skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
IMO: I have never worked in a job where I would have been like "heck yeah, four day work week lets do it". Part of that is, there's kinda two distinct and separate camps, and sometimes its unclear which camp people are in and what we're fighting for. Is it "I work ~40 hours in four days" or "I work ~32 hours in four days"?

And my take is, I don't like either of these solutions.

I've never worked in a role where I feel like working 32 hours a week would deliver meaningfully similar results to working 40 hours. You're just gonna deliver less. That doesn't mean I'm coding for 40 hours a week, not even close, but there's so much admin and meetings (and even just finding availability for meetings!) that reducing net hours worked by 20% isn't going to have market success.

Increasing the hours worked on each day by 20%, but getting an extra day off, also sucks. There's more "things I gotta do every day" than "things I gotta do every week". I need every hour I've got most nights. Cooking, working out, reading, entertainment to keep the sad away, some types of shopping, these aren't by and large things that I can just say "lets wait and do them all on my extra Friday off!", they need to be done ~every day.

What you say is 100% my feeling as well: I am comfortable working 38-42 hours a week, and I want to by-and-large choose the hours and days I work to hit that. That is the best solution. If I need to schedule a dentist appointment for 1pm two weeks out, I want to do that without thinking even for a second that I need to check with "work", file PTO, etc. In exchange, I'll make up that hour by working until 6pm, or going to a coffee shop for a couple hours over the weekend, whatever feels like it makes the most sense for where I'm at and where the business is at. And, sure, there's core hours, there's meetings, we work around those; I'm talking policy, not the day to day.

This pattern of handling time off is so important to me that I have quit a job within the first month because they misrepresented how they handled PTO. I was told "oh yeah you can take off for a doctors, whatever bro no big deal", which turned into "oh no you've gotta file PTO, any time off throughout the day costs a full day and needs to be approved". I quit on the spot. Policies like that, four day work weeks, limited PTO, attract cogs, not high performers.
Firefox is adding better profile UX (it’s currently behind a flag)

I have about:profiles as the first tab in my set of home tabs...for multiple profiles. I am pretty sure I will continue to do that so long as Firefox allows it because drop down menus are pretty terrible UX and my first tab is always just ctrl-1 away. Good luck.
I’ve worked a 4 day week for a few years now. Best decision I’ve had the chance to make. I feel more productive on those 4 days, and my time away from work is more fulfilled too.

I always recommend it to people who may be lucky enough to afford and choose it.
Seems pretty common that a platforms owner would actually try new apis with their own stuff.

What better way to get primary real world usage before stabilizing?
> No scientist would trust a result that depends on a single small sample paper.

Unfortunately, they would. There are papers with thousands of citations that don't even have data samples, just models based on assumptions.
This is often overlooked but is actually a big deal:

> ...it’s straightforward to modify JavaScript dependencies locally. I’ve often tweaked something in my local node_modules folder when I’m trying to track down a bug or work on a feature in a library I depend on. Whereas if it’s written in a native language, I’d need to check out the source code and compile it myself – a big barrier to entry.

I too often find myself inserting `console.log` inside node_modules to figure out why the toolchain doesn't work as I'm expecting it to. It has gotten me out of some very nasty situations when StackOverflow/Google/GPT didn't help at all.

Had it been written in Rust, I wouldn't have had a chance.
The resulting ash would contain the vast majority of the extracted minerals. Throw in some kitchen scraps to replenish nitrogen and you'd probably be self sustaining at a reasonable hobbyist scale.
It worked out so well for them with the browser… oh wait.
However, the Lichess blitz ELO vs bots is about 700 points lower than vs humans.
Huh, I assumed that MS Live Share and GH Copilot extensions were already using some secret APIs in the past, since I never saw any open source extension being able to do what they do. I guess I was wrong before, and this only starts being the case now?
My lawnmower (openmower) can do <2cm accuracy over GNSS. It is absolutely believable they could achieve 0.5cm on GNSS (plus rtk correction data from a fixed base station nearby) alone without measuring any relative distance using other systems.
But is the moral of the story that the guys that made the bad decisions got their bonuses and moved on, and aren’t affected by the aftermath? That’s what I fear the MBA’s will learn - don’t stick around.
You define "fair" as "whatever the market for a particular sort of job will support," but then throw in a comparison to other, very different lines of work and note some differences. What's the connection?
Incident Management from an Astronaut
No, you're really not supposed to cheat.
> people will support whatever benefits they can get

Not true.

There are many people who fought against the choice of WFH despite the flexibility being generally good for everyone. There are many reasons for this e.g. they are extroverts and need the social interaction, have a poor home life etc.

Which is why now the trend is now forced hybrid.
I just want to second this (also did an undergrad in physics funny enough). I specifically sought out the harder professors in my undergrad and for the most part I'm happy I did it, but it's also a good thing that I'm not very motivated by money or prestige because I saw many of my colleagues who had gotten into better schools or jobs (even just the return calls on applications) who chose the easier routes or cheated. They are without a doubt wealthier. What mattered the most was the line items on their resumes and networking, but there is feedback in this so one begets the other. Fwiw, I had a 3.3.

So it then becomes hard for me to make suggestions to juniors. It isn't difficult to sniff out those like you or me who are motivated by the rabbit holes themselves, nor difficult to tell those who are entirely driven by social pressures (money, prestige, family, etc), but what about those on the edge? I think it's the morally best option to encourage learning for learning but it's naive to also not recognize that their peers who will cheat will be rewarded for that effort. It's clear that we do not optimize for the right things and we've fallen victim to Goodhart's Law, but I just hope we can recognize it because those systems are self reinforcing and the longer we work in them the harder they are to escape. Especially because there are many bright students who's major flaw is simply a lack of opportunity. For me? I'm just happy if I can be left to do my research, read papers and books, and have sufficient resources -- which is much more modest than many of my peers (ML). But it'd be naive to not recognize the costs and I'm a big believer in recognizing incentive structures and systematic issues. Unfortunately these are hard to resolve because they're caused by small choices by all of us collectively, but fortunately that too means they can be resolved by small choices each of us make.
I strongly disagree, this is 100% vulnerability, you're leaking private DNS records - aka if the name server is also used for private records these are effectively exposed.

There's NO REASON to have zone transfer enabled.
Tight information control means that rumors are often the best source of information so people are more engaged in the rumor mill. Same thing happened in the Soviet Union.
I think part of that is the consequence of lack information. just what happened, but no why or other context.
People have a really hard time with things that exist on cosmic scales. We tend to think within the frame of a single human lifetime. 100 years is a long time for us. 1000 is so long that we don't even expect to have much information. 10,000 years might as well be 1 million for all we distinguish.

There is about as much time between the Tyrannosaurus Rex and humans than between the Tyrannosaurus Rex and Stegosaurus. If we took the entirety of the planet's existence and mapped it out on a single year, all of humanity takes place in the last 25 minutes of the last day. All of recorded history takes place in the thirty seconds before midnight on December 31st.

The Triassic/Jurassic extinction event took place "in less than 10,000 years". That's longer than recorded history. The KT extinction took place over 5000 years.

So "quick" is relative. We think in terms of weeks or months or years. But we're talking about a process that takes centuries or millennia.
For me, I work 4x 10hr days, and it's the best work situation I've ever had. Having every single weekend be a 3-day weekend is something it would be very hard to move away from unless I was doubling my salary or something.
Not FOSS at all, but I've used 1password for years and love it. It's one of the few pieces of software that just works across my devices (Mac/iPad/Android phone), cloud sync is awesome, and built-in support for cloud-synced 2FA and Passkeys means I never have to worry about replacing devices.

I pay for a family plan and share it with family members. It's really wonderful and something I never have to worry about.

It's not the kind of thing worth wasting time self-building and hosting, IMO, especially the cloud component. I don't want to keep up with all the latest exploits and zero-days; much rather have a commercial company taking care of it with a vested interest in keeping your data safe.

There are FOSS things like Keepass XC. But the overall experience just sucks compared to 1password.
impressive list. i have a book rec for you not on your list: Battle Mage by Peter Flannery
Well that's what the Washington regime and its media lackies do anyway, "according to a confidential source at the Whitehouse..."
I don't see what fairness has to do with WFH. Its in the company's best interest to maximize employee productivity. If an employee has to travel three hours per day to sit on zoom meetings, they might not be motivated to perform as well as they would for a company that treats them better.
Although I fit the profile of a verbal thinker (English degree, education in the humanities) I don't exactly find language the primary aspect of my thought.

It seems more like a complement to it: the idea arises, and then I have this compulsion to verbalise it, which gets quite frustrating as it takes several iterations. Clearly words do matter to me as a way to structure and record my ideas but there is something that pre-empts verbalisation and to some extent resists it.

I cannot provide insight on how I arrive at ideas. Even when I did literary criticism, the best I can say is that I absorbed lots of text and then suddenly a pattern would spring out. But the same things would happen for me studying maths or the hard sciences.

Software engineering is actually a bit different for me because I am not naturally a good algorithmic problem solver. Really I am somebody very passionate about computing who has a near-compulsion to see and collect more and more technology. So for me it is as simple as saying "this resembles a reader monad" or "this puns on the active record pattern". Less impressive than my humanities intelligence but worth maybe 10x the amount in the labour market :-)
What's the harm here if the APIs are temporary and they don't have a history of elongating the lives of temporary APIs like this? They've stated the purpose of these "proposed APIs" and we have no evidence from the last decade to believe they'd renege on their stated goals.
Astrodynamics
Are you proposing ridesharing? Self-driving hasn't been widely deployed yet.
Gosh, that sounds really challenging. I've worked with tons of early stage startups and issues between founders is not unusual -- in a lot of ways it's like a marriage, in all the good and bad ways.

I would suggest sitting down with them and trying to point out some of the issues you've raised above, if you can approach it in a "we're in this together, let's solve this problem" kind of way.

If you can't, is there an investor or a trusted outside party who could help facilitate that conversation?

If you feel like there isn't a productive way to have this conversation, then maybe it's time to figure out whether this is a partnership that can continue and make some difficult choices.

Some of these problems could potentially be solved by outsourcing more of the work you're doing, so you aren't doing all of the jobs, all of the time, but of course, that requires capital, which you may or may not have.

I sympathize, it sounds really difficult right now. Just know these issues are not unique to your situation, and hopefully with some proactive communication you can actually improve the situation for you and for the business.

Happy to chat more if that's helpful!
It's pretty obvious that they use this OCR system to track sent letters that don't expect a reply as well as forms you return and they've just used the same template in both cases.
There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. I know this already. Alone, unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the enemy.

Remember this: freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they’ve already enlisted in the cause.

Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.

And remember this: the Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear.

Remember that. And know this, the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empires’s authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege.

Remember this: try.
Going back?

When did they stop?
Ah my bad, so it's not a replacement of IA. In that case it makes sense
> If, on the other hand, it’s knowledge that isn’t well (or at all) represented, and instead requires experience or experimentation with the relevant system, LLMs don’t do very well. I regularly fail with applying LLMs to tasks that turn out to require such “hidden” knowledge.

It's true enough that there are many tasks like this. But there are also many relatively arcane APIs/protocols/domains that LLMs do a surprisingly good job with. I tend to think it's worth checking which bucket a task falls into before spending hours or days hammering something out myself.

I think many devs are underestimating how arcane the knowledge needs to be before an LLM will be hopeless at a knowledge-based task. There's a lot of code on the internet.
Of course it would, not a lot would run otherwise.
Here is very nice writeup about vtables and constructors: https://shaharmike.com/cpp/vtable-part4/
> I'm also very sympathetic to the jitters stuff, because I get it a lot and make dumb mistakes when in the spotlight lol.

As an interviewer, I spot this and try to get them to ease up. I will talk about myself for a bit, about the work I do. I'm trying to get them to realize they are not in the spotlight, but whether we would be a good fit together; and thus both of us want them to work there.

BUT, my interviews tend to be about us solving a problem together, very rarely about actual code. For example, we might walk through how we would implement an email inbox system. We may discuss some of the finer details, if they come up, but generally, I'm interested in how they might design something they've basically used every day. How would we do search, what the database schema would look like, drafts, and so on.

I won't nudge them (to keep my biases in check), but I will help them down the path they choose, even if I don't like it. I'm not testing for the chosen path, but what "gotchas" they know and how they think though them. If you are a programmer, it shows. If you are an excellent programmer, it shows. If you are not a programmer, you won't make it 10 minutes.
Very interestingly, just yesterday I discovered that VSCode has a set of APIs for adding SSH tunneling, and under normal circumstances you must launch vscode with special flags to be able to use them. Somehow their built-in JavaScript debugging extension can use these APIs without any issues.

https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/main/src/vscode-dts...

And you can hardly find any public information about these APIs. Well, unless someone asks -- As of 2 years ago, they didn't have any plans to "finalize" these APIs, i.e. make them public. You are advised to find other workarounds (which do work).

https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-discussions/discussions/...

This is much less "harmful" than Copilot though, I guess.
NotebookLM by Google
So, precisely the same constraints that IA operates under, just perma.cc isn't big enough yet to have been forced to comply with them?

I'll hold my breath.
As impressive as the space efforts in the 60s and 70s were, I've often thought that they were a false start created by a war-like impetus to show off. Tech-wise, we really weren't ready for a space age. The sort of control systems that make this sort of outcome possible haven't been around for all that long, really, especially if you mark them from being economical and not just "it technically existed in a lab somewhere". Plus if you really dig into how these rockets are built and maintained, you see a lot of other technologies that have not been around for that many decades, like, practical and reliable 3D printing, and computing simulations that have more computational power per second than the entire computing world could scrape together in a year in the 1960s, and those are just the highlights, not the exhaustive list.

A lot of people are like "we got to the moon in the 1960s, where's the progress we should have had since then?" but I see the 1960s as the bizarre exception rather than the thing that should be used to set the rule. There was no way the space age was going to happen then, in an era where you're almost sitting there counting each bit of RAM you can afford to send into space. The true Space Age is just dawning now, and it's still early in the dawn; we still have to have massive international cooperation to put a single space station up, we can't do something as basic as refuel in orbit, we just barely started having people in space for commercial rather than governmental reasons... it's just the beginning.
Enshittify
When you make some kind of porridge by boiling either ground cereal seeds (i.e. some kind of coarse cereal meal, e.g. cornmeal or semolina) or whole cereal seeds (e.g. of rice or wheat or barley), they will absorb a quantity of water of at least four times the mass of the cereals. Therefore the cooked food will be much more voluminous than the original cereals.

Both Pyrocystis noctiluca and the boiled cereal seeds increase their volume many times by absorbing water, but Pyrocystis noctiluca keeps the water in internal vacuoles, while in the boiled seeds the water is incorporated in their starch granules. All starchy seeds absorb water when boiled, but most of them do not absorb so much water as the cereal seeds, so their increase in volume is lower.
Maybe all the gains went to the top? Quality of life for the ultra-high net worth set has never been better.
It just means that melodies and harmonies are “supposed to be” sung and thus continuously pitched, where the ears of the musicians guide them to the proper harmonies. This is not feasible with keyboard or fretted instruments, so we have to make compromises if we want to play polytonal music on a single piano. 12-TET is a compromise that stood the test of time: ultimately a slightly “clangy” dominant seventh is preferable to the corrupt fifths and thirds you get with unequal temperaments.

I really don’t think there’s much more to it than that, except composers with picky ears should just bite the bullet with 17-TET or something. (I am a guitarist and sometimes I wish I had flatter thirds and tritones without having to bend the strings.) As shown off-handedly in the Werckmeister Harmonies novel and film, composers who get too deep into the weeds of temperament systems often find themselves confusing form with function and waging ideological battles, forgetting that the point of the exercise is create interesting music.
Are you looking at single country pairings for the border size?

The closest comparison, both in border length and economic gap is EU/non-EU, when you look at the size of the border along the Mediterranean and the Balkans.

Another close comparison is South Africa, 4,862 km border (compared to US-Mexico at 3,145 km). Huge economic gap and even larger migration numbers.
I used to work 4x10 hour days, Sun-Wed, 2nd shift. It was OK, but I was ecstatic when I was finally able to move to a normal 9-5 Mon-Fri schedule. It's so much nicer to have society's expectations of when you are meant to be working to match when you are actually working.
There are just certain technologies my brain says "fuck, no" to. GNOME. The Great Banality Laser (whose official name was once Twitter). Visual Studio Code.

The fullness of time usually proves my brain's initial impressions right, as it seems to be doing now with Visual Studio Code.

I can still remember the monthly paroxysm of bliss that radiated throughout Hackernews, regular as clockwork, timed with Microsoft's monthly VS Code drops. Glad to see it enter its trough of disillusionment, at least on Hackernews.
I think a three day weekend is more important than a four day work week. We should move to an 8 day week :)
The house just passed $1.6B spending bill for the production of anti-china propaganda. This isn't necessarily a result of that, but I'd imagine some of the weird rumors you hear are manufactured by US intelligence/state dept.
Right. But the actual use case of being able to sell your home's floorplan and general cleaning schedule/behaviors/etc to advertisers requires cloud functionality, so you need some fig leaf to cover up the requirement...

I agree, local only would be great. But that's not aligned with the "sell a product once, sell the data collected forever!" model that most modern consumer tech products operate on.