well as manufacturing jobs, which are considered “lower skilled” and require less education.

I'm ready to believe that there could be harms associated with this, but it's notable that Fortune doesn't bother actually identifying the real, concrete, human harm caused by an 85-million-person talent shortage.

There's a historical model that proposes that the Renaissance directly came out of the Black Death—the decrease in population gave the working class more bargaining power, which led to higher standards of living for the survivors, which created an environment where there was more leisure time to spend creating and consuming arts and philosophy.

It doesn't particularly matter to me if this model is strictly accurate to the history, it's a plausible outcome from reduced workforces.

We only need to work more if companies need to continue to bring in large amounts of profit. I'll need to see some really persuasive evidence that companies having a smaller bottom line because they have to compete for workers in a shrinking workforce hurts the workers in any meaningful way.
That's the one reservation I have about reading. When you're reading you aren't living, in a sense.
updated the gist: I'm getting close to 3-4 frames per second! this is only possible because of the partial screen refreshes since most pixels don't change between consecutive frames
This whole situation is been a real mess for years.

1) Quiet quitting is primarily the result of disengagement. It is typically an organization failure and not an IC problem.

2) More than a fifth of the workforce was laid off early in the pandemic, causing issues with teams.

3) The pivot to massive hiring during the pandemic tended to ignore the need to be careful about changes to teams and their need to gel.

4) There was an impedance mismatch between individual KPI's and business needs that had been building for years, mainly due to Goodhart's law that also caused disengagement.

5) While RTO mandates were bad enough, firing those who advocated for who they thought was important taught workers that speaking out was forbidden, leading to even more disengagement.

6) While CEOs are back tracking, very few are doing anything that helps an organization recover from this engagement problem.

Obviously it is more complicated with activist investors, who sometimes had real estate interests forced the hand of some companies, but after seeing that it really failed as a tricky way to do a RIFF and had high costs that had a long tail, they are changing their story without any acceptance of their own role...same as it ever was.

In my experience it takes way longer to get a company to start working as teams, with a shared purpose, than most people expect. Typically 2-5 years in my experience to get most of the org in that mindset.

But that is without the very public and visceral impact of RTO related firings, with no communication from Leadership to say they changed course and that the efforts failed to align with core values etc...

It is festering, not fading. I turned down two EA jobs in the past 6 months because, as a guardrail/runways EA, there was no way to stay aligned with the CIOs goal and build that sense of shared purpose that would provide value.

I am sure that they ended up finding a ivory tower/cop EA, which will just exacerbate the problem.

I am sure that there are some Quants in BSG/McKinsey like firms that will blamed for this in a pile of books in a few years....

But C*Os must have known that when they fired people advocating for RTO targets that were important, they must have known that employees would start to delegate up and become less engaged.

We could use this crisis to help uplift Managers past their traditional role...as to be honest their need for new tools and tactics has been ignored for way too long.

But while CEOs are backing away from RTO mandates, there is little to no evidence that many are making serious efforts to repair the damage.

/rant
Gandhara (not "Ghandara") is mentioned in the Behistun inscription of the Persian emperor Darius, from about two hundred years before Alexander, so it's clearly not "a corruption of Alexandria".
> I produced this album

Pretty sure the AI did, not you.
This is the opposite of https://github-roast.pages.dev, fyi
Same at Amazon, 0 teammates out of the 100+ on my product work at my office or in my timezone but I have to badge into it because they don’t allow virtual positions anymore. So now I have to spend 2.5 hours commuting, worse mood, I'm less flexible for meetings…

If you’re wondering why I stay, it’s cause Amazon was my first real Software job, I started as an intern in 2020 and was always remote. I’m on a team that rapidly grew during covid and I happen to have been on the team the longest so it’s hard for me to find a position with an equivalent staff level scope with my level of experience.
I did a similar project
HDMI in

https://hackaday.com/2021/01/08/old-kindle-shows-hdmi-video-...

to make an OK Monitor - https://barwap.com/projects/okmonitor/
The Spartan Protocol Homepage
Sure. I don't know if those specific devices were around 20 years ago, but there are various options.

Another part of our goal was to build a voting system that was accessible by default, meaning everyone was able to use the same device regardless of any disabilities they may have.
All: we've changed the URL from https://github.com/racket/rhombus/discussions/521 to the base link suggested by commenters. Thanks!

Also related:

Rhombus-in-the-Rough - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36075516 - May 2023 (1 comment)

State of Rhombus (programming language) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30314109 - Feb 2022 (17 comments)
Sure it does. It doesn't mean it's impossible for long-term to be overpriced, but it is definitely a lot less likely to be significant/impactful, and if it is overpriced and experiences a correction, you're much more likely to be able to ride it out and average into a reasonable position over time. With long term you're looking for several % growth per year, over multiple years. With long term you're much less sensitive to overpricing. Short term on the other hand carries significant risk of overpricing, because you're concerned about tiny % changes over short periods of time. With volatility/risk, the length makes a big difference.
It’s settled that it wasn’t a "carbon copy" by the spacecraft’s first actual flight. The US Space Shuttle had no such uncrewed flight capability.
Well, you will get control over employees that show up. The rest are passed over until they leave.

If I had a choice to manage a team hybrid in person or manage fully remote, I would always pick in person.

I think it will naturally move back to more in person just because those are going to be the higher functioning teams with the higher functioning managers.
> It annoys me

Do you realise this is the only time you used the personal pronoun? The rest of your comment is "we" and "our". The funny thing is that I didn't do any of the things you claim "we" did, but I do empathise with your annoyance.
Ambiguous Words
Fair point. LinkedIn doesn't let you access users' experiences, but we're about to add an option for scraping them.

> Date picker is bugged, Aug 2018 converts to Jul 2018

Yeah, my bad. We identified the pb and are fixing it.
Why not enable both modes? It's a virtual filesystem after all. You don't need a single path per event.
My dad installed a base-t network for our 386 machines. The cards he used (I assume 3com) had the AUI media converter din port on them.

I asked him what they were for, and he said "something really expensive", and given the size of the coax, I can see his point.
EdTech is a cursed problem (https://youtu.be/8uE6-vIi1rQ?si=660l-bO9hrtGhQ_D). What do companies want? Retention. What hurts retention? Friction. And friction is precisely what you need to teach someone something. I even think this article is a bit overly simplistic, paying money will not change the equation that much.
What are your rates for freelancing?
Doesn't have to be. A non-growning company that is yielding high profit can still be worth a large amount of money.
that's just crazy bs, starting from open source code and adding specific features needed for a project is a very common strategy, doesn't mean at all that the tool wasn't good to begin with
Presumably Apple has enough cash on hand so that it could "pay back" its current shareholders by big (relatively speaking) dividends and even stock buy-backs, but not sure how much that influences the buy/sell decisions of retail/small stock-exchange investors.
And he now has a hefty amount in cash, so if things go bad, he can buy Low again, and enjoy another rally to the previous highs.

If not, then he has enough cash to buy/support the next big thing.
Whenever people ask questions like this, my feeling is always: you’re welcome to try :)

It’s hard to fathom, for people used to modern computing, just how limited the SNES’ 65816 is. Even at the time it was pretty underpowered.

I don’t know about the specific techniques you’re referring to (though I’d be surprised if they weren’t known about back then, when lookup tables were king!) but something to bear in mind is that, in general, most advances in math programming knowledge since that era hinge on the availability of floating point, which is a non-starter for the SNES.

The tiny amount of ROM available was also a limiting factor - I think Pilotwings was only 512kb, at most 1mb. There wasn’t even a lot of space for lookup tables!
Does Sundar Pichai/Search team know how bad Google search is?
I've been increasingly getting annoyed at Google search results. I understand this is an old topic and quite a hot one. Many people feel the same about this. But I can't seem to wrap my head around why isn't Google doing anything. They did push an update a couple of months ago, but it didn't seem to make a dent. Results are still absolute crap, full off SEO junk.

If some of you say they're focusing on "revenue" and "ads" then I don't think that is it. The reason I don't agree with it is due to being a short-term focus. If your search results are bad, people will start trusting you less over time and look for answers on platforms like Reddit or other search engines, therefore you can't show them relevant ads and you lose money over the long term.

Let's be honest, google is not a search company. They're an ad company and their current goal is not to organize the world's information but to pick the best ad for the user. Ads are bad we all know that, I get it but they also pay the bills and we can't live in an ideal world. So ads are fine, I'm not mad at ads. Heck, if ads are relevant to me I'm cool with it.

In my opinion, search results and ads are not mutually exclusive, they can't and shouldn't live without each other. Both need the other to survive. But I think the management at Google has forgotten that. They're trying to optimize for ad revenue, they think it's working. And it is, companies pay tons to rank their content. But I think it'll all crash and burn eventually as they realize their stuff isn't shown in the SERPs because people now append "Reddit". Or maybe I'm just completely flat-out wrong but I can be sure about one thing - their results are going to get worse if they don't switch to a user/product-focused mindset.

Also, the CEO sucks. He's not a tinkerer, he's a bureaucrat. He's like a shitty caretaker that doesn't care about the users or the product.

Sorry for the rant, I'm just concerned.
It's fascinating to consider how the Cold War's technological arms race wasn't just about who could innovate faster, but also about who could weaponize deception more effectively. The operation described in the Politico article is a stark reminder that the Cold War wasn't just fought with nukes and proxy wars, but also through intricate webs of misinformation and sabotage.

What strikes me is the dual-edged nature of these operations. While they may have successfully stymied Soviet technological progress, they also pushed the Soviets towards a more cautious and suspicious approach to Western technology, possibly slowing down legitimate collaborations and trust-building that could have benefited both sides.

This raises an interesting question: In today's context, with global supply chains so interwoven, could such large-scale technological sabotage even be feasible? And if so, how would it impact not just national security, but global economic stability?

Moreover, considering the evolution of espionage tactics with the advent of cyber warfare, I wonder if we'll look back in a few decades and see similar stories emerging about current technological conflicts. The stakes and methods have changed, but the underlying strategic goals seem eerily similar.
A bubble burst or similar doesn't have to crash the whole economy. It definitely can, especially when it's stuff like financial or real estate. A tech bubble burst would devalue many of the highest valued stocks but doesn't have to take the entire USD down with it.

That being said, I haven't studied economics and am very much a layman. So if someone wanna correct me, please do!
Have a look at the https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring threads. It helps to read the FAQ ('can I post a job ad') and most important: add information how to contact you. HN doesn't have direct messages and only you can see the registration email address.
..or less growth, but I guess that's not an option for "fortune.com"
AI to invade hundreds more Taco Bell drive-thrus this year
Investment is actually about returns. Growth is a means of getting returns, but not the only way. A large, stable, profitable company with no growth prospects is not a poor investment if they pay out returns.
U-bahn is old, but new trains are slowly arriving on some lines. Anyway it is not the best part of its public transport system - I personally enjoy trams.
Not to mention the title of the button to dismiss: “I’ll fix it next time”. Ugh.
ok. Thanks for feedback. Will reduce it.
It is what you make it. If you don't utilize the face time you have with people then you're leaving opportunity on the table.

The world won't end or anything if you don't network, but you'll have a leg up on everyone if you do.

I've had face to face meetings that cleared up 6 months of email/chat/zoom misunderstanding.
> Funny that you have some R1 universities but not others

We don't do that on purpose. After you submit your profile, we sync the orgs with LinkedIn if they're missing. If you come back in a while they'll all be synced.
> There's a historical model that proposes that the Renaissance directly came out of the Black Death

Totally irrelevant. A common misunderstanding. That worked then because the main source of wealth was land. Less people means more land per person.

That's not been the case since the industrial revolution. Now the main source of wealth is capital, including human capital.

That's why New Jersey is so much wealthier than Montana.
... and the post has me poking around with C again. was always an ecmascript guy with a little Lingo in there from long ago, however I have an itch for all things low-resource and close to the metal (but not assembly lang close) and golfing my way towards somethings that encourage me to dig deeper
Any news sources on that? Honestly asking because I've missed it.
I get why he wrote it like that. Having this conversation (the "I know there are lots of bad things about them, but LLMs are genuinely useful for all sorts of things" conversation) is pretty exhausting. This whole piece was very clearly a reaction to having had that conversation time and time again, at which point letting some frustration slip through is understandable.
Yes, in the US and Europe. But Apple lost China and many parts of the world don't have the same loyalty to them. This may put Apple's profits in jeopardy in the medium to long term.
The idea behind macros is so to speak to allow the programmer to extend the compiler.

In a language like MetaPost I can use equations between variables:

x + y = 10
x - y = 6

A reference to a variable x will use the current set of equations and solve for x. The solution (it it exists) will become the value of the variable reference.

Let's say I want to extend Rhombus with this new kind of variable
(let's call them linear variables).

Each linear variable needs to have some static information attached.
Here the relevant information is the set of equations to consider.
A reference to a linear variable will then reduce (at compile time) the equations associated with the variable. The reduced set of equations is then used to generate runtime code that finds the value.

In a sense "static information attached to an expression" is just a convenient
way of working with compile time information (in the sense currently used by
macros in Racket).
Indeed. As profitable companies get big and struggle more with growth, they can do stock buybacks, or pay out dividends. Plenty of stocks have held strong with small growth % but non-trivial dividends. I agree, when talking about companies this size, it isn't all about growth.
a week before they told me to come to the offic, they decided there wasn't enough budget to pay for my trip to india. whatever value they expect from me in the office they obviously don't belive it as half the people I work with are in india.

at least I moved to where I can bike to work so I'm in the best shape of my life. That is the major gain
> LLMs will tend to spit those out too, purely because the high school version of anything has been represented heavily enough in the training data that it's more likely than not to fall out of the huge matrix of numbers!

That assumes that the high school version of the subject exists, which is unlikely because I already have the high school version of most subjects that have a high school version.

The subjects that I would want to dig into at that level would be something along the lines of chemical engineering, civil engineering, or economics—subjects that I don't yet know very much about but have interest or utility for me. These subjects don't have a widely-taught high school version crafted by humans, and I don't trust that they would have enough training data to produce useful results from an LLM.
Yikes, please don't cross into personal attack on HN. We have to ban accounts that do that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
What you are writing is valid for investing in broad market index funds, but not for investing in individual businesses.

Warren Buffet's goals are not the same as those of someone who wants to maximize long term returns while also minimizing time and effort spent evaluating investment options.
[dupe]

More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41147381
So what’s the lesson for Nvidia?
It is getting difficult to navigate all this inconsistency. Robot farmer but 6 day work weeks. Climate change but RTO. AI but labor shortage. Like a Ouija board jumping back and forth; what is it trying to spell?
The thing about Berkshire is that they're so big that they can either buy pieces of huge companies like Apple, all of which have high valuations, or they can sit on the cash. Nothing else moves the needle for them - an amazing multi-million dollar business would be 0.0.. % of their portfolio.
Give the flights a 128 bit number, so we can give each grain of sand on Earth its own flight number.
> But having a straightforward/predictable mapping to the underlying machine and its semantics is included in the C model of computation.

While you can often guess what the assembly will be from looking at C code given that you're familiar with the compiler, exactly how C is to be translated into assembly isn't well-specified.

For example, you can't expect that all uses of the multiplication operator "*" results in an actual x86 mul instruction. Many users expect constant propagation, so you can write something like "2 * SOME_CONSTANT" without computing that value at runtime; there is no guarantee of this behavior, though. Also, for unsigned integers, when optimizations are turned on, many expect compilers to emit left shift instructions when multiplying by a constant power of two, but again, there's no guarantee of this. That's not to say this behavior couldn't be part of a specification, but it's just an informal expectation right now.

What I think people might want is some readable, well-defined set of attribute grammars[0] for translation of C into assembly for varying optimization levels - then, you really would be able to know exactly how some piece of C code under some context would be translated into assembly. They've already been used for writing code generator generators in compilers, but what I'm thinking is something more abstract, not as concrete as a code generation tool.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribute_grammar
Funds like this don’t think one way. They can be bearish, cash out while hedging
Not really. It may look that way if all you see is historical averages (and you dollar cost average) but there are definitely times when buying will screw you indefinitely compared to not.

Valuation absolutely matters, and buying when something is overvalued can irrevocably screw you over.

And that is on a broad market basis - individual companies can just flat out go bankrupt and cease to exist.

If you bought in ‘72 or ‘99 for instance, it was a very, very long time before you’d even be able to cash out neutral.
I suspect this is one of the toxic outcomes of broad stock ownership.

We could allow the real-world economy to approach a stable equilibrium and even modest contraction and it would probably have many positive outcomes. We do burn a lot of labour and resources on buillshit and bubbles.

But so much of the population is staked in the stock market now that any narrative aside from "perpetual 7% growth" is political suicide.