skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Amazon has yet to share any of that internal data with its internal employees or the outside world. The only reasoning shared has been vague talk about energy being higher and culture being easier to spread. There is a lot of money to be saved and a lot of initiatives that would benefit from broad embracing of WFH by Amazon.

They claim to support improving DEI for neuro-divergent and mobility-impaired folks, where WFH would be a massive improvement in their ability to contribute without being required to commute into the office which might present challenges for them.

They claim to support sustainability and achieving carbon neutrality, but forcing employees into the office burns significant fossil fuels and puts wear on vehicles and increases pollution since the majority of the workforce winds up driving a car to work. They will increase this measurable impact by 60%+ by mandating another 2 days of office-work per week.

Much more likely, there are motives to doing this change that are not aligned with data and stated goals. That could either mean nefarious goals or lacking data. But it's more likely nefarious goals, since WFH didn't seem to be hurting anything according to all the data anyone has been able to tell. I'd expect someone to be able to come up with plausible ways that WFO is better than WFH in a data-oriented manner, but it really does seem to be down to personal preference for individuals on how they like to work. Who knows, maybe Andy Jassy really likes to work in-office and thinks that anyone saying they don't is lying and lazy. We have as much evidence for that as everything else that's been conjectured.
Would love to read an MLOps lessons learned or approach you had or if you recommend any particular books that really hit the nail on the head
Nice to get your detailed thoughts and experiences!
Yes, this is a large part of the concept of liberation. Why are you trying to sell people shit nobody asked for? We could be making technology that enables expression of the individual and of society rather than commodification of it.
No, if it was characterized as a donation on the non-profit's financials, after the loss of non-profit status the amount will be treated as revenue unless the donation legalese contained a conversion clause.

But conversion clauses are extremely rare. 99.9999% of the time, if a donor is concerned that an entity will do something to jeopardize or deliberately lose its non-profit status, they simply won't make the donation.
This meme is based on a premise that copying others is bad. But I would argue the opposite: why keep reinventing what already exists?

Take software engineers, for example. Most spend their entire lives rewriting code that's already been written at many companies simply because sharing is verboten. They might go their entire lives redoing what's already been done for a revolving door of bosses, without ever creating something truly new. The scale of wasted potential is stupendous.

If we all agreed on a mindset of more sharing and copying, those engineers could focus their efforts on real innovation and build the future. And there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of them.

This is not a radical new idea. This was the mindset many software engineers had in the gaming industry (my industry) in the 90s and 00s. Carmack famously released his code under what you might call a "have fun" license[0]. Around late 90s it was re-licensed under GPL to promote open-source/hacker development. This is why DOOM (and Quake) has been hacked to run on everything and used as a base for many games and game engines – real innovation instead of reinventing the same game.

Today game companies guard their code fiercely. I'm not only talking about serious trade secrets, but most frivolous basic libraries, like they would go bankrupt if they shared. Well, guess what, EA shares EASTL[1] and that didn't make them any less dominant in games. Source Engine is also available under a fairly permissive license, as is Unreal Engine's source code. What's the common denominator? They both were written by people very closely aligned with Carmack's hacker culture. Source was born out of Quake, for example.

The hubris of this closed-off approach is evident when new tech like Copilot arrives. Many tech companies panic about it "using their code" when in reality, that code already exists in numerous open-source libs. And Copilot can write 80% of what a mid level engineer writes in games anyways. Even for a principal/fellow level engineer, it is helpful in boilerplate. You can't escape the absurdity of rewriting what's already been written.

How many ways can you allocate memory for a dynamically allocated array anyways? How many ways to implement the PID controller to steer an AI car in games? How many ways to do occlusion culling in graphics? A few, but not many. Yet every company guards it like it's their own secret sauce.

So yeah, it would be pretty mature to revisit our values and go back to what worked in computing.

[0] https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM?tab=readme-ov-file – still has the "have fun" readme.

[1] https://github.com/electronicarts/EASTL
It’s an opportunity to call out things four business hours after they happened. We have Slack now. Or Teams. If you’re stuck, tell people. Don’t wait until tomorrow morning.
What happened to Hacker News today?
Not OP, but I think most manages genuinely struggle with this because it is hard. Im not sure what the solution is. Perhaps they need to double the pay for management to hire folks who can tell the difference?
Right. It will live on. I love it, plan to buy a Pro.

But for their hardware engineers they’re likely done and moved on.
ah.

https://www.newsweek.com/russian-soldiers-struck-radiation-s...

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/red-forest-c...

https://www.kyivpost.com/post/31734
Collage_n – A collage and sprite creation editor
IT is a profession that attracts that type of personality. From autism to assholes. "Technically correct" is the best kind of correct for technology. Technology is an often "exacting" science in the eyes of those individuals even when it isn't exacting, it's just their strongly held preference or belief.

If you go into the profession, you will not be able to avoid it in a corporate environment. If it isn't something you feel you could handle and burn your way through, consider small teams, non-IT companies, or consulting/running your own business.

But these kind of people exist in every profession as do autistic individuals and assholes. It's part of being an adult and improving your interpersonal skills.

There have been many lone wolves who have created great things in our world. Don't discount them. You would not be "better off".
The Army Corps of Engineers also does a lot of flood management work, and they use a cost/benefit analysis when deciding which projects to approve that takes into account the value of the real estate being protected. And even then, the local community has to put up a large share of the funding. So it definitely ends up favoring richer communities.

99 Percent Invisible did an episode about this recently:

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/nbft-05-the-little-le...
> Can Apple do something about eliminating all these bureaucratic barriers that hurt the health of so many?

Integrate with the existing providers (= making deals with all the existing players and provide the adequate SDKs) and bring more accurate and reliable measurements than dedicated, calibrated devices.

That sure could be possible, but has Apple ever done anything like that ?

They couldn't come to an agreement wit Massimo, I wouldn't be holding my breath on them sealing deals with the incumbents in the field.
Which one
> but it could just as well be ported to Rust

Without formal semantics for the complete rust language the result couldn't be verified. Rust's complexity makes it hard to define formal semantics.

I wouldn't normally bring this up as a disadvantage of rust, but people aren't normally talking about software that has been formally verified.
Of course it is, the whole thing with the internet is a small group of people can reach a disproportionately massive number of people who can pay with their money or data. Startups with massive upfront costs that can also achieve that are increasing the risk not the upside.
A “press” that is very biased and does not hold leaders to account is a national security threat. A press that ignores very obvious elite capture is a threat. A press that perpetuates stories that have been debunked or memory holes stories that don’t fit their agenda is a threat.
You can get yourself a nice pour-over setup on Amazon for the office and every two weeks or so buy a bag of small batch coffee at Whole Foods ...
In other news... https://www.reuters.com/technology/intel-aws-expand-strategi...
L6’s got no raises and now this. Gonna see a lot of good people leave I think
>>He's a very reasonable person and very easy to get along with, so I have no idea what to make of that.

that's not the type of person that should work at Amazon. The place is best for people who are driven, works hard, cares little about backstabbing others.
How would you explain cross PS5/PC releases being much more efficient on the PS5?

e.g. Horizon Forbidden West needing a much better GPU on PC to run at the same level of fidelity as the PS5.

If not for special tuning specific to the PS5’s differences.

(I can imagine Windows bloat and other junk requiring an additional 10% to 20%, but not 30% to 50%.)
the "unvested stock" thing is largely misunderstood. you have a target compensation number, and every year you get new awards to keep hitting that. if the stock goes up fast, your effective comp is higher than planned in the short term, but you get very few RSUs in the subsequent rounds. unless the stock goes up like a rocketship for many years in a row, your comp converges to slightly above target in the long term. although it has a strong psychological effect on some people, it's usually not rational to wait around for unvested shares.
Have you used many cli tools that consume a meaningful amount of cpu (in terms of cost)? They are generally used by a human, so the scale can’t be all that big.
> I can't fathom why there's so little interest at any level of government to tackle this problem.

Since lawmakers live in places where they have their own police officer at the entrance to the street and can afford triple pane windows.

And the Venn-diagram of police officers and people that think loud exhausts are cool has substantial overlap.
Most of the rest of the industry is doing extremely well by separating design from foundry.

I’m not sure why one would compare Boeing when one could look at TSMC, ARM, Apple, etc instead, all of whom have been doing only one of the 2 all this while.

Heck, you could also look at AMD that was failing and split into AMD (design) and foundry (GlobalFoundries).

At the time of the split (approx 16 years ago) the company’s market cap was $8Bn.

Today AMD’s market cap is $150Bn and GlobalFoundries’s market cap is $21Bn.
Until they don’t.

“The Department of Justice estimates that American police officers shoot 10,000 pet dogs in the line of duty each year.”

https://scholars.unh.edu/unh_lr/vol17/iss1/18/
Copying packets is brutal in software as well.
It's not possible under Wayland. Windows can't even position themselves, let alone have another process move them.
You can afford hundreds or thousands of dollars for transporting your car by train? Putting a car on a train isn't free, or even remotely cheap. Even regular Amtrak tickets in coach class are quite expensive.

And define "very popular". I was reading an article this weekend about some Amtrak line between Chicago and Minneapolis being unexpectedly "very popular", which apparently equated to a whopping 300 passengers per day. Here in Japan, that's about half of one of the smallest bullet trains, and less than a quarter of the larger ones, and those are just single trains, which usually run multiple times per hour, sometimes more frequently than every 10 minutes. In a country of 310M people, 300 people per day doing something is not what I would call "popular".
Yeah I remember the Xbox 360 being hit and miss with backwards compatibility - their FAQs said that most of the time the people working on it had to just look at the raw assembly of games they were trying to get running to figure out what went wrong.
I doubt it, and actually, with NYC it's the exact opposite
Thanks man - definitely gonna have a go at then :-)
You generally can't ride every day long enough to expend more than 300-400 calories. And that's just one small smoothie.
There are no ARM builds of Microsoft SQL Server.

Even if Microsoft does release such as thing, enterprise software lives in an ecosystem of thousands of third-party vendors that provide components that are often co-installed on the same box.

Also, products like MSSQL are licensed per CPU core, so you want the fastest possible cores, not the cheapest. Currently that's the AMD EPYC X86-compatible CPUs, which run rings around everything else.
You can simulate a brain to some degree, maybe, but you won’t get the whole thing short of just… using an actual brain, that is physically identical to the one you’re simulating, down to at least the quantum level (and who knows what else?). It’s not at all certain that this can be reduced to math.

The calculations for operating an LLM definitely can be reduced to math. No reduction needed, in fact—they are math.

This isn’t an argument (to my mind, anyway) against even the possibility of machine whatever-you-like (consciousness, understanding, whatever) but against the idea of equivalence because we could simulate either one—in fact, we can’t simulate one. The other, essentially is already simulation, no further steps needed.

What you’re getting at (if I may attempt to present your argument) is that we could reduce either to its components and make it look ridiculous that it might be doing anything particularly advanced.

However, in fact we definitely can reproduce exactly what one of them does with a bunch of thick books of lookup tables and some formulas that we could mechanically follow by hand, and it might even be possible to do so in practice, not just hypothetically (at significant, but not impossible, expense) while we do not know we can do that for a human brain, short of just using exactly the brain that we want to “simulate”.
You're both wrong.

Equating recreational drugs with medication is misleading; with psychiatric drugs, dangerously so.

Branding recreation and leisure as wasted life, meanwhile, is small minded. Particularly when it comes to something so thoroughly encapsulated by even the most conservative risk envelope.

Saying this as someone who doesn't particularly care for weed.
I once heard it proposed as an immutable law of nature, been looking for exceptions ever since. None so far.
My example is specifically for a 66-bit range. There are two loops in my post, one removes 2^33 multiples of 2^33, the other builds a table to check for values with a 33-bit range. My example will find a solution in a 66-bit range using only 2^34 point operations and 2^33 table lookups.

Work thought it, I think it'll be more informative than me simply repeating myself further. If you're still confused, ask specific questions and I'll be glad to answer.
What Are Occlupanids?
ImplicitCAD is unusable, the CSG algorithms it uses are not stable and give horrible results. There is zero chance that you can use it to make engineered objects.

It is entirely possible to write broken software in Haskell.
I've used it so many times doing that, and also handling UIWebView events where I didn't know what all might happen. Really helpful.
Tell me more about this implant. Is that the electric one that basically tenses up your tongue as you breathe in?

How long until you got it? Did you have to 'fail' CPAP & the mandibular device?
Career focused younger people have also been adversely affected by wfh for the last few years in a big way. All the mentorship and networking opportunities have withered. The non career focused younger people are living it up though.
This change is about macos removing the pop up altogether so you need to go dig into the settings to give permission.
There are many differences, is this a difference that will reverse a historic trend of world powers rising and faliing, of waxing and waning?

Will the diversity within the US enable it to pull together as a nation, overcome infighting, and out innovate China with it's plethora of phone and EV types, overnight pprototyping, on demand cheap bulk bespoke pharma production, etc?
There's a life and death cycle even for companies and its important to remember that. Leaving and starting somewhere fresh seems natural.
> If so, then what difference does it make how much cash YT hands to Mr. Beast?

I think it matters a lot. It creates massive distortions in society's perception of value.

Because of YouTube's advertising, you have people becoming multimillionaires by making total nonsense videos where they do things like react to other videos. Literally a YouTube video of a guy watching other YouTube videos, pausing and saying whatever pops into his head. Like this comment section. And he gets millions of dollars for it.

There's something deeply wrong with a society where you are rewarded for nothing. The people who actually do something tend to feel cheated when they see it happen. Imagine being a professional, a trades person and seeing a random dude get 1000x richer than you because he said stupid shit on the internet. And if you point it out, some startup founder accuses you of sour grapes.

Society should think deeply about the incentives it offers to people. Because people will respond to them.
Presumably you mean dtrace? strace is a Linux thing. dtrace should still work but you need to disable SIP first.
Pushing packets in software is generally brutal but multicast/broadcast should be inherently easier. It's less "copy this packet 27 times" and more "instead of receiving 27 packets and sending 27 packets you receive 1 packet and send it 27 times before you remove it from memory". The "hard" part becomes dealing with the queues filling up because you're inherently able to churn out so much more data than you're able to receive vs unicast.
It would be great to know a bit more about the protocol itself in the readme. I’m left wondering if it’s reliable connection-oriented, stream or message based, etc.
Thank you I needed a laugh today.
I have the impression they regarded generative AI as too dangerous. Before the success of ChatGPT, they never considered making PaLM or LaMDA or Chinchilla or Imagen publicly available until they saw themselves in a competitive disadvantage.
Thanks, that’s a really interesting perspective. I had a similar tenure at Google, and it was a great fit for me, but for very different reasons. Working towards technical perfection, almost divorced from any real world implications. Just puzzles to solve as elegantly as possible.

But I can see how that would not be for everyone. And I did see people who were more customer/outcome oriented really struggle.
Nice. I just wish they chose a watch with more pixels for the display. Perhaps they’ll consider doing another one as a successor.
Do you know of any statistics that back this?

I could see it be the other way around, or various factors balancing each other out. From my experience the current young generation is more willing to trade money for QoL , and quit when they feel QoL is bad, than the previous one.
I don't know how true it is I've heard that the ratio of managers to engineers has been increasing over the last few years, if that's true this policy lines up with what we've seen from management-heavy / inverted triangle org cultures
What groundbreaking logic it had implemented?

We consider a lot of what it introduced as "just videogames" nowadays, so it can be hard to spot. Comparing can help - consider Doom (1993) versus Wolfenstein 3D from the previous year:

* walls at angles besides 90 degrees

* floor and ceiling textures

* multiple kinds of ammunition

* lighting

Why it is ported to various platforms

It was open-sourced in 1999, so it's partly about availability. I suspect it's also because it's _possible_ to port to lots of things; it benefits from specialized hardware for graphics acceleration but doesn't require it.
d) tax incentives?
What prevents them from networking remotely and scheduling coffee chats? That seems like a weak excuse.
I think that Amazon is past the point where excellent software engineering is what makes them money. What makes them money is going out for golf with some Fortune 500 exec that saw "Stats powered by AWS" on the last NFL game, and wants something like that for their company. They then buy 80 million dollars of reserved CPU hours and get tickets to the Seahawks game.

These big companies are self-sustaining no matter how unfriendly to employees they might be. Yes, it's great when you hire great engineers and they invent the next billion dollar business. That is now a rounding error for Amazon, so they won't notice it's gone if it goes. And, a lot of engineers don't really care about returning to the office if it means they're getting paid $800k a year.

So overall, with everyone's retirement plan buying Amazon stock by default (oh sorry "Target 2050 Fund" shares), I wouldn't expect one supplier change or one HR policy to make a significant difference in their stock price.
> because a hypothetical light particle emitted at A couldn't reach B in time

Fascinating insights - it can be seen as causality, or at scale that there is a multi-dimensional reality where some timelines are inaccessible/impossible to each other (yet exist in their own right).
I thought I was the only one. I played so much FOMT on GBA that when I found Stardew Valley I was ecstatic because the dev added a bunch of QOL features I always wanted to add to FOMT.

The longer I played the less I enjoyed it and it’s hard to put my finger on. Music is great, gameplay is great, relationships are alright. Something always feels off though.

I blame the hard coded cooking aspect of the game tbh. And your animals can’t die. And you can’t save in the mines…
The examples you gave are commonly available proprietary software, but it’s really the long tail of low volume software where the author will only support really specific configurations
Making one's own processor design must be the new "every BigCo needs its own proprietary typeface" from yesteryear.

Are we to believe that Amazon's workload is so unique that an existing design can't fit the bill?

This is just a vanity exercise.
I think many will click them nonetheless, especially when it is hard to judge how relevant the linked article is.
Yeah, but you only need to approve an app once. I think I Ctrl+Open an app like once a quarter on average, sometimes going most of a year. This really isn't a big deal.
Google paid Firefox plenty of money.
Buying Intel at this moment still feels like catching a falling knife. Buyer beware.
Well, except Apple specifically calls out this exact photo and video search function on their page titled "Apple Intelligence." Sure they've had some basic search already, but in their demos and advertising, they promise that Apple Intelligence is used to find photos by descriptions.

>Search for photos and videos in the Photos app simply by describing what you’re looking for. Apple Intelligence can even find a particular moment in a video clip that fits your search description and take you right to it.

https://www.apple.com/apple-intelligence/
It’s not CS, it’s the world. You go into any industry and you’ll find jerks that assert their power by correcting and out-explaining someone else. It’s even become a popular gendered concept: mansplaining.

It feels like there are more in tech, but I think that’s just a side effect of tech being a space where a lot of genius things have happened in the last 100 years. You’d get as many guys trying to outdo one another at a fishing expo, their expertise is just in a different area.

LARPing as Sheldon Cooper is a fantastic turn of phrase.