skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Traditional school work has rewarded exactly the formulaic dry ChatGPT language, while the free thinking, explorative and creative writing that humans excel at is at best ignored, more commonly marked down for irrelevant typos and lack of the expected structure and too much personality showing through.
To add: This issue isn't that troublesome in languages like JavaScript where the runtime is event driven out-of-the-box (synchrounous APIs are considered the exception and suffixed with 'Sync' by convention), but it will become difficult to reason about in languages like rust and python where an event driven runtime is optionally choosen by the developer. Because now it's not enough to conceptually grep all awaiting calls to reason about any blocking code, but you'd also need to know if any other synchronous calls are implicitly awaiting in an underlying layer.
Hire and retain only the best
Pretty generous and also thanks for radix!
Some of the sources say that he sat in the incident meetings during troubleshooting and adjusted his attacks to avoid detection, too.
> they would never return to the office anyway.

exactly, so i would counter with saying that if they're never returning to office, then it can't possibly harm to add it as a clause in to the employment contract.
A viable strategy for making money, or providing value to society?

I think for some niches, the former can for a brief period precede the latter. But eventually the market catches up and roots out that which lacks actual value.

More concretely, I suspect the advertising apparatus is going to increasingly devalue unattributed content online, favouring curated platforms and eventually resembling a more hands on media distribution with human platform relationships (where media == the actual medium of distribution not content).

That is already a thing, where for example an instagrammer promoting your product is more valuable than the automated ad-network on instagram itself.

At which point, hopefully, automated content and spam loses legitimacy and value as ad-media.
Well, that is how AI works.
Does this apply to Amazon operations in the EU and UK as well. I could imagine that it might be possible to fight such an edict under UK employment law. I'm pretty sure that they would not be able to do it quite so easily here in Norway.
Reading this comment, it sounds to me that you live in a dystopian nightmare.
By now I wouldn't be surprised if more people know who Kurt Vonnegut is than Barnes and Noble, at least globally
3 points are ~the threshold to put you on the front page for a very short time to maybe get more votes. Comments are not a positive influence as far as I know. (But a high comment-to-upvote ratio can apply a penalty)

You just got lucky to see a new post at the right time.
If there was poop on it, would you clean it or throw it out? Thought experiment to decide if you should keep a thing around or not.
You're full of negative energy. Precondition for your rant being yet another pandemic, which is... diabolic to say the least. Please take a deep breath, and try to get the hate out of your system.
It seems now is the time to start asking for a private office, some furniture, a massage chair ;)

That way, if performance drops, you can blame it on the inferior office at work :)
We call them APT -1 (Microsoft)
I have had glasses since I was 7... A year after my father brought home a 'portable computer' (luggable) [0] with a tiny monochrome screen. Not sure if that was related, but I guess it could be as the screen was very tiny (see pic below).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_1
unless you know you don't actually need those higher performers (presumably an assumption the bean counters have). People who have fewer options then would necessarily not going to ask for pay rises too. Therefore, you double whammy get both cheaper workers, as well as more obedient ones.
I mean, I agree with that. That certainly matches my experience. I just don't think the deciding factor is "simpleness" so much as an inability to handle large scale at all.

My point is more that LLMs can handle (some) projects that are useful. It's not just oneliners and hello worlds. There's a region in between "one-page demos" and "medium-sized codebases and up" where useful work can already happen.
Well yes, if you disregard the fact that the last four years of realising that WFH is not only possible but preferable for workers happened. It's backsliding from a situation that was advantageous for many workers.

For many people it's become non-negotiable that a job offer remote working. If where I worked mandated return-to-office I would immediately begin looking for somewhere else to work.
can confirm. Was forced to do this at a previous job actually
No company will put this in an employment contract unless they are desperate to hire you, and if they are that desperate to hire you, you're in a whole other league than the people this news applies to.
So how much time did you spend looking for feeds and people who match your interests?

There are curated/automated feeds on many topics:

https://bsky.app/feeds
Generate AI headshots in 10 seconds – HeadShots.fun [OpenSource]
Eh, it's a bit hacked together sure. I find it easy to read?
I love this old Maxell ad. Still makes me laugh.

https://youtu.be/mxELSzay2lc?si=vPtg2y-ZkI3rDQMh
Amazon (aws) was by far the worst place I’ve worked. Literally every engineer was offered and this was in Germany, where the culture and labor laws are super employee friendly. Everything was soulless including the god ugly Chime and other internal tools. Although principles like bias for action, disagree and commit are pretty effective and cool.

Just for work culture, I’d have preferred to work at Google or Facebook for upto 30% pay cut. So with policies like this, I’d imagine people who don’t quit are the ones who can’t quit. Maybe that’s fine for Amazon. They diversified the workforce geographically
https://archive.is/Foe1r

I always check archive.is for snapshots :-D
> I hope the next time there is a pandemic like Covid that we do more sensible things like not ban access to outdoor activities, shutdown beaches, shutdown everything for months, destroy the economy, etc..

At the time we didn't have enough information to know locking down outdoor activities was unnecessary. All we knew is it is more contagious than other infectious diseases, like the flu. Given what we knew, it was a reasonable policy, even if in hindsight we know it wasn't necessary.

It's funny how the same people who kept saying we don't have enough information about if masks work, because we didn't test them enough specifically with covid, are now the ones who say we should have known that outdoor activities could have been left open.

> Also ironically WFH is great unless you are the poor soul who still needs to work on the “front line” every day like warehouse workers, delivery drivers, etc.

"Front line" workers like warehouse workers and delivery drivers also profit from limiting vectors of infection by office workers staying home. Nothing "ironic" about it.
I don't buy the argument that a lot of the performance jumps from rewrites comes from developers writing more optimised code.

I've worked on multiple rewrites of existing systems in both JS and PHP to Go and those projects were usually re-written strictly 1:1 (bugs becoming features and all that). It was pretty typical to see an 8-10x performance improvement by just switching language.
This is why the death of fansites and forums was so huge. Instead of that quiet restaurant or blues bar we were all shoved into a dingy fast food joint and crammed together like sardines with robotic staff who do everything in their power to keep us in the joint as long as possible, even if we’re all hangry and throwing things. Really the only problem I had with forums is finding new ones, and that’s probably the only thing Reddit did right was ease of creating and finding communities.
My impression as a longtime user of AWS is that they don't care to retain competent people. They seem to have a "throw more bodies at it" attitude toward work.
I've heard a similar story from someone who was at HP when the donut carts ended, it signaled a significant culture change.
I doubt that has anything to do with anything. It’s far more likely they want to encourage people to move on without having to pay severance. I read on some news site there’s some employee chat channel with thousands of members advocating for flexible work.
It is not a bug, it is a feature.

That's how you can mold society as you like at your level: this student's older sibling was a menace? Let's fuck them over, being shitty must run in the family. You don't like the race / gender / sexuality of a student? Now "chatGPT" can give you an easy way to make their school life harder.
> have less than 5% of the followers they used to have

Human value ranked by number of social media followers, what a sad world we live in.
Their recruiters basically never stopped sending out messages even during the mass layoffs of the past few years, from my experience
> This entire thread smells of multiaccounting

Indeed so, username "hsbauauvhabzb".
I realise this topic has been covered repeatedly but considering it from another angle:

As an engineer employed by third party companies using AWS, this doesn't look good. I don't care if the support people are in an office. I do care if they're available and know what they're doing. There are other cloud providers available. For new entrants, what's Amazon's unique selling point?
Kudos to the authors. It takes some fortitude to try to make a contribution to something as fundamental and ubiquitous as the "if" statement. Appreciate providing the grammar and the thorough explanations, will save a lot of pain when trying to implement!
The H1B workers have to comply.
Thanks for the feedback, looks like you're not the only one. Personally I enjoy it, but I can understand that some might find it distracting.

I just need to figure out a way to implement a toggle for the music, while also playing nicely with the playback speed etc.
Entitled to what? Control over their own lives? I hope you didn't have any choice in your job, or take holiday or weekends, or even get paid or sleep. Otherwise you might feel entitled to these things.
> 2006 property crash

Assuming you are talking about the US financial crisis, do you mean 2008, instead of 2006? As I recall, easy money (via mortgages) was still sloshing about, well into 2007.
There is always need for maintenance on Android.
You're mostly hinting at a very obvious shortcoming of synthesized speech: Its sequential. The phenomenon is most obvious if you look at screen readers using speech synthesis. Its a fundamental problem of the medium, which some devs will discover independently, now that tts has a new surge.
We have stronger worker entitlements here in Europe but WFH is often just a positive remnant from the COVID era and not something specified in our contracts. For example I work fewer hours and from home on Fridays but nowhere in my contract does it say I'm allowed to do that.
Highly doubt it. It is increasingly becoming difficult to get (or renew) H1B visa.
title is missing a " Presents " in the middle
I don't know what these 'students' are doing, but it's not very hard to prompt a system into not using the easily detectable 'ai generated' language at all. Also adding in some spelling errors and uncapping some words (like ai above here) makes it more realistic. But just adding an example of how you write and telling it to keep your vocabulary and writing some python to post process it makes it impossible to detect ai for humans or ai detectors. You can also ask multiple ais to rewrite it. Getting an nsfw one to add in some 'aggressive' contrary position also helps as gpt/claude would not do that unless jailbroken (which is whack-a-mole).
It's an app that ships with/downloads the synching (go-based) binary. (I am pretty sure this is still the case, I looked at it some years ago)
Interesting. So assuming these allegations are true, is this lack of employment consequences common across academia?
I'm not sure what your argument is. I feel like you just wanted to bash amazon. If you don't care if the support people are in office, why are you concerned by the RTO news?
The length went from 13mins to 37mins (!) with small prompts.
while I'm a fan of TypeScript and using type hints in Python from an autocomplete and linting perspective, I am curious...

... has either language leveraged these to better tell the CPU what to do? presumably for perf.
That’s what he is saying. Get rid of non h1bs then keep draining people until they leave and then use that as justification to expand h1b positions.

H1b is really not fair. They have virtually no negotiation standing without risking their immigration status. They are underpaid and subsidized, and drive domestic wages down. Among many simple reforms they should execute, a big one would be tonseperate the sponsor company from the visa. Which would allow them to negotiate and have more agency.
> Literally every engineer was offered

I might be missing an idiom here - offered what?
Quit, and you have full control over your life again. Stop being so childish. Comparing holidays, sick leave, pay and nightly sleep to physical presence is simply laughable. The pandemic was an exceptional situation. Holding onto that special status is plain entitlement.
IPv4 is valuable, there are reasons to not be able to uniquely id/tag/censor every endpoint. It's much harder to block a country than a user.
That would be the saner name, yes.
C++23: ISO/IEC 14882:2024
In Australia the term "engineer" wasn't really used for software until relatively recently. I've been in tech for almost 30 years and have been a sys admin, network admin, db admin, developer, manager, product lead, consultant etc. I have experience in many languages, platforms and technologies and have worn many hats.

I now just call myself a developer. But I also only program for fun these days.
This website has possibly the worst alternative to horizontal scrollbars I’ve ever seen: horizontal scrolling per paragraph.
The point of `pass` is to offload the security aspect to gpg, so unless something goes wrong with that, I don't believe continued use, even if unmaintained, is very insecure.
Yes. Rust has safe destructor semantics. C++ does not.

Back references are really hard in Rust. You can do them with Rc, RefCell, and Weak, but there's a lot of run-time checking involved. More static analysis could eliminate most of that run-time checking. .borrow(), .borrow_mut(), and .upgrade().unwrap() panic if they ever fail. So you really want to prove they can't fail. If you can do that, you don't need the run-time checks. In that direction lies the solution to Rust's limited data structure problems.
It's a step towards landing on Mars. They aren't even claiming to have landed.
When in the parent class destructor, the v-table will point toward the parent's v-table not the child's (try it out), so I'm not sure how you'd call a virtual method accessing a child member.
How are you verifying you're correct? How do you know you're not finding false positives?
PHP does but the types actually mean something. If your types can be stripped out to make the program run, I have a hard time believing that there is any optimization occurring there.
No, you are not the only one, background music is pretty common though.

Often the background music is just too loud compared to the voice. Professional productions use a technique called ducking, where the music is dynamically made quiet in relation to the volume of the voice.

Personally, I prefer no background music at all, and I wonder if there is a case to made for the professionally balanced case?
I enjoy it as well. Makes it easier to listen for me, voice alone is droning.
Doesn’t this open them up for wrongful termination suits..
I think it's stupid to have a country where guns are legal.
1. Impossible to prove this in court.

2. The idea that any FAANG wants to push out non-H1B workers is pretty laughable. They have some of the most efficient workforce in existence and the highest comp in the industry. Many H1Bs in Amazon make more than the vast majority of citizen devs pound for pound. These companies could hire loyal, willing citizens to replace all H1Bs at a fraction of the cost. But they don't do that because H1Bs are also talented and worth the high compensation. Those H1Bs in turn know that and job hop just as citizens do. They also value remote work when it's available at a similar comp range, but these days it no longer is.
And that's exactly the line and slander they would use when they bring in new legislation to stop "abuse" of the system. You've proven my point
Loved this post! Could anyone recommend a book (or other medium) with similar content about RMBDS internals?
I was thinking about something like that at first, but still doesn't make sense compared to other "new" entries.

For example, the following one was posted 1h ago, have almost 50 points and comments, and is just at the 15th place now when the IBM one is around 9th with 6 points. When I did my first comment it already had a lot of points but was on second page of results.

Just around the same time as IBM post, there was 2 other posts with also 3 points that aren't anywhere near any of the "top" pages:

One 5 mins before:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41901058

One 15 min later:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41901168

And 20 mins later:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41901210

Obviously points are increasing a lot now that the post is in the topest of the top.
> I think folks conflate “GC overhead” with the overhead of languages that happen to use GC.

That is fair to a point. Some GC languages (like Java) are significantly more inefficient than they need to be regardless of the GC.

Nonetheless, for performance C++ code you don’t see much malloc anywhere, directly or indirectly, so the efficiency doesn’t matter that much. That’s pretty idiomatic. I think this is the real point. As a C++ programmer, if you are not serious about eliminating dynamic allocation then you aren’t serious about performance. Since C++ is used for performance, you don’t see much dynamic allocation that a GC could theoretically help with. Most objects in the hot path have explicitly and carefully managed lifetimes for performance.

I use GC languages for quite a few things, but it is always for things where performance doesn’t matter. When performance matters, I’ve always been able to beat a GC for performance, and I’ve done my fair share of performance engineering in GC languages.
The only free food is bananas from what I hear. Fits the starving African theme!
Do they not have any power for amplifiers? Or is that done with fiber too, or carried on the same metal layer used for protection?
Does Amazon even do contracts?
I wouldn't say so. It's a very marked difference with a sharp change the moment I drive through the border.
Seems to me that the article and many of the comments conflate JS with Node. Personally I abhor Node and work with both Bun and Deno. In both cases avoiding the Node compatible bits.
Since you are highly knowledgeable about AP/Mastodon, may I was one more question, if you have a moment?

I believe that one of the neatest things about AT/Bluesky is that each user has their own SQLite DB. This and DIDs makes account portability pretty easy, right? [0]

Where is AP/Mastodon on account portability?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35881905 (I assume it's progressed since then)
They were just fired, not put in prison or sued. Getting fired is a typical capitalist punishment, I'd bet way more engineers gets fired for mistakes in USA than China.
What makes me notice is that I have noticed recently that there is a lot of posts that reach the top without even a single comment.

And I often expect the comments to provide interesting context for articles. Especially some like that there are raw company PR without context.
That’s fair. I see “bidding on a username” as fundamentally the same as using bitcoin to buy a pizza. An auction is a bit more complicated, but it’s still just commerce. Bitcoin as over complicated money.

But I didn’t exclude commerce in my post above. Thanks for replying.
> It seems like a long term loosing proposition.

Sounds like a good candidate to IPO early
> Glean.com does it for the enterprise I work at: It consumes all of our knowledge sources including Slack, Google docs, wiki, source code and provides answers to complex specific questions in a way that’s downright magical

There are a few other companies in this space (and it's not something that complex to DIY either); the issue is data quality. If your Google Docs and wikis contain obsolete information (because nobody updated them), it's just going to be shit in, shit out. Curating the input data is the challenging part.
I am a fan of 3D printing. And I think you can probably get some circuit traces 3D printed for some niche applications.

But active electronics? That's a huge stretch. But more importantly, the economics just doesn't make sense. Components already cost fractions of a cent. Small-run PCB prototyping is like <$25 for 5 boards or so.

"A step toward..."

Maybe. But why?
Presumably a job.
The problem with that logic is that plenty of people were hired as remote during the period when in-office was not mandatory, so it's not "reverting" them to any conditions they had previously. I joined a distributed team at AWS late in 2021 for a fairly new product where the managers weren't even all in the same areas as each other. When the "return" to office happened, we were so spread that we had three separate offices they would accept us going to in person and none of them was even roughly in the same area as me (I live in New York, the options were in Virginia, Texas, and Seattle) and that we'd have to relocate, transfer, or quit. Due to a medical situation, I wouldn't have been able to go into an office even in New York without health risks for my fiancee, and it wasn't clear to either me or my manager what exemption I should apply for, let alone how long it would last without being renewed. My fiancee and I had no intention of moving even when the medial situation got resolved, so given amount of stress that would ensue from having to navigate the internal bureaucracy (which potentially would have to be repeated in the future, depending on the length of the exemption and how the medical situation progressed), and uncertainty that they'd even approve the exemption each time I'd have to apply, it didn't seem worth the effort, and I left pretty much as quickly as I could.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that company policy should have to account for every single outlier, but arguing that circumstances that make "returning" to office extremely difficult are not actually that uncommon people hired under the pretense of indefinite remote work for a given position. One of my teammates (who also didn't live anywhere close to any of the three offices mentioned above) had bought a house just a month or two before we were all told we needed to be in one of those locations. If Amazon truly considered remote work to be untenable in the long term, they shouldn't have built up entirely remote teams in the few years they had to deal with it and hired teams locally with the expectation that they might need to go into an office some day.

Yes, I know they aren't technically under any obligation to respect the fact that people are hired remotely, but that's the whole point being made here; weak labor laws mean that it's legal, but that doesn't make it any less scummy.
Author’s paper also doesn’t solve the problem, because I wager most C++ programmers wouldn’t touch this rustified C++, which manages to look even worse than the already not light on the eyes original.
Overworked* oops