skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I get this, but I think we can recognize the author might not be from the same background. Which I think you can talk about the point while noting what language is used in your community.

After all, is it the words or the ideas behind the words that matter more? We should always be trying to improve our language, but I'm worried if we prioritize words over meanings. I feel it's an important thing considering how language is constantly evolving.
Yes. It was specifically adding untracked files automatically.
There were 3 stages to this.

1. There is no IC progression, so engineers go into management for promotion.

2. There is IC progression, with roughly standardized expectations/naming at the various levels.

3. The standard levels were then exploited by companies to under-pay employees, by over-titling them (title in lieu of compensation).

This piece is about the final/current abuse of title stage.
I don't use any tools. Just plain text editor for notes
I'm reminded of a time that an intern took down us-east1 on AWS, by modifying a configuration file they shouldn't have had access to. Amazon (somehow) did the correct thing and didn't fire them -- instead, they used the experience to fix the security hole. It was a file they shouldn't have had access to in the first place.

If the intern "had no experience with the AI lab", is it the right thing to do to fire them, instead of admitting that there is a security/access fault internally? Can other employees (intentionally, or unintentionally) cause that same amount of "damage"?
This is exactly it. This is why often people will have titles change along with increases in compensation even though there may not be any change whatsoever in job description or responsibilities.
I've been through a handful of job changes in my career, and it seems that most of the time either my title goes up but my pay goes down, or vice versa:

* Software Engineer -> Founder: huge pay cut

* Founder -> Principal Engineer: Got a salary again

* Principal -> Advisory Engineer: 20% raise

* Advisory -> Senior: More than doubled my TC (but the job was stressful and the hours were terrible)

* Senior -> Staff: Cut my TC nearly in half (but much better WLB)

In general, I'll take the money over the title. But beyond a certain point, I'll take time with my family over the money.
Job titles exist in the context of the business and don't mean a lot outside that context, and putting stock into it is not worthwhile.

I have worked at businesses where "senior engineer" was equivalent to a "staff engineer" and we had no juniors, so "engineer" was equivalent to being an senior anywhere else. I've also worked places where "VP of engineering" was basically a PM. Title inflation is a thing and big tech has kind of figured it out, somewhat with their own internal rankings that match salary bands and responsibilities.

What I've also seen is demand on HR or executives to reclassify roles as "senior" or "staff" from unknown companies because employees felt just being called "engineer" was harming their resumes and future prospects because it didn't reflect their work.

Point being, we put too much stock in these things. Ask people what they've done or what their role is and weight it accordingly. If you don't have enough knowledge about the hierarchy of roles in a business than you can't use the title as an indicator into what their role is, you actually have to talk to them about it.
> If you think in async terms, it is blocking your entire event loop for some executor

I think I'm mis-understanding this. async doesn't block your entire event loop. Other events continue to be processed. Trivial example

const wait = ms => new Promise(resolve => setTimeout(resolve, ms));

setInterval(() => { console.log(performance.now()); }, 1000);
console.log('before');
await wait(10000);
console.log('after');

Did I misunderstand your meaning of "blocking the entire event loop"?
> Saying "close to the speed of light" changes nothing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh-My-God_particle
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBCode

I just experienced a wave of nostalgia.
They do mean something on your resume and as social capital. I wouldn’t sell short the actual intrinsic value of having a big title even if it’s fake you can sell it to the next employer. Even if they disagree with giving you the same title, you can use it to justify your comp expectations.
These days I equate senior titles with more mid level. You've seen some shit but could use a bit more time in the oven so to speak. I see Staff Engineer and Engineering Lead used for what I would consider a senior role 7 or 8 years back. I fully expect those will become meaningless as well and we'll move on to something else.
Oh yeah you're fine. We get hit with a lot more tough comments than that.
Except in terms of aligning oneself with that $COMPLETELY_UNRELATED_EVIL, individually one has essentially zero choice.

But in terms of aligning oneself with $COMPANY and its various endeavours (whatever one may make of them -- as an individual, one generally has vastly greater choice.
Show HN: An AI that builds perfect React landing pages
As an indie hacker, I used to spend hours creating landing pages for my side projects and SaaS.

So, in the past few months, I built Webifier.io.

It converts prompts into full blown landing pages that are customized for you. This includes: animations, custom sections, etc. You can then export a clean React/Next project.

Can’t wait to hear what you think!
My favorite question is: whether or not Bowser took the princess to another castle.
it has been reddit for the longest time, but now i see a lot of my friends building in public on X and getting momentum and traction.
Enjoyed this a lot! Particularly enjoyed the meta update about this thread. There are some neat suggestions here, but if this could come up on my podcast feed as-is I would listen to it.
It depends on the people you’re playing with. With an active group there’s a lot of strategy that goes into the negotiations, and also a good amount of “push your luck” gameplay. In my experience, a lot of the game comes down to one or two extremely intense negotiation sessions that everyone at the table ends up jumping in on.
It does support passkeys.
The ones that matter, do this. In many states if you are building anything for a government or business where lives are at stake, a PE is involved and there's legal liability for the engineers that certify something.

But the whole PE thing is nonsense. We can get around this with malpractice policies/insurance and still have a qualified human certifying things, and reasonable bodies rejecting that certification if they don't feel the human that does it is up to snuff. The whole PE dance is just a dog and pony show.
Bad news there. https://forum.syncthing.net/t/discontinuing-syncthing-androi...
My take is that the difference between junior / mid / senior / principle / CTO is the following question:

At what scope are you taking responsibility?

A junior can take responsibility to take a completely described specification and turn it into code. Eg, "We need a button on the page which looks like this: (mockup). When clicked, it should do this."

A senior can take responsibility for broader / more ambiguous problems. For example: "We're getting sporadic reports from users that they can't fill in this web form. But we can't reproduce it - every time we ask them to show us, everything works." / "The website just feels slow". Or: "The web server crashed again last night! That's the third time this month. How do we make this problem go away?"

As you keep "going up", the solutions increasingly involve subtle judgement (of the team and the customers) and interacting with other people. "Hey Jenny - I've been looking into a reported bug. I talked to a couple of our users about it. Part of the problem is this particular UX flow. I think it needs another pass. How full is your plate?" / "Ideally we'd scale up the team. Our biggest bottleneck is frontend iOS development. Lets hire 2 more devs. I'll talk to a couple recruiters and get the process started."

With this sort of perspective in mind, it gets much easier to judge the seniority of someone. Forget their job title, past or present. The author is right: Thats more signal than noise these days. In an interview, ask them to tell the story of some problems they've faced in their last role. Press for details on how the issue was communicated to them, and what was difficult / rewarding. Juniors will talk about tickets they closed, or tell you a story about a failing test case they were assigned by their lead that they fixed. Seniors will talk about something ambiguous and long running, or how they speced out a problem. Or about a long running issue they found & fixed off their own initiative. CTO level people will talk about hiring, or one time they corrected something that was going wrong in the team's culture.

Its pretty clear. Was it a more ambiguous problem? Was the scope broad? Did they take the initiative themselves? Did solving it involve judgement in a broad range of areas (eg technical, social, UX, etc)? All of those things demonstrate that the person is acting at a more senior level.

I use the same approach when coaching people at work. Lots of people are capable of operating at a higher level, they just need the right set of challenges and often the right push to take initiative and start stretching themselves. (And plenty of people, sadly, are the opposite.)
For a small and ever-decreasing share of the population, since the seventies.
i'm leaving a comment here because i think peter roberts is the OG. there's so many immigration attorney's now all around SF. but i remember peter being there from back in like 2016 when i was looking for attorney's. although i didn't go with him (peter thank you for doing this, and taking a call with me back in the day)
I'm paying for BitWarden because I want to support them. But it's pretty clear that they're backsliding.

This is understandable, the password manager market is saturated and implementing new features like Passkeys is far from trivial.

Still, they are the only real option for a one-click mostly open source password manager that works across all the major platforms and that supports modern features.
> Companies that resist title inflation gain a significant competitive edge. By maintaining meaningful titles, they attract and retain top talent who value authentic growth over inflated roles. This leads to more accurate hiring, improved team dynamics, and enhanced productivity. Realistic titles also foster trust, both internally and with clients, positioning the company as a beacon of integrity in the industry. Ultimately, companies with well-defined, honest title structures build stronger, more capable teams and a reputation for excellence that sets them apart in the market.

This argument is more intuitive to me if I consider that these people who value authentic growth are looking for more than just a sensible title system.

So, nurture a variety of organizational qualities that appeal to people who want more than just a paycheck and job-hopping, and one of the many things you do in the process is to set a sensible title system.
they got called out for hiding the reporting of it in tooling that can't be accessed by most security teams.
Dang, this is rough. Pass is imo still the best password manager if you set it up right.

Hopefully someone picks this up.
> One of the most important roles that titles play in the tech industry (at least the US-centric tech industry) is to help evaluate compensation.

I think there are some hints left by management and HR. We often hear excuses around appraisal like:

"we want to give you a hike, but your current job title doesn't allow us to pay beyond xyz and we don't have budget for a promotion".

I guess there's an element of truth in it sometimes (often these are excuses) because your title may limit your hike but it doesn't stop your manager from assigning and expecting you to take on work above your pay grade.
> people are incredibly susceptible to manipulation

Many truly disastrous things have already happened due to human-generated mass propaganda (and other forms of manipulation). I agree that AI can be used as a force amplifier (and Brian points this out in his talk), but AI isn't introducing a scary new sci-fi problem, we're still just facing the same problems humanity have struggled with for centuries. And LLMs are far from the first technology to have this downside.

When non-doomers say "cool it", we're not saying to ignore the already real problems AI might conceivably make worse, we're saying it's way off base to worry that we should bomb datacenters to prevent being killed by AI-controlled superweapons or eaten by gray goo.
> another vague term is "doctor" ...

The English definition of "doctor" is not a vague term. It has two common usages, both of which share the concept of one having an advanced degree[0].

a person who has earned one of the highest academic degrees
(such as a PhD) conferred by a university

a person skilled or specializing in healing arts

0 - https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/doctor
I get it, this is hacker news after all, but it really could be worthwhile for the profession to differentiate between someone who picked up Python for a weekend project, and someone with 30 years experience with real-world systems.

Would you get surgery from someone in a back alley? Is that credentialist crap?
What would you consider a good set of formal qualifications?

Degrees that the people who wrote software you regard well probably didn't have, and people writing software you dislike do? Quickly outdated written tests? Years of experience when a common refrain is 1 year of experience x times?

I work with safety critical systems. I still haven't found a better way to evaluate people than having a conversation because none of the overt metrics have correlated well with my "won't get people killed" rating.
Which part of that quote do you think is a misreading? That's exactly how I remember it unfolding in the book.
afaik this was intentional in that they stopped training runs and changing parameters for other employee training runs, and even joined in on the debugging group trying to solve the "issues".
OK, thanks for actually checking. Hey man, since you might actually see this. You guys are the coolest people in the land. I want to genuinely thank you, Jay, and the rest of the protocol nerds turned product people for creating what you have wrought.

There are teenagers signing up right now, who could have their handle, posts, and followers in 50 years, generally speaking, no matter what happens. That is freaking cool.
there's nothing you can do. ideas are really just ideas, if i was the CTO i'd give you a call back and appreciate the idea and show you that we executed it perfectly and it works and buy you dinner.
Note that this is specific to CSAM, not crimes in general. Specifically, online service providers are required to report any detected actual or imminent violation of laws regarding child sex abuse (including CSAM) and there are substantial fines for violations of the reporting requirement.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2258A
Putting aside the license / closed source issues with CockroachDB (CRDB) and just focus at it technically: CRDB uses MVVM too, but its storage is a key-value store. I know it uses some kind of garbage collection to remove the old versions.

I wonder if CRDB (or other newer designed DBs) has circumvented those issues? Or don't we just hear from those issues as CRDB and the other newer DBs are not that widely used and mainly in the commercial space?
The difference in this case is intent.

Did the employee have the intent to cause damage? If so just fire him/her.
I'm sure there are people, and companies, impressed by fancy titles.

Personally, I go the other way. I don't have a fancy title, and I don't want a fancy title. I don't need a title to earn social credit or impress an interviewer. I have my achievements for that.

But of course, to those who are impressed by titles feel free to call yourself anything you like. There are no qualifications or skillsets required.
Sorry, but under no circumstances should an ISP router auto route internal computers from the network. Thats just going to expose so many internal services, most consumers wouldn't even know they were running in the first place.

If we are to have a transition to IPv6, and I am very much in favour of this, then by all means make the addresses be globally routable, but force people to select the ports and addresses to be shared in their router. Otherwise we end up with another mess ala "open wifi".
A true senior engineer doesn't mess with scrolljacking scripts.
Programmer, developer, software engineer, etc. get used interchangeably, they don't indicate any real distinction except maybe within a single organization. Similarly "senior" doesn't mean anything other than "I got promoted."

In the last decade "architect" started to show up as a euphemism for what we used to call "analyst," someone who gathers, makes sense of, and translates business requirements into software development plans. But I have seen relatively junior programmers call themselves "architect," I suppose because it sounds cool. For me an architect designs buildings.
Seeing this on HN feels a bit like those apocryphal stories of the professor who hands out the "read all the questions before you start" quiz, and the last question just tells the students to ignore everything else, wait 30 minutes and leave for full marks.
> Reading this makes me willing to bet that this capital intensive investment boom will be similar to other enormous capital investment booms in US history, such as the laying of the railroads in the 1800s, the proliferation of car companies in the early 1900s, and the telecom fiber boom in the late 1900s. In all of these cases there was an enormous infrastructure (over) build out, followed by a crash where nearly all the companies in the industry ended up in bankruptcy, but then that original infrastructure build out had huge benefits for the economy and society as that infrastructure was "soaked up" in the subsequent years.

> I think that will happen here.

Why? The rail network, road network and fiber network that was laid could be used for decades after their original investors went bust.

The current datacenters full of AI compute can't really be used for anything else if AI companies go bust.

That's the problem with investing in compute infrastructure - you need to have a plan to use it all up in the next 5 years, because after that you wouldn't even be able to give it away.
Eh whatever. I'm a senior engineer by actual job (solo dev everything for a large org), but have a mishmash of actual experience, so I just call myself a developer because it's accurate.
What are "scratches"? For the film illiterate.
I think the thing we need to learn about security is that usability matters.

I think this is easy for pretty much anyone that's an active HN user, but is it for your parents or grandparents? It's they who matter a lot. It's why WhatsApp was so successful, it passed the Grandma check. Signal might, but onboarding is "hard" (and the nerds argue and that's all others hear and then do what... Use telegram? Lol). But it's why Matrix isn't gaining popularity, because frankly until creating servers is a one click install it's not going to get mass appeal (same for any federated app).

It's the old PGP joke: how do you decrypt a PGP email? You email the sender "I can't decrypt, can you send it without encryption?"
What the article describes seems like a parallel concept (and an important one.) I wouldn't call them Accountability Sinks, though, as they seem more like Accountability Avoiders. Here are things we might think of as sinks in the real world:

- "Sin Eaters"

- Corporations, especially companies that are spun off and take on all the debt of the original company

- Voluntary stool pigeons (in criminal organizations, etc.)

- Certain religious martyrs
It is practically impossible to get a PE in the defense industry because of the apprenticeship/vouching requirements. If your employer has no PEs, you can't ever qualify for one.
From what I've seen in Amazon it's pretty consistent that they do not blame the messenger which is what they consider the person who messed up. Usually that person is the last in a long series of decisions that could have prevented the issue, and thus why blame them. That is unless the person is a) acting with malice, b) is repeatedly shown a pattern of willful ignorance. IIRC, when one person took down S3 with a manual command overriding the safeguards the action was not to fire them but to figure out why it was still a manual process without sign off. Say what you will about Amazon culture, the ability to make mistakes or call them out is pretty consistently protected.
I’ve been watching these once a day since the announcement of the re-release. These are a mixture of heart-warming and heart-breaking but they’re all very much American. The film style varies but is also very Lynchian.
While writing "death to Arabs", "good Arab = dead Arab", "Nakba 2023", and other vile shit on the walls of their destroyed cities.

Can you provide incident details, please? I'm not doubting that stuff like this has happened, but specific (at least theoretically reliable) attestations are always helpful.
Making Castro’s Feeds Update Faster the Lazy Way
Someone send you a meme that looks like a meme, you share it through messenger, the meme looks like something else to the messenger, messenger reports you to NCMEC. It's NOT police but they can forward it to police. As a side effect NCMEC gets overloaded helping more of real abuse continue.
Would be cool to create embeddings for historical HN posts, and then use a users favorite posts to personalize the post selection by averaging the embedding vectors for a users favorite posts then doing a cosine similarity search to select stories most likely to be of interest to a user.

Although it would be even better to use a users like history, but I’m not sure if/how those can be accessed.

Speaking of, I’m curious how other folks use embeddings. I know you can average multiple embeddings together, but is anyone else doing other translations and having success? Thinking of King - Man + Women = Queen, It seems a lot of the time I see questions being directly used as inputs for semantic search/RAG. I wonder if it might make sense to create a large set of question-answer pairs and embed them and then determine the average translation to move from “question space” to “answer space”, then when you embed questions you apply the translation on the embedding to move it into “answer space” before performing RAG, or maybe this would just add too much noise?
I think they use it to change the number of coils that are active in the pickup. I think this is outside of/as well as supporting existing features like coil tapping humbuckers.
In the bay area it’s mildly different as its known that the wages are high
Algeria was considered an integral département of France, so technically they might be right if that population was substantial enough.
My gym instructor describes my pudgy, bald, middle-aged body as "stud".
I think I'm gonna update my resume, and linked-in profile to "Stud". I expect that will help in the next interview.