skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey HN,

I work full-time in an office and I often wake up wondering who's in the office that day. Depending on who's there, I either decide to go to the office or work remotely. It’s a small but recurring decision that takes time and effort each day.

The problem is, there’s no easy way to check this quickly from my phone. Google Calendar doesn’t offer a built-in feature to show where my colleagues are working from today (office or remote).

So, I’m building whereworking?! — a simple tool to see at a glance who’s in the office and who’s not, allowing you to make a quick decision about whether to head in or stay home. It might just be a single feature, but it's fulfilling my personal use case.

Would love to get some feedback from you, especially those with hybrid or non-remote jobs. Wdyt about this?

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!
I would not listen to their PR there is no reasonableness being applied to these rules.

I hurt my knees back in May and tried to get HR to make an exception for me. They shot it down because they said I didn’t have enough documentation. They wanted more paperwork, which meant I had to make another doctor’s appointment. Getting a doctor’s appointment these days takes weeks, so I never managed to get the exception.

How much leeway you get totally depends on your L8 Director. If you’ve got a strict L8, good luck—this policy isn’t going to be applied reasonably. They’re actually looking at badge reports that show how many hours you’re in the office, and managers will call you out if you’re just “coffee badging.”

If you think this kind of thing doesn’t happen, just take a look at Blind. There’s no logic to how these rules are applied. Meanwhile, if you go to an L8/L10 meeting, try counting how many people are actually in the office. It’s a joke, especially when all the <L7 exceptions have been pulled.
>> Amazon said each team will review their structure as part of the process, and that it’s possible they’ll identify roles that are no longer required.
Severance wasn't required in the first place, it's just a thing respectable companies do
The future will be that California will pass a law that mandates that newly manufuctured cars cannot tailgate at all, just like the one pending to beep at you when speeding.

In all serousiness, eventually, driving will be removed from humans.
> Now only reason to go to office is to artificially maintain property value so landlords don't lose money.

Bingo! Many companies are invested in real estate, and having the ticking time bomb of empty offices vs unsustainable office rent finally implode would be bad financially. Hence, the push everywhere to return to the office.

The benefits of being in a physical office disappeared 20 years ago. COVID accelerated the formation of globally distributed teams. To now go back to commuting 2-3 hours a day, just to do your Zoom calls from and office desk, is insanity.
Downtown did just fine before Amazon too. And they need to realize Amazon has no loyalty to downtown seattle and depending on them alone is stone cold dumb. See Detroit.
Yes, better than Amazon but still a valley job.
I'm glad it's legal, but where I'm from it's illegal to grow it unless you live a certain distance from a dispensary. So they're still doing "drug raids" on unlicensed producers, but since it's legal to possess, that clearly means the "crime" is competing with the very wealthy who secured permits to run their own dispensary! I know regulatory capture is nothing new, but that situation really drills the point home for me: "interfere with our profits? Go to prison for drug trafficking".
Been at AWS for 5 years, learned there more in one year than in my entire career. Great colleagues, and I was lucky to have great management (both direct and skip level). Great internal mobility, and (surprisingly, to me) great work life balance.
The main issue is that it highly varies from team to team. It is such a large company that asking how it is to work for Amazon, is like asking how it is to live in Europe, YKMV.
I'd counter that with the rise of high quality niche publications [0]

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/16/business/media/outdoors-p...
I'm not sure about those particular services, but in general the ground breaking and foundational things at the FANG and adjacent companies were convinced by people at much lower level than L7. It was a lot of L5-6 folks who then went on to be 7+ many years later.
This document makes me want to study it so I understand what Mr Beast thinks it's the best viral video and then de-program myself so I never ever click in those. I'm halfway there, if I see a thumbnail of a guy in a ketchup bathtub I will tell youtube to never recommend that channel again.
Zoom and Chrome both seem fine
Considering many shops are just "implement whatever the business people want" and have things silo'd out across many teams, the autonomy to make a thing you work on and support better is hugely valuable. You can get that lots of other places, but it's very hit and miss on the level of ownership you can actually achieve. Amazon does tend toward a very startup-like sense of technical ownership, even if there's little financial tie to the product.

I'd argue that most startups have little financial tie to the product too for all but the first couple of contributors due to all the complications that wind up going into startup funding. If you can only realize any value from your equity with 1:10000 odds, your expected ownership is 1/10000 of whatever you actually got in equity.
Apple doesn't manufacture the chips, they subcontract that out to TSMC/Samsung. In this case Intel is the contract manufacturer, not the chip designer fulfilling the same role as TSMC does for Apple.
Sure, but usually these things can be accelerated if you are blocked and can't do other work. It's usually expected that you are doing other work while waiting, be it ops, reviews, invention/simplification, design, coding for other projects, or networking with coworkers etc. It's not uncommon for a firm to be amendable to spending some portion of time on outside activities such as education, event planning, or (sometimes) a side business/startup.

If everyone is spending 5 minutes working every 4 weeks... why would you hire extra people outside of contingency coverage?
Isnt Graviton an in house design?

And Intel is building an "AI fabric" chip for AWS, though its not clear who designed it.
> The part that didn't exist was, of course, the dungeons. There was no nominally ethical-concern-free money sitting around underground; the source was other people, willing or not.

I would have said the dragons were a much more obviously non-existent part, but sure.
Gamebaby – Phone Armor with Retro Gaming Superpowers
Casio FW-91 replaced with smart internals
Huh, there are exempt vs non-exempt employees and I believe all software employees are exempt (just like in all places I worked as FTE) which means they are not entitled to overtime pay.

People here talk like they have just invented the wheel.
Intel made ARM chips, then sold that portion of the company in 2006, shortly before the iPhone was announced.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XScale

It was incredibly bad timing. If intel had continued making ARM chips they could be in an entirely different position today.
Move Fast and Abandon Things
If anything there are tax penalties. SF makes companies pay a tax per person in a seat working in SF, so it incentivized companies to move offices elsewhere and go remote
It’s hard not to choose a car based lifestyle when outside of cities there is basically little or no public transit in many places. On top of that, when many people’s experience with travel by train is the outdated and slow infrastructure that already exists, why would they support more of that experience? I’m not anti- these things, just adding to the context.
CEO letter is here: https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1710/...

There are a few threads on this now, so maybe they can be merged and linked to this primary source instead of news articles summarizing it.
china are a diverse group

similary to the arabs, they all write the same way but talk differently,

at least until the advent of tv and radio and all that
Ask HN: Recommendations for Eye Tracking Hardware?
I am supporting a disabled loved one who is going to lose control over their body do to multiple sclerosis complicated by a series of strokes.

We have tried a tobii eye tracker c4. Unfortunately monitor mounted eye trackers are problematic for those with limited mobility and wheelchair-bound. From a positional standpoint there's a lot of variability relative to a monitor.

- Muscle fatigue causing posture changes such as head droop or leaning torso

- A person's position in the chair such as tilt or recline

- Chair alignment to the monitor

- Prescription glasses can interfere with tracking

Tobii eye tracker c4 can't cope with this kind of environment. In addition Tobii does not really support the disabled community. Tobii restricts any other language besides C,C#,C++ via the Stream Engine or Interaction Library API. The creation of a wrapper to gather data to pipe to another language is prohibited in end-user license agreement. This severely hampers accessibility communities ability to create tools they need to thrive.

Any recommendations for reasonably priced eye tracking hardware that are mounted to headset (not VR/AR) preferably wireless that with a permissive software license?

Thank you in advance!
These analyses don't make any sense. The people born in China right now are much more influenced by a combination of contemporary Western and Chinese media/tech than anything having to do with ancient Chinese dynasties.

Same is true for most nations these days.
Most people would find living without a general purpose mobile iOS or Android device a serious practical disaster.

The software & hardware that comes together in general purpose mobile devices is non-trivially different from simple raw “computing” capabilities.
Because as humans progress, so must our working conditions. The onus of working in the office is ALL on the employee:

- getting to the office (commute time is never paid time)

- figuring out a mode of travel (parking, gas are rarely paid, transit sometimes)

- child / senior care (major cost for parents)

- biology issues (quality of bathrooms, quality of kitchen, bringing items to/from work, flatulence, illnesses)
Many of the industries mentioned in the article are heavily regulated union industries in the U.S.

China also has zero independent unions.

I'm not a union hater, but there was a post here recently about unions in shipyards, with one commenter saying something like "we need to prevent any automation and broaden unions across all shipyards".

That's just not helpful in the long run and if that's the mentality of unions in this country then we're doomed.
Not taking calls from a car sounds like a feature. We don't need more distracted drivers or meeting participants.
All it really takes is one coordinated action. They can just tell those execs to go and fuck themselves. If done by everyone then Amazon would have no options but to oblige. Unfortunately people are rarely capable of thi.
When you’re too cheap to pay severance and too chickenshit to have layoffs
I did some more research and I was wrong.

My source was an AMD tech talk from years ago where they mentioned keeping instruction timings the same for backwards compatibility reasons.

I believe they were talking about this for the XBox One X: https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/microsoft/scorpio_engine#Overvi... (and a similar chip for the PS4 Pro)

So basically, they upgraded and lightly enhanced the Jaguar architecture, shrunk the process (28nm -> 16nm), but otherwise kept it the same. AMD Zen was released around this time and was far superior but they decided to stick with Jaguar in order to make sure that instruction timings were kept the same.

I guess that they didn't want two hardware revisions of the same console generation running on different micro-architectures, but they were okay switching the micro-architecture for the next console generation.
He doesn't say the iPod Nano was a flop, he says it was a mistake. And there is a difference. For example, the iPhone 4 was a mistake (remember antenna gate?) and yet, it sold plenty units. But the 4s antennas were a new design and by the 5 they'd started moving the antennas back inside the phone. The butterfly keyboard and the touch bar were mistakes. Their models still sold millions of units.
I think what they have been doing is focusing on what 95% of people use these things for. Just basic utility based things. The most complex thing most people will render is Google Earth. I would not be surprised if that is probably the most like focus of performance for metrics Intel is using the iGPU for.
Does any other European nation, other than Ukraine, have issues with random explosives?
china is not know for invading
I think Meta overall has better people and more homogeneous in the quality, it makes coasting more difficult and leads to a grinding culture.

Amazon on the other hand, is toxic but has corners, so the coasting opportunities exist and some of the orgs are incredibly bloated with not too much to do.
If you read nothing else from the article, read table 1. I’ll summarize it here.

The US leads in the following industries: IT and Information Services, Pharmaceuticals, Other Transportation

China leads in the following industries: Computers and Electronics, Chemicals, Machinery and Equipment, Motor Vehicles, Basic Metals, Fabricated Metals, Electrical Equipment

The authors mention that although China’s workers are still less efficient than American workers, this is changing, and by the time Chinese workers are 80% as efficient as their American counterparts the Chinese economy will be 2-3x the size of America’s.
What healthcare plan do you have? Why are you dealing with the insurance and not the healthcare provider?
I don't think my TV can display 120 fps and I'm not buying a new one. But they promise 4K 60 (with upscaling) on the PS5 Pro, so they have to have something beyond that for PS6.
eh, big company, many different opinions. working on stuff that's already built can be pretty chill. you spend a lot of time being hard blocked on approvals from external teams. no amount of extra hours can change that, and management generally understands. the downside is that promos are harder to find and there's a greater risk of some VP figuring out that your org doesn't really do anything useful. then it's time for the next round of musical chairs.

if you're more ambitious and/or genuinely enjoy building things, new product teams are the place to be. you don't have to deal with approval hell so much, but the dates are more aggressive and managers will do anything to hit them. this is where you learn what "building the plane while flying it" means.

I find people exaggerate how bad it is, but you definitely need to be good at reading the room to stick around.
This is just a hypothesis, but I wonder if it’s simply that AMD was willing to accept lower margins to keep their business going, where INTC wasn’t willing to compete because they’re comparing the contract to the higher margin sales they made in the PC business?

I mean, sure, technical issues and such too, but mature businesses have a hard time accepting lower margins because it hurts their stock market metrics.
Yup, having 1-2 days to care for your home is just that good.
The USA, overall, does not encourage the development of high-tech engineering, improved infrastructure, cultural growth, appreciation for academic rigor, etc. By a mixture of miracles we became the world's superpower, but many of our fortuitous circumstances were accidental (mass migration of talented Europeans/Asians in the wake of famines/persecutions, WWII decimating manufacturing in Europe and Asia, abundant natural resources and perfect geography).

However to improve as a country we have to abandon the puerile notion that the US is special for some metaphysical, divine reason. We got lucky and became a perfect environment for the development of the world's leading industries, but that providence is being quickly ceded to China. In terms of overall lifestyle quality we are far behind much of Europe anyways.

The only thing America has that are the best in the world are its research universities (due to money and being able to take advantage of brain drain from around the world), its tech industry and high cultural soft power, areas it once held an overwhelming lead in that are evaporating fast.
Right, and the KGB was an innocent party in Ukrainian politics until the evil CIA forced their hand. /s

You talk about CIA operations during the Euromaidan, but forget the elephant in the room that is objectively true: the Euromaidan was a response to a Russian controlled Ukrainian president betraying his people who were expecting closer ties with the EU and instead doing a deal with Russia last minute.
Computer Science Personality Disorder?
I'm an academic in CS. I'm constantly frustrated with the way people in my community behave (I call it computer science personality disorder).

It feels like so many academics in my community are competing to be that stereotypical "genius non-personable guy who just doesn't realize he's rude." Don't get me wrong, these people are smart. But they're not geniuses -- mostly just above average guys LARPing as Sheldon Cooper. I sometimes wonder whether the CS community would be better off with people half as smart but twice as collaborative and supportive.

Is this everyone else's experience?
They have native 3d acceleration, native modern web browser and virtualization support to e.g. run Linux and any non-ported software on that.

Genode is no joke.
Spain, France, Holland, Britain - they all rose and fell as major powers.

The US Steven Bradbury'd it's way into world hegemony less than a hundred years past following a European home goal that took out Britain and Germany.

China hasn't been just a regional power for a few decades now; eg: how many nuclear power stations (long term big infrastructure) are being built by China in other countries right now .. how many are the US building?

The US will be around for a century and more most likely, but it's alliances and economic integration are alteady on the wane.

Depends whether the US can bring back proper diplomacy or whether it'll continue to rely on force projection.
If you're on a Mac, your terminal has `say` built in. Lots of Mac users don't know about it but I use `say` a lot.

$ bash long_build_script.sh; say job done

$ sleep 1; say job done
> even though the majority of the time was spent on HTTP calls?

I'm not sure why this detail is relevant. The CPU it consumes is still CPU. Hypothetically, if a rewrite saves $100 million annually in compute, why does it matter that the majority of its time isn't spent in compute? It's still $100 million.
Telematics HW during peak pandemic. Went from an Group office who's top eNPS opportunity was remote work requests - It went from not letting the Services guys telecommute in once a day to the hardware guys orchestrating a lab move to a new office location and enabling remote connectivity to test benches while shipping out 3 new products polling in test data from vehicles across the 50 states.

RTO is an eyewash.
Strategic of them to include the 5-day a week to hide the 15% managerial layoffs. 1 in 8 managers need to be converted into ICs. The average manager has around 8 ICs with the "two-pizza team" ideal, so that means 2% overall layoffs. Not huge, but managers generally cost more than ICs, so there's likely outsized salary impact. Organizational changes will surely reduce productivity as everyone gets shuffled too.
Tibet, India, and Vietnam would like a word.
This is interesting. But how would you use it? You'd need to open up a new type of socket (neither TCP nor UDP but nyxpsi) and everything along your network route would need to support it. So it wouldn't be useful with existing mobile networks (middle boxes won't speak the protocol) nor within the data center (because it's used for high packet loss situations). So what's the use case? Custom wireless networks with embedded devices?
Right. So in one team I worked in, the team leader had to take notes during stand-ups of what everyone is doing to deliver them to managers so they can browse at their leisure.
Data point: in California my partner was getting treatment for cancer. They asked the dr and nurse about it for symptoms, they were sort of noncommittal until they said they were going to try it. Then all of the sudden there were very supportive, explaining that many other patients had seen great results.
There’s no shortage of conspiracy theories online trying to explain return to office policies, when the simplest explanation “managers like being in the same room as employees” has sufficient explanatory power.
Yep. The plan to enforce this in January, after Q4 when people are busy at work (with Amazon’s Q4 peak retail sales period) and with the holidays, makes it clear that Andy Jassy intends to make this an impossible change. He just wants to force people out - maybe to do a layoff without paying severance. Or maybe it is a way to select for young people that live in downtown cores near Amazon offices, and get rid of older people or people with families. You know, people that live away from city centers, have commutes, and cannot deal with an abusive RTO policy. I hope they face lawsuits and also that talent flees.

The only reason Andy Jassy and Amazon can get away with this is because they have enough market power that they don’t have to care about consequences. In other words, they are too big to fail, and immune to the negative effects of this that may result from real competition. It’s time for them to also face anti trust regulation. As a customer, I’m going to cancel Prime and stop shopping there entirely. I don’t like rewarding companies that set illogical trends across the entire industry.
Rail and cars aren’t mutually exclusive. Amtraks car carrier service seems to be very popular despite how badly they manage it.

Why can’t I drive my car on a train and go cross country?
Working on COBOL in a fortune 500 company.
There's very different metrics when dealing with a team of mostly mid and senior devs at a small shop that can carefully mentor / manage their handful of junior devs ... and one that is working on the scale that Amazon is working on.

The org with a few teams and 100 devs total works and mentors differently than how Amazon operates.
Re: information sharing by entanglement, CHSH, and the Bell test:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41480957#41515663 :

> And all it takes to win the game is to transmit classical bits with digital error correction using hidden variables?
Not Nissan Leaf batteries. The article explicitly says:

> The Nissan Leaf bears a lot of responsibility for the idea that EV batteries don't last. Nissan eschewed liquid cooling for the Leaf's pack, and the EV first went on sale in model year 2012, so there has been enough time for some early Leafs to lose up to 20 percent of their pack's storage capacity.
The users are too busy buying their mom iphones.
During the work day I need to provide results not just learn

Results come from learning.
I think history has shown that a planned economy isn't really viable long term.
Yea, i too want my pro device designed around my grandmas use case. Make sure we think about the children too.
Not just magazines. I remember being amazed in 2018 how my flatmates were watching YouTube on their living-room TV instead of a broadcast TV channel.

This change of attention is also affecting movie studios like Disney
They've demonstrated an interest in watching talented others do serious role-play (and also acting, which is largely orthogonal); but does that really translate into a desire to try it themselves?
> middle boxes won't speak the protocol

Middle boxes only need to speak IP, which they do already, and not block nyxpsi packets (which they probably do).