skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>People in apartments usually have an assigned parking space, often covered. All you need to provide is a 240v outlet like a clothes dryer uses. Car owners can bring their own chargers.

That sounds like rich apartments. Most apartments I've seen don't have assigned parking, or adequate parking for guests. Covered parking is extra, even in the hottest parts of the US. Tenants don't have anywhere to plug in. Don't take my word for it. Go take a tour of basic apartments in your area with a realtor and see how many of them can support more than like 5 EV cars. I think you will find that all of them cannot support mass adoption of EVs.

You're talking about installing megawatts worth of cabling for EVs that nobody wants as if it's already done or trivial to do. Even if you did it, the additional fire hazard is nothing to scoff at. State Farm (the insurance company) decided that EV charging was too dangerous for its parking garages. Who are we to tell them that they are wrong about the risks?

You might be somewhat right about this being a chicken/egg problem. It goes all the way back to the power plants that cannot produce enough power for EVs. This conversion to EVs, if it ever happens, will need decades to unfold. It could easily be disrupted by developments in synthetic chemical power such as hydrogen. In any case, whining about manufacturers and consumers not going in directions that don't work for them is a non-starter. EVs are at present luxury items that only work for people who can shape their lives around charging requirements.
Seems like a hiring problem, not a firing problem.
> Why do line managers want this info? Do you think they have someone in mind for promotion, and they are looking for metrics of accomplishment?

Nah, you don't need to assume malice :)

Most times it was managers with good intentions, not realizing that those metrics were either pointless (e.g. how much code / commits does $person do), or toxic, in the sense that it leads the team to game metrics, that it prevents the manager to actually understand why the values are what they are, that it opens the risk to link them to promotions and perf reviews etc.

Explaining them all this was generally enough!

> And, cynically, I would say that senior managers don't care... because to them, most hands-on engineers/devs are fungible. What is your view about why the upper levels never ask for it?

Actually that wasn't the case. AFAIK (I left at some point, but kept a bit in touch with former colleagues) upper management started using some of those metrics to set organizational objectives.

Again, same argument. You don't need to assume malice. Management has a legit interest in engineering productivity. What happens most of the time is that they don't know how to measure it in an effective way, or how to use it to drive organizational change. Providing guidance is part of your job as a Platform eng.
Fellow (house) dancer here and couldn't agree with you more. Luckily, however, I recently relocated to London and though I rarely stay out late these days, I did go to a venue called Fabric and I bring this because there's a policy (moderately enforced) of "no phones" and in fact, prior to entering, they will place little stickers on camera lens. Of course, some individuals will inevitably whip out their phones to capture a video or photo, at which point an (disguised as civilian) employee will demand that they put their phone away. So again, moderately enforced.

All that is to say, dance in clubs still exists...just rare to find.
No it isn't. Users should rate in good faith, but honestly and correctly. The score will retain more value if they do. There is a lot that is commonly wrong with Uber drivers:

1. If they have a phone GPS, odds are 80% that it's mounted in a hazardous way or not at all.

2. They play hideous music and should just be silent instead.

3. They take non-urgent and prolonged calls while driving.

4. On rare occasions, some drive dangerously.

All of these are good reasons to not give the highest score.
I don't give a shit whether the workers are asking for "too much", whether they've got a cushy desk job, whether they want to eat avocado toast and drive a nice car. Everyone's entitled to whatever they can bargain for. Applying some kind of value judgement to it is doing ownership's work for free.
I agree with the premise that numbers aren't a replacement for actually knowing what's going on, I think there's a false equivalency the author has that if you're a manager wanting metrics on your people that it's because you don't know what's happening.

Metrics are like supporting arguments for a whatever narrative a manager is telling. I've used employee metrics to help support the case for promotion or supporting my case to HR for why they should be fired (I've never fired someone because of metrics). It reinforces observation. The time metrics get toxic is when a manager starts telling ICs their performance is their metrics. A whole host of bad things happen then.

And if you're telling me bad managers will suddenly become good managers if you take away their employee metrics, you've got a surprise coming.
Show HN: Happy Inbox – Privacy First Gmail Cleanup
Hey HN,

I have always been one of those who finds it very hard to maintain a clean inbox. Two main issues stood out: first, Gmail doesn’t make it easy to identify the biggest space hogs, and second, deleting large quantities of emails isn’t intuitive. I realized that inbox cleanup could be much simpler with the right approach.

Problem with existing solutions: When I looked for tools to solve this, I found they were either pricey or selling user data to third parties. For me, email holds some of my most sensitive personal data, so data-sharing was an absolute dealbreaker. Plus, Gmail cleanup is usually done periodically, so paying monthly fees wasn't convincing enough.

What Happy Inbox does differently: Happy Inbox organizes emails by volume. For example, if you have 1,800 emails from "Amazon Promotions," we group them in a “1500+” bucket, making it easy to delete all with a single click or selectively choose what to remove. This feature gives users clear insight into their top space consumers and an efficient way to clean up, all while prioritizing privacy. So you can check once in a while and clear out your top space cloggers and easily get back your inbox space. Easy-Peasy!!

Our journey so far: We launched Happy Inbox four months ago and have grown organically helped people worldwide delete over 6 million emails, showing just how much inbox clutter people are dealing with!

We’d love to hear your feedback and any ideas for improvement. Try it out here: www.happy-inbox.com
“Hire to fire”. Not a new idea. I have been hearing it for at least 5 years now.
> While I wholeheartedly support their legal right to organize, I am not required to celebrate at the cynicism of attempting to undermine faith in democracy to win a better job

I’m not gonna support your cynical anti-union, anti-worker policy of blaming everything on the part of the workers while dismissing the management side with a “I don’t doubt it”.

Two can play this game.
The judges will rule swiftly and for the betterment of democracy. I expect zero support of any consequence for election denying maggots.
Jobs Killed Music DRM – Why Not Movies?
Modus: code-first intelligent APIs powered by WebAssembly
Cheaper by $1
Need middleware libs that react to eBPF data and signal app code to scale up/down forks in their own memory VM, like V8

Kubernetes is another mess of userspace ops tools. Userspace is for composable UI not backend. Kube and Chef and all those other ops tools are backend functionality being used like UI by leet haxxors
> Like do you even have any union negotiation experience?

I spent 3 years working for a professional union negotiator. I don't know everything, but I feel like I have a bit more insight into how the sausage gets made.
Dammit! Did I forget to forget him? Seems pretty memorable to me, and I'm just a regular dev.
>>The default for the US is "at-will employment", which means that your employer can fire you at any time, no reason needed.

>> That seems... fine? In most transaction neither party needs to give "just cause" to terminate a contract.

You like having a sword over your neck at all times that an employer can just swing and take away your salary and your health insurance for any reason at all?
NeXT and Apple are stories of a founder bulldozing ahead with a vision, his coming and going coinciding with the respective companies’ high and low tides. The discussions around a “thing” are framed in the context of the of the thing, the founder, and one or more people who happen to be involved (the storyteller, scribe). No thing is ever discussed in isolation without the founder, and it’s always the scribe who tells that story. You will hardly ever come across a pivotal story about NeXT or Apple without the founder being mentioned as a key figure in that story, to the point that it’s their decision as to how that story ends.

The point? The thing is meaningless. It’s the story of the founder’s reaction and the cause and effect of the founder’s choices. The thing has no gravity in and of itself. It’s meaning entirely created and destroyed by the founder.

In the case of NeXT, it is literally the company rising and falling with the presence of the founder. The weight of any thing immediately diminished with founder’s departure. Nothing remained.

We shall see what happens with Apple. It may attain a new founder, or it may not.
Spotting AI Cheaters in Remote Tech Interviews
Tamarind Bio (YC W24) is hiring a founding engineer to scale bioML infra (SF)
They were asking the wrong questions. "Was your planning effective?"; that's a stupid question.

Instead ask the team: (1) Are you happy overall? (2) Are you happy with your manager? (3) How is the current big project progressing? (4) How is the quality of the work being done on the project?

The first 2 questions cover intra-team dynamics. If everyone is personally happy, and happy with the manager, who cares about planning efficiency?

The last 2 questions help the company judge the team as a whole. If a team always indicates good progress and high quality, but then delivers late and with poor quality, you can judge that the team is incompetent and hire/fire/train as needed. Judging the overall value of what the team produces is for the higher-ups at the company to judge.

I'm guessing you got asked 1000 times about planning efficiency, and, maybe like, 2 times about these other questions?
I just installed the reader extension for this feature and can't wait to see if it's useful (I dearly hope so, though). IMO, a fundamental area I'd like LLMs to be used in is the consolidation of all scientific knowledge. As it stands, there are thousands of papers being published every month and it's getting pretty difficult to keep track of everything, even in my specific field, by my own measly self.
This is written as an indictment of Perf Review process. I think it is an indictment of most managers. Where possible, they should be axed and replaced with software. There are way more "evil" or "useless" managers than you'd think.
> Hacker News handles a huge amount of traffic to dynamic pages with basically zero (by comparison) technical maintenance.

Hacker News isn't exactly the kind of website for many millions of Internet users to engage with. Its interface and features work well for the kind of niche it serves, which is much smaller compared to many other websites. HN (at least the user-facing parts) seem to run on mostly the same code for years, where NYT likely needs to build many interactive, one-off features for the flavor of the day topic.

> Twitter (though not doing well as a business) was overloaded with tech employees.

I read this a lot and maybe it has a truth to it, though I remember before the Great Layoff of 2023 there was a time when Twitter was trying (and AFAICT often failing) to grow its business. One example is that they've tried (and failed) short-form videos way before Tiktok started. Today's Twitter seem to be in maintenance mode, and operates with less people.

Maybe it was 'overloaded' in the sense that it was the kind of business that could never grow and shrinking it down to the size where it can be profitable and squeezing it hard was the way to go, that I cannot know.
Background: I work as a technical support specialist, originally with no development background. However, with the rapid advancement of AI in recent years, even someone with basic skills like me can build websites with AI assistance. Due to economic pressures, I've been exploring overseas markets to generate additional income through website development.
For previous context, you can refer to my earlier post: [Previous link removed as reference]
Main Points:
After reviewing my experience with previous sites, I've identified these key challenges:

Rushing to develop main features before achieving good rankings
Even with good rankings, low-frequency non-essential scenarios resulted in poor conversion rates

Current Focus:
I'm now experimenting with gaming websites, specifically iframe-embedded mini-games. I've launched 3 gaming sites so far. These are proving to be faster to develop compared to utility websites and quite engaging.
Latest Project:
My newest site (https://sprunkiphase3.online) is a gaming utility platform. It's relatively low-cost to maintain as it primarily uses iframes to embed existing content.
The problem is what it takes to implement that. I've seen companies currently trying to do exactly that, and their demos go like this "ok, give me a prompt for the environment" and if they're lucky, they can cherry pick some stuff the crowd says and if they're not, they sheepishly ask for a prompt that would visit indicate one of 5 environment types they've worked on and include several of the dozen premade textured meshes they've made, and in reality you've got a really really expensive procedural map with asset placement that's worse than if it was done using traditional semi-pre-baked approaches. A deceptive amount of work goes into the nitty gritty of making environments, and even with all of the incredible tooling that's around now, we are not even close to automating that. It's worth noting that my alma mater has game environment art degree programs. Unless you're making these things, you can't easily see how much finesse and artistic sensibility it takes to make beautiful compositions with complementary lighting and nice atmospheric progression. It's not just that nobody has really given it a go— it's really difficult. When you have tooling that uses AI controlled by an artist that knows these things, that's one thing. When they need to make great results every time so players keep coming back? That's a very different task. I've never met anyone that thought it was remotely currently feasible without lacking knowledge of generative AI, game development, or both.

Automating the tools so a smaller workforce can make more worlds and more possibilities? We're already there— but it's a very large leap to remove the human creative and technical intermediaries.
The original Turing test started by imagining you're trying to work out which of two people is a man or woman based on their responses to questions alone.

But supposing that you ran that test where one of the hidden people is a confederate that steganographically embeds a gender marker without it being obvious to anyone but yourself. You would be able to break the game, even if your confederate was perfectly mimicking the other gender.

That is to say, embedding a secret recognition code into a stream of responses works on humans, too, so it doesn't say anything about computer intelligence.

And for that matter, passing the Turing test is supposed to be sufficient for proving that something is intelligent, not necessary. You could imagine all sorts of deeply inhuman but intelligent systems that completely fail the Turing test. In Blade Runner, we aren't supposed to conclude that failing the Voight-Kampff test makes the androids mindless automatons, even if that's what humans in the movie think.
Does it still make sense to have a union while there are jobs? Yes.
> Striking during election week is kind of a crappy move to pull.

That sounds like an anti-union stance to me.

There's no better time to strike than when your opponent can't afford to look bad.
Saved me a click, TY!

France also tried out shorter work week and the articles I read about it implied it was a failure. Maybe it was biased reporting so that the idea wouldn't catch on here, though.
They don’t think RTO is reasonable, which is a completely logical stance to take if you’ve setup your life working from home (esp if it’s hours from the office).
Never, per se?

You can define "take over" in different ways to change the answer. Put yourself into the position of some big customer. Will you change your usage profile to get really cheap electricity, or not? Solar will or won't take over the customer you're thinking of.

Many people don't grasp how cheap solar is becoming. We're close to the point where solar+batteries becomes the cheapest way to provide nighttime power in a few regions, which astonishes me. And the prices of both solar and batteries still drop quickly.
1: i suppose we will have to wait and see whether it was a crappy or smart move.

2: i suspect that it is not the NYT readers who are fretting about media credibility. By definition, they already believe in the system.
I'm not knowledgeable about networking - what's the benefit of having a 1gb lan and a 2.5gb wan? Why not have them both be the same?
It's remote work though, why would they live in NYC.
"Church’s lambda calculus and the Turing machine are equally powerful but differ in the fact that Turing machines use mutable state. To this day, there is a rift between functional and imperative programming languages, because of the separation of Church and state."

[I have known the above quote forever, but I can't find an original source]

edit: might be from Guy Steele: "And some people prefer not to commingle the functional, lambda-calculus part of a
language with the parts that do side effects. It seems they believe in the separation of Church and state"
Since writing this:

* My colleagues Simon Grimm and Will Bradshaw did a much more thorough analysis which ended up in a similar place: https://naobservatory.org/blog/investigating-the-sensitivity...

* I've updated the NAO's simulator to include this data and estimate the effectiveness of different approaches to pathogen detection: https://data.securebio.org/simulator/

* We've done some sample collection and are planning to be out at least weekly this infectious disease season

* We're making the data available in real time at https://data.securebio.org/sampling-metadata/
Manjaro Linux prepares to enable telemetry by default
Creator here. It takes around 30ms to resolve a public key DNS entry on the DHT. After the first resolution, the entry is obviously cached according to the configured time-to-live (ttl).

It's not as fast as regular DNS, 30ms is still very quick.
> It was full of people that when in-office seemed gave the impression of hard-working, largely by a combination of 'face time', and just talking to other employees, and not necessarily about work.

Hahah, we all know these people! They walk around the office, sometimes carrying a clipboard or stack of paper, initiating business-y conversations, always making sure they look very serious and busy, deliberately walking past the boss's office frequently so he can see them visibly DoingSeriousBusiness. When promotion time comes around, these social butterflies are always at the top of the list, because naive managers see them buzzing around everywhere, and they at least think they know that these guys are constantly doing work.

These people were panicking during COVID and WFH. Their entire self-promotion vector disappeared overnight.

Now that most companies have returned to in-person work, these hall-walkers are back and once again getting promoted based entirely on their presence and visibility.
Did you stop reading there and not the subsequent sentence?

>Getting fired is disruptive to someone's finances that some notice/severance would be justified
Crumb has been living in a small village in the south of France since the 90's.

In the "Crumb" doc he says something along "They're all wearing baseball hats. I'm getting out of here.", speaking about the US.

He also laments having taken too much LSD.
Agreed - what I tried to highlight through a series about people that have contributed significantly, but are not so well known outside of the fields they impacted, there is always cooperation to a large extent and others involved - rarely a lone individual as the Turing movie and much of the press in the UK likes to portray. And many people, who should be known, get lost in the complexity of history. It's worth bringing the attention of this to a wider audience - people are genuinely inquisitive. Plus as another example, on an intro course to AI 45 out of 52 bachelor students had never heard of Church!
I dont know you or anything about the product, but before revamping, go get ten more sales. sales. sales.

this is coming from an engineer with adhd :)
Lessons from 10 Years of Writing
Back to the future: Writing 6502 assembler with Amazon Q Developer
Show HN: Convert any website into a React component
Hey HN, we built a Chrome Extension (https://www.magicpatterns.com/extension) that converts a snippet of any website to an isolated React component.

Demo video: https://youtu.be/hutUYDkyE_A

How it works: 1) Iterate through each node in the selected DOM tree, 2) For each element, find any matching CSS selectors / inline styles, 3) Use window.getComputedStyle to get the deterministic values, 4) Construct JSX

It was pretty hard producing the minimal code necessary while maintaining the same visual look. To do this, we implemented things like abstracting out global styles, removing inherited styles, pulling out SVGs, deleting styles with no effect, and condensing styles into their shorthand properties.

We dive into each of those optimizations here for fun: https://www.magicpatterns.com/blog/any-website-to-react-comp...

One of the main reasons we cared so much about condensing down the styles was not only to make it more human-readable, but also to reduce context length for an LLM, so that you can iterate on it with AI. Our extension has a “convert” option that lets you convert the output to Tailwind, Shadcn, or Chakra UI using an LLM. You can also export to Figma.

We're frontend engineers and we built the extension because our core product (https://www.magicpatterns.com/) helps software teams prototype their product ideas. And a huge pain point for users is getting their existing designs into our product, so that they can reference them to generate UIs with their existing aesthetic.

The extension allows you to get existing design context from any website, even localhost. Since launch, the extension has more than 3,000 users and interestingly is most popular in Japan.

Here's some real examples if you're curious what the final output looks like:

A) Hacker News Navbar - https://www.magicpatterns.com/ac9f38e4-5ef0-49e5-8b80-dbc429...

B) ChatGPT Welcome Screen - https://www.magicpatterns.com/7cb3ad12-cb12-4a5b-b32b-eda04d...

C) Cal.com Calendar Component — https://www.magicpatterns.com/a43bac78-134d-458d-8107-811ac7...

D) Stripe.com logo section - https://www.magicpatterns.com/deff1793-7a05-42fe-97f7-945976...

If you have an opinion about the extension, we’re all ears! You can try it for free at: https://www.magicpatterns.com/extension
Excellent insight!

Metrics are useful, but only with context. Any metrics reported at skip level by definition lack context: there's no ground-level engagement or time to dig into details. Ergo, the reported numbers are understood as the only numbers.

With the exact solution you offered! Use them, but only at the level in which additional context is available, then report up new numbers that allow for enriching / adjusting the base numbers.