skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They should face the same consequences as the people they are firing. Lose their health insurance (or pay COBRA), have a few months' worth of expenses in the bank, have to find a new job, that kind of thing.

I suspect you wouldn't see these comments if CEO pay was on the same order of magnitude as the people who actually work at the companies they run. Watching someone treat your livelihood like a toy, while also being rewarded with more money than any person will ever need, is a bit grating.
While this post is about the authors own video being better and less cringe than Apple’s videos, the Apple videos might not be for me, and trying to say Apple’s AI is for everyone, including people who aren’t perfect.

The scenarios could have been different or better to me. But maybe I’m not the target audience, and iPhone is the beginner smartphone that almost anyone can use.
I would rather my SO just tell me they forgot. Then we could have an honest conversation about why. That, I believe, is what you should do in a marriage.
The answer depends on what is rate-limiting growth; while we are supply-constrained on GPUs you can’t just increase AI usage.

The next bottleneck will be datacenter power interconnects, but in that scenario as you say you can expect power usage to expand to fill the supply gap if there is a perf win.
That last paragraph could have been taken directly out of the defense contractor lobbyist handbook. Congratulations.

Seriously -- we don't have military commitments to "underpin the global order". We have military commitments to "protect our political and economic interests" -- and who do those benefit? The American people? Nah, not really. But the American people are the ones footing the bill for it, choosing to reduce our own quality of life in order to exert power over other nations (and invade them at will).
Thoughts on Software Complexity
Hello Hacker News Community!

I want to share my post that discusses system complexity. I have five years of experience, and these insights come from my personal experience.

Let me know what you think. Any feedback is appreciated!
His history shows that he did not compromise his integrity to gain a momentary advantage, so I doubt he'd have succumbed in that instance. He understood those things have a tendency to backfire. It's a different world now. That was towards the end of the era where deals could be done with a handshake.
AI is mostly about selling something no one needs to people who don't need it. I think they nailed it there.

The Ubuntu ad looks cheap.
You'll love ddr5 times.
As someone whose watch called 911 for me when I was in an accident, and who got a call when my mother fell, fear or not there are real, tangible benefits that probably can't be overstated.
They're linked in the article.

That video specifically: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m0MoYKwVTM
Sadly that's what most users expect. They don't want to be bothered with learning and understanding, they just want a quick result now with as little effort as possible.
Why bring this IARC list up out of the blue? The parent comment mentioned an EPA classification and you brought up a list of IARC classifications. The EPA and IARC frequently disagree on their classifications.
The post contains hyperlinks.
I could see a huge business opportunity here. In Amazon S3 there is a concept of "requestor pays" so you can have an S3 bucket that loads of people download data from yet you aren't hit with the bill and instead the "requestor" pays for the bandwidth.

With AI scraping becoming more of a thing, a cloud platform could roll out a feature where an AI is allowed to scrape the daylights out of your site, but they must pay for the bandwidth or bandwidth + premium.

In this scenario you wouldn't wake up bankrupt but instead with a windfall of cash because TikTok decided to scrape all your stuff.
"Unpopular opinion", sure, how brave of you.

Simple: they sure love to talk a big game about responsibilities and taking responsibilities. Until it's time to actually do it. For the good of the company of course (if the company is in such dire straits, as the most highly paid employee - and probably not the hardest working one - why don't you take a big pay cut? For the good of the company of course).

That's what people don't take well.

It's amazing this still has to be explained.
I didn’t think they were humorous. If that was the intention, I question the moral baseline of those who wrote them and those that find them funny.

To me they looked bleak, depressing and evocative of a culture that views giving respect to other people as an annoyance that needs an app to make it go away.
Seeking our future in the deep past
Also, factors like quality, maintainability, performance, etc are open ended and hard to measure. So teams tend to just keep improving them. Some amount is critical, some is important, some is nice to have and some is just excess.
Ads are linked in the article, I believe the "schlub" is shown in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m0MoYKwVTM
Fifth frame from the bottom, I misunderstood it to be about workers themselves.
Creating a LLM-as-a-Judge That Drives Business Results
In my experience a lot of hiring in those big or publicly traded companies is to "build the structure to get promoted".

When you're big, investors and banks and auditors don't like flat structures with a lot of individual contributors. A vertical structure is a must to go public. The rest is people playing the game they're forced into.
You may also like lcamtuf's current thingy, a substack

https://lcamtuf.substack.com/
Is that because "AI" use cases are a joke ?
I'm a libertarian in most things but I still don't like layoffs from profitable companies.

Like it's probably not good for our society that people have to up end their life every few years and probably move to find a new job.

Both my parents stayed in the same
job for their careers and it meant they could stay in the same place, have kids, build ties to the community, etc. Seems important if you want to not die out as a society.
The other reason to fire them is that their services are no linger needed (ie a layoff)
Nothing else I've taken so far has changed my life in such an immediate and drastic manner. It's why I'm all over these threads in a desire to help dispel misinformed social-media fueled FUD. There are legitimate concerns to be had, but what most people repeat even on HN are downright Facebook meme quality level.

That said...

For me, I went from 276lbs to 162lbs at my lowest in about 9mo on Tirzepatide (Mounjaro/Zepbound). 85% of the loss was in the first 100 days. I was putting in all the effort I possibly could aside from taking the drug, but I attribute the drug for most of my actual long-term success. It made things I had tried to do in the past (eating healthy, eating properly sized portions, regulating my snacking/late night binges, drinking) much easier. I call it a PED for dieting. Losing the weight also made exercising at first tolerable, and these days downright enjoyable and something I look forward to on training days.

Since I hit my lowest I have put on about 25lbs of lean muscle mass by hitting the gym for resistance training at a regular consistent schedule. When you see the results I did so rapidly in one direction, it's highly motivating to know you can "put in the work" and see results in the other. I'm now about 187lbs at 5'11" with a body fat percentage of just under 12% from my latest DEXA scan. I plan to try to stabilize at around 11% or so, since the studies on it show 12% is where the major long-term health benefits start to accrue. After that I will begin to focus on increasing my VO2MAX (e.g. cardio fitness) as much as possible. I'll be at 2 years from starting Tirzepatide this coming March.

The drug in combination with lifestyle changes can work wonders. I am but one example, and not much of an outlier at this point.

I used to worry about "outing" myself when I first started taking it, but after seeing the results I did and having friends ask me what the hell I was doing to see such success I realized I could no longer pretend it was "eating less and moving more" - I didn't want to be part of the problem.

Hope it helps someone reading this!
is this the same wizard as the wonderful wizard of oz?
I believe this is the ad being described by GP: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRwkZWowI8o
Was that the same scene where he said "Their failure is my fault...for trusting them."?

I just about had to change my underwear after that scene.
Considering how horrible the job market is right now, four months of pay may not go very far.
He had my attention until he posted that mind-numbingly generic Ubuntu ad. Most people would tune that out in seconds.

I’m kind of glad Apple is putting a touch more flavor in their ads.
> That's true if you need to clean up temporary files every night or make a backup.

Making a backup is usually reserved for the quietest hours of the morning, so that it does not compete as much for resources with the normal operation of the system; in my experience, the quietest hour is usually around 4:00 local time.
Sam may be talented in other areas but HW, chips, and infrastructure is obviously not his forte and he should probably delegate discussion on this topic to someone who knows what they are talking about.
Yeah. Somehow I get a different ad
Spoofed and Randomized are not the same thing. Spoofing implies you are deliberately copying another machine’s MAC address in order to appear as that machine to the network.
I like Ubuntu but agree that this post would've been better off without the comparison. Let's just ignore it.

The Apple Intelligence ads really are sending a terrible message. Humanity needs more honesty, not a higher pile of lies.
And then you validate against Microsoft's default `ClockSkew` of 5 minutes.
The article has links to all the mentioned videos.
Desktop Gaming segment is the ignored child
Take note, Rust.
This is the kind of ad people take issue with. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRwkZWowI8o / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0k4VVgmuNvU / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dD0rUo1wZds

Or a similar crash detection feature in iPhone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWBFF9R3VmU / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsAL36M8bwE
In this market, 4 months definitely isn't enough to find a similar job.
Just be rigorous with your words.
The parent comment's mention of the IARC list is completely irrelevant. IARC doesn't have anything to do with the EPA.

Edit: Prior to it being edited, the comment I responded to here posed the question to the original IARC comment of whether the EPA could ban red meat due to it classified as a carcinogen by IARC.
I got a 4k 32" IPS monitor years ago and was never really happy with it for similar reasons. Scaling never felt right, 2x is like basically using 1080p and fractional never looked good or had issues (in linux). Now I have a giant curved samsung display which is like two 1440p monitors side by side. There is a new version that is like two 27" 4k monitors side by side and I am just worried I would have the same issue I had before... I kind like being able to see my pixels :)
While still titling it “A message from Drew”
I think this is mostly just a problem of not having good reasons to sell AI products to consumers in the first place.

I recently saw some Ray Ban Meta glasses ads.

One of them had a guy ask the glasses to describe what was in front of his face, and then he remarked “wow that’s accurate” (there are people skateboarding). The guy wasn’t blind. His use of the glasses made little sense.

Another ad has a young man asking his glasses how to dress for fall and then blindly following the suggestions like they’ve never dressed themselves before. It was embarrassing to watch.

A third ad has someone ask their glasses how to decorate for a disco theme party, and then they implement the very mediocre suggestions.

None of these things required AI, it’s just kind of “there”, and companies are like “idk maybe people will use our AI to like… dress themselves? or something?”
Sometimes I think that tech world has been after "growth" for too long. Instead accepting that at some point companies are reasonably mature. After which they can do more incremental development with lot less head count growth.
US salaries are quite a lot more; lifestyle creep is a thing but at least for developers they get paid a lot more than the average worker in the US than say in the Europe. Factoring that, 4 months is amazing.
Not necessarily.

If you're actually good at your job, you typically end up with an even better job: https://hbr.org/2018/10/research-when-getting-fired-is-good-...
I'd really like to hold onto the belief that "make lying easier" doesn't speak to the everyman for just a little bit longer please.
It's just a very standard ad. A lot better than these horrible ads from Apple, though.
That’s such a naive take. For the past 5 years at least these layoffs are not about particular projects being discontinued or even improving the bottom line. This is about how people are expendable and their priority is investors.
Haaretz Investigation: Intelligence Operation Collected Information on Strava
https://archive.is/K6F1h
BMI is a shit metric and must be taken with a grain of salt.
If you take a not so tall person with a large muscle mass and sub 10% body fat, you can still end up in the severely overweight / obese range.

Because muscle is way more dense than fat, and we should factor in for bone mineralization and bone weight in those who do resistance sports as well.

So take BMI = kg/m2 with precaution, as there better metrics such as waist-to-height ratio.
I think it's pretty safe to assume it's regions that fall under the GDPR (or equivalent).
Well, we’ll build all sort of APIs for LLMs to plug into.
I can rephrase it for you.

It's annoying to find a notary and pay for their services to attest that I'm not doing something.
What benefits does uv have over poetry?
>That means in NYC you’d get to work at 13:00 and go home at 21:00,

Fine.. so I'm going to have a teleconference with a company in NYC. Due to what you wrote above I now have an idea of what UTC time window to plan for - after all, I want to be able to reach them during their working hours.

Then on Friday I have to schedule a teleconf with a company in Japan. When do they work, relative to UTC? You forgot to add that, so I have to find it somewhere.

Hm, wouldn't it be nice if my computer could keep track of the working hours everywhere in the world. Let's make a database of that.. There's just one issue: How is this any better than using the timezone system we already have? Using that, I can figure out the local time in those places, and I can safely assume that they'll at least be working from around 09:00 local time. Having to instead keep track of their working hours relative to UTC doesn't seem like much of an improvement to me.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-11/study-the...

I think the only way to not be aware of this trend is to be american
The Nasdaq crash in 2000 started with semiconductors like ASML underperforming and dropping 20%.

We are in a very bad situation due to global wars, excess COVID money (a lot of which went to rich people who pumped up the stock market) and an energy crisis induced by sanctions and the Nordstream terrorism act. No company in Germany will buy expensive CPUs, they barely survive. Global revenue matters ...
Wow, the price list at the bottom of that Altair article: $439 for the computer (in kit form), $262 for the 4K word memory board, $124 for the serial teletype board, and $1500 for the teletype terminal. The terminal is twice as much as the rest put together!
Often they target the lowest performers for such layoff. Of course they rarely succeed in doing that, but the idea is that these people should have been let go anyway but weren’t for various reasons.
Your post was in reply to a note about sanctions.

There is a difference between "explaining actions" and "justifying actions".
Fair point. Let's look at profits then. Net profit margin across the S&P500 is 12%, a YOY increase.
For context, Drew Houston's total compensation for the year in 2023 was $1.5M:

> According to our data, Dropbox, Inc. ... paid its CEO total annual compensation worth US$1.5m over the year to December 2023. That's a notable increase of 34% on last year

via https://finance.yahoo.com/news/heres-why-dropbox-inc-nasdaq-...

Even if Drew took minimum wage, that would save ~15 jobs assuming $100K all-in comp (which seems low to me for a tech salary). 500 employees is more like $50M/year, and probably more.

Of course, Drew Houston's net worth is ~$2B and he could technically loan Dropbox Inc money personally to save the jobs, my guess is a lot of his net worth is actually Dropbox stock that he would have to liquidate and would affect the stock price materially. He would also need to follow insider trading laws too and can't just up and sell vast amounts of stock on a whim. Most executives are on pre-approved schedules to sell any stock to avoid triggering insider trading.

The severance package Dropbox is offering is pretty good - 16 weeks of pay + an additional week for each year of tenure, impacted employees get their Q4 equity vest & prorated bonuses, everyone keeps company devices, an offer for extra time + help for people on visas, and job placement help for everyone.

Dropbox is a public company that is profitable, but not really growing through their flagship product. No growth is more or less bad on Wall Street. They also haven't really had a major hit since their initial file-sharing product and missed some shots they probably should have hit (mainly vs. Notion with Dropbox Paper, Mailbox acquisition, etc). With many systems moving away from "files" and to "cloud objects" like Figma, Notion, etc, their workhorse product might be going away over time too. They need the time and focus to find that next S-growth curve.

Layoffs suck and no one wants to do it, but sometimes it's needed to save the ship.
> lie about remembering an acquaintance’s name.

That's a heck of a reach. Is it also a lie if I ask my partner what someone's name is when I forget?

The email writing one is pretty innocuous as well. Grammarly has been running basically the same ad for the last 5 years.

I agree the others are not so great.
when the largest company in the world is telling you that lying is the main sell of AI....i guess lying is the new honesty in 2024? smfh lmfao
> No, it's because you can get the same result, plus other ancillary benefits, by simply stopping the behavior causing the issue.

And people who are 5'7" can dunk basketball if they "simply" jump higher.
I miss the laptops from Toshiba. Decent price and very reliable, easy to upgrade.
I guess this is a response to pg_duckdb which had its initial release last week: https://github.com/duckdb/pg_duckdb
Love the competition though. Looking forward to trying both of them when they are in RDS.
I think they are referring to the "Apple Watch Series 7 911 ad".

I think they are correct in their use of "literally".
Surely they're one and the same. By explicitly stating that someone is not liable, you're indirectly defining more the set of people who are liable.
> I’ve been off of it for nearly a month and I’ve kept off the weight so far.

Unfortunately, evidence so far seems to show sustaining weight after discontinuing GLP-1 RAs isn't very common
I don't completely disagree with your take, but people in this world have it pretty good. Most of the employees being laid off were taking home good paychecks for years. They had good benefits and they paid into retirement. According to the article, the company is going to pay on average around $125,000 in severance per employee.

Contrast this with the staff member at a university making $40,000 a year that gets laid off with little notice and no severance. Or the guy working in manufacturing that gets laid off because a major customer changed distributor so the company has to reorganize. Those are people having their lives upended.
From TFA:

> "So my approach to AI right now is I will basically ignore it because I think the whole tech industry around AI is in a very bad position," Torvalds added, "however, it seems like there is almost too much AI BS around for the Fin to tolerate."

That last bit doesn't look like a quote from Linus at all, but editorializing about him, so it shouldn't be in quotation marks.

And of course, being a Finn, it's hard to believe he'd ever misspell that word.
Kestrel does ASP.Net very quickly, because that's all it does. If you want a full web server, that does things like static files, SSL, Reverse Proxying, etc. then you want IIS at the very least sitting in front of it.

See https://stackify.com/kestrel-web-server-asp-net-core-kestrel... - comparison table 3/4 of the way down.
Got anything for India's new rules against recurring charges? So many of our customers in India are having a very hard time paying us with credit cards because their banks no longer are allowed to accept subscription charges.
What I've found is that the capabilities of LLMs depend on the problem solving skills of the person writing the prompts. If you know exactly what needs to be done and can translate that into step-by-step prompts it can do pretty much anything, but if you're looking for it actually solve 100% of the problem you're going to run into issues. Which is to say you still need to find the solution but you just have the LLM do the monkey work.
They’re not having to turn away people at the hospital because it’s full of obese people.
> Unless you’re doing some fairly exotic things where you’re finding yourself saying things like

>> Oh yeah the OCR on Japanese driving licenses pops out things like “平成 8”, that’s just how they sometimes say 1996 over there. That’s why we have this in the parser: eras = { "大正": 1912, "昭和": 1926, "平成": 1989 }

>> One of these days we’ll need to add "令和": 2019, but it hasn’t come up yet.

Taiwan also uses the ROC calendar[1] which is directly descended from the regnal calendars of imperial china.

But it's quaint that the Japanese name their year after one person, while us enlightened westerners simply use a calendar where it's simply the 2024th year of the, erm, hmmmph...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_China_calendar
Apple also shows while Canonical tells.

The average person doesn't care about an animation of a terminal or a chip with 3d composited "Performant" or "Secure" text. They care about "what can this thing do".
Speed, compatibility, ergonomics, standards compliance.
This article is a prime example of why tech literate people aren’t inherently strong marketers for tech.

What does the Ubuntu ad say to the user? How does it capture someone’s attention? None of the ad tells me why this is something worth paying attention to versus other distros or OSs, it doesn’t even tell me it’s about the OS at all unless I already know what Ubuntu is.

Contrast with the Apple ads that tell you exactly what they want in the same time frame. Apple ads have always been tongue in cheek, and have always had a portion of people rubbed the wrong way because they took it too literally.

But at the end of the day, barring the few missteps like the crush ad, they seem to work for the target audience.

I find a lot of technical folk seem to struggle with “I don’t like it therefore it must be bad” and would have failed basically any media analysis class in college as a result. Similarly, the author falls into the “I like Ubuntu and this ad” and hasn’t stopped to think about how it plays to anyone but himself. It’s a really self centered outlook and one that means they’d never be able to market to others.
https://archive.ph/PRZdB