skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Crontributing

This is probably just a typo, but I love the unintentional pun. A wiki was called that because it allowed quick edits by its users. Crontributing to this site takes much more time...
The reason is that most developers have no clue and/or no interest about performance, and so they only optimize where there's a user-visible problem, which means that the program will consume resources proportional to speed of the developer's machine.
Does your IR temp gun accurately measure a shiny stainless steel surface?
Actually, you've reinforced my point.
Those examples are, as you said, high-level executives, not software engineers.

While office politics has always existed, it used to remain within the context of engineering.

You mention Apple, Steve Jobs was the business person/visionary. But Steve Wozniak, the engineer behind Apple, actually made it very clear he doesn't like nor want to participate in politics or business tricks.
I left tech (C# developer for a partner reselling/customising the MS XRM/Dynamics CRM platform in the UK a few years ago to get my HGV (CDL in the US?) license and drive trucks.

Honestly, I love it, generally I talk to the office to get my route/keys at the start of the shift and I won’t talk to them again until the end of my shift.

Money wise I’m earning more (but working longer/more “antisocial” hours) and I like when I drop my keys off I don’t have to think about work until my next shift, no emails while I’m off with “just one quick thing” I can genuinely enjoy not working.

Made the change probably 2 years ago now, and lucked into a decent company who take on new drivers (most places want 1-2 years experience for insurance purposes) who I’ve been with since I started.
The landscape is a little different over in Australia. Most of the Big Four are closing as many branches as they can. Branches are no longer a mover or shaker, because most Australians never touch cash anymore. [0] Most transactions are digital.

Almost as many people pay with card as with phone.

Faster record systems, faster transfers, actually do win people over here.

[0] https://www.rba.gov.au/publications/bulletin/2023/jun/cash-u...
The Apollo guidance computer had 4 kilobytes of core memory and took humans to the moon.
Uhhh… you might need to work on your reading comprehension skills, or are you projecting something on to me?

Why would I be ‘salty’ about anything anyone does in Hanoi?

It seems clear that many people in Hanoi are benefitting enormously, which is pretty much a total positive, except for some possibility of inducing corruption elsewhere.
While developing the syntax for a programming language in the early 80s, I discovered that allowing spaces in identifiers was unambiguous, e.g., upper left corner = scale factor * old upper left corner.
Cuba also has the largest medical school in the world, specifically set up to train foreigners: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_American_School_of_Medic...

It's tuition-free and the state provides room and board. Part of the admission criteria is that you have to be from an underprivileged community and you take an oath to go back to serve that community.

They have accepted folks from poor parts of the US, as well.
take it easy, pal. consultants at least those in corps don't sell themselves they are being sold.
Seismologists Solve Mystery of How Concertgoers Shake Things Up
With a database you can lock down the schema. In reality though, many data system are composed mainly of people emailing in Excel spreadsheets. Good luck enforcing any sort of schema there.

My day job is writing a desktop/file-based ETL system. I have just added in a schema version feature to cover these sort of issues. It was one of the most requested features, because most people aren't able to control the schemas of the data they receive.
How do you figure? The profit motive isn't a factor when nationalized. Where would the waste come from?
I think the opposite is true! What bigger waste is there than profit? Schumpeter agrees with me.

It would be different, of course, if intel were the bleeding edge of innovation.... but that hasn't been true for about twenty years. Maybe longer.
On mine, it shows about 30 MB, which is less than this HN thread. I don't see the right-click hijacking either. Am I missing something?
Slack is not a good example of a performant electron app (or, perhaps if it is, that is quite damning praise). I should never be able to type faster than it can put characters on screen...
Whenever I think about automation, I, of course, think about having toddlers in the house.

Toddlers are a transient disruption to the household logistics operation. They induce novel challenges. Their clothes are have different form factors, and may be dirtied in novel and interesting ways. Their nutritional demands are only partially-overlapping with the preexisting household diet. They introduce hundreds of small toylike objects into the environment. Even their dishware is smaller, flimsier and more numerous, disrupting any existing dish-washing workflows. And the development (or purchase) of permanent solutions to these problems is in some sense wasteful because the toddlers will stop being toddlers before too long, and you will have to pivot again.

The holy trinity of washer, dryer, dishwasher solves a relatively high percentage of household labor but the tail is very long. The purpose of the above digression on toddlers is to illustrate that some household labor disruptions are transient and really not worth developing specific solutions to permanently resolve.

This household example is both a true example of the problem and a metaphor for this type of situation which occurs in all human environments. There is always a long tail. There are always changes to processes with knock-on effects that leave gaps in preexisting workflows. And the solution of final resort has always been human manual labor. There are always transient solutions that require transient workarounds. And this long tail is where it will be enormously helpful to have humanoid form factor robots. This is true for exactly the same reasons that a young parent would appreciate having a humanoid robot in the house, to pick up clothes off the floor and fold clean ones, gather up toys and put them in their appropriate storage bin, and clean the table and floor and nearby walls (and possibly ceiling) after meals.
I think there's another explanation as well, and it's also the reason why "running the government like a business" makes no sense even if private industry can be more efficient.

Companies are profit driven entities and at the end of the day can look at net profit and see if it's positive or negative. This doesn't guarantee efficiency, but it gives you a pretty simple success metric that you can then work to tie everything else back to. This is a major oversimplification, but government doesn't even have that basic starting framework. Government functions cost money, but generally produce no direct monetary profit that can be measured against their cost. Of course government produces other outcomes, but since those outcomes are not monetary, you run into a units problem if you compare inputs and outputs. You can say how many crimes the FBI solves per million dollars of budget, but there's no easy way to measure a "break even" point where you have a net benefit. You can measure relative efficiency (solving more crimes for a given budget), but you can't say what the right target value is.

Even if you could measure government efficiency the same way, the other issue is that companies can improve their efficiency by just stopping inefficient activities to focus on the efficient ones, while government agencies generally do not have that choice. The FBI could probably increase their efficiency by ignoring hard to solve crimes and focusing exclusively on the easy to solve ones, but that's probably not the right thing to incentivize.
Yeah, and if you look at my comments, I agree that Biden won the race as run. I just question the entire legitimacy of counting any of the votes in a rogue election. I don't think rogue elections should happen. The moral hazard is too great, and it's a direct attack on democratic processes.
Thanks. I didn’t do a good job of listening to what the new director wants when we met. Frankly I was (understandably, I think) concerned for my career, and asked things mostly related to myself. I should’ve planned the conversation better. It’s unfortunate that a 30 minute conversation like that can establish a first impression that’ll be hard to get rid of.

I think he will most likely be named the new director of both my current team and my manager’s other team, which will make him my skip either way. They drafted an hiring req for the position that seems especially tuned to him. Any thoughts on how I might repair things?
I don't really have an opinion about the man outside of "growing a business", but how on earth does this benefit him? I don't know where on earth you got "authority" from as i didn't invoke this concept at all.
Microsoft would hire a ton more engineers and look very different if engineer price went to ~zero. So what does that look like? If you can make an app snappy with $100 in GPU time, why wouldn’t they?
Yeah, this one is a really good fit. Already added it to the directory, thanks for the suggestion.
Honestly, your line of questioning is a non-sequitur, because I don't question the election results. I question the election itself. There is no doubt in my mind that Joe Biden had enough votes in the contest as run. I just think the contest is not a legal election since they didn't follow the law.

As I've said elsewhere, it's as if I put a ballot box outside my house, got enough votes based on my own rules, and then declared whomever got enough votes in my contest the winner. That's great, but for it to be a legitimate election, the law has to be followed.

Again I'm hardly alone in this. Polling shows widespread bipartisan belief that the election was irregular. I'm honestly shocked at how different the mainstream media views are from the everyday person you talk to.
Which begs the question: is Windows' NVIDIA driver even affected by this recent flaw?

Because I don't use my PC to play games and thus don't need anything more than run-of-the-mill graphics acceleration, I'm loathe to download NVIDIA's enormous drivers, which I assume contain extraneous features and utilities that are useless to me.
I'm not a consultant/contractor, I have a fixed salary and have been an employee here for over 20 years.

But wouldn't it better for both consultant and customer to agree regular "gates". Agree on $100k of work for 10 units of work or whatever, but agree that it's paid in instalments of $10k every time each milestone is passed, ensuring that any misunderstandings are understood sooner.

The customer would benefit in that they don't have to wait 3 months to get a waterfall delivery which perhaps meets the spec, but not their requirement

The consultant benefits in that they don't do 3 months of work and don't get a penny until the customer is happy
This is a best-of comment, and I'm glad I waded through the rest of the dreck in the thread to find it. Thank you.

[Edit] Thinking through your final paragraph a bit more, there are "oppressions" (and I'm putting that in scare-quotes, because I think it's too strong a word; I'd say something like "prejudices" or "restricted opportunities") which some (USA) white people accurately perceive being applied to them. Those are based around class markers (think: what schools someone went to, what accent they have, what body-type they are), not race. Accurately understanding that would require / create an entirely different sociological paradigm.
Defense Mechanisms: Neuroscience Meets Psychoanalysis (2009)
Ask HN: Is it burn-out or the culture pushing me?
As the title says, I am contemplating leaving my current engineering manager job at a mid-size company.

I have been at the job for >3 years and have had some great time shipping software and at the same time seeing the company introduce always-in-flux process after process for the past 2.5 years.

Most of my peers remain hush-hush because everyone feels helpless and there is an insane amount of time spent by line managers to do,
- paper-work(jira and SAFe) to do minor things (we are not even that big an eng org, probably 60-70 people),
- forced retrospectives on each an every defect(minor->major) where saying we missed a test-case is not sufficient,
- forced retrospectives after every sprint that need to be shared across the company in the name of visibility,
- slack-overload,
- Over-coordination in scrum of scrums each day where every change that was committed by all teams is announced to be deployed.
- Design by committee where every feature is discussed and needs to be approved by almost all Directors/VPs and most of the time they ask questions that are already on the document because they have no time to put a deep thought and dedicate time(understandably). So you end up repeating in comments what is already said on the document.
- Lack of appetite to build small and scale without going through a large scale design and architecture review that may or may not result in a feature that the market wants now. Leading to product teams complaining to the CEO and eng leadership not having the backbone to pushback but turnaround and question engineering line managers and engineers decisions to manage conflicting signals from business and eng leaders.

All the while managing the above, I can see my technical skills getting eroded in-front of my eyes because I seldom get time to think deep enough about a problem, provide valuable code-reviews like in the past, have the energy and motivation to have critical analysis and thought on new designs.

At the end of the day when I leave my desk, I am so exhausted that I do not even want to look at a laptop screen, leaving no time for any personal projects/coding exercises.

Discussing with my partner about re-evaluating the need for me to be a manager now that I have been doing for close to 5 years and taking a more hands-on role at another company, although not a full IC. However, she feels I will be stepping back in my career with this step and not a great idea. I am not sure if I seek another manager role at another place, is it going to be similar to where I am at now or is it more to do with the culture at the current place that it is leaving me jaded.

It could also be burn-out or just that I am not adapting well

Looking for some wisdom and excuse me if this feels like rambling.
Because they'd rather spend that $100 in GPU time on adding a new feature. Repeat that a few times and now your app is 10x more complex and costs 1000x more to perf-optimise.
I'm guessing you're on Edge if you're in that predicament; in that case you should check if you can set tracker blocking to "strict". It doesn't work completely like an ad blocker (it doesn't hide broken elements for instance) but that may block loads of unwanted content without needing permission to install addons.
Each page has a 'Edit on GitHub' button. You just need your changes to be approved, so I guess it's like a moderated wiki.
> C is also very small and easy to hold in your head

Mostly true during K&R C days, without taking into consideration C compiler dialects outside UNIX V6.

Already during 16 bit home computer days it was already flexible enough with compiler extensions all over the place, that most folks would fail a pub quiz on C.

Even more so with C23 as current.
Thanks, I hate auth even more now. One reason OpenAI and Anthropic ran laps around the big three is how easy it is to get started with their API endpoints; you get a static token, and off you go. Same reason Cloudflare and Fly.io are an absolute delight compared to AWS, GCP, or Azure.

Sure, it’s a security risk, but this security circle jerking is exactly what I dislike about modern tech. IAM, OAuth, WebAuth—get lost. I just wanna try something out.
Given your tastes in websites, I hope you will be receptive to my attempt at reviving Craigslist's casual encounters:

https://LokiList.com/

Its size in kilobytes varies depending on how many posts are displayed on the front page.
Because features require more human overhead to understand and manage than porting/optimizing does, by assumption of this hypothetical. Product managers and high-level architects aren’t free.
Changed to the blog post from https://pypi.org/project/venvstacks/, since it gives more background. Thanks!
I don’t know how it’s typically done but if I’m taking a fixed cost project as a consultant I’d ask for some portion up front. If you can’t even put up a portion or pay for the first few hours then how are you gonna pay for the actual project? If (not when) it starts making money? Might as well look for a “cofounder engineer” willing to work for equity.
That doesn't feel correct. I think we push the boundaries on hardware because we aspire to scale up computation. If all those aspirational computations were faster we'd still develop faster hardware and have bigger ambitions. Unnecessarily slow software has no redeeming features.
> Nobody can just jump in and add value immediately.

That depends on the project and how much domain knowledge the consultant/contractor has. I've certainly been able to contribute on day 1 on several of my gigs.

> I’ve met rich employees, founders, but not so much independent consultants.

May depend on the market, and what you mean by 'rich'. Consultants rarely get stock, but they often make out far better than employees. I've met very few employees that got anywhere near 'rich' but consultants in London (for example) can certainly become quite wealthy.
Could AI Help Curb Conspiracy Theory Beliefs?
Casey Muratori started a whole educational webseries about this - the fact that hardware is getting faster and faster but the user experience seems to be staying the same.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ge3aKEmZcqY&list=PLEMXAbCVnm...

He also has a "performance-aware programming" series:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ0MF1q_LUE&list=PLEMXAbCVnm...
Large Language Models and the Rationalist-Empiricist Debate
Yes. My family was heavily democrat during the Bush years. Attended protests and the whole thing against the war. Around the time of Obama the family kind of split, and some of us were skeptical (mainly due to illegal immigration and social issues) but some of us liked the health care stuff. Then with Trump, basically everyone got on board.

There are a lot of us. I don't really relate to the Bush GOP at all, and am not even sure what they have in common with the modern one other than some vague tax cuts (democrats do that too every once in a while though, so this is hardly some great conservative idea). I'm happy to see the Bush GOP completely gone. Today's GOP feels much more like the democrat party of the 2000s, which is what I grew up in. Much more working class. More 'rough' around the edges. Anti-corporate, etc (most fortune 500 companies and workers support the democrats, based on donation numbers)

For me the big national issue has always been a refusal to fight unnecessary wars. I admire that Trump started no new wars or engagements (he continued the existing ones, including some escalations, but I'm not a radical pacifist). For me, that alone seals the deal. I just don't believe in fighting stupid wars. I don't care about threats and I don't care about targeted military intervention. I'm not fighting forever wars, where they send boys my age to die (most of whom happen to lean conservative anyway). What a grift. If the Cheneys in the world want to fight wars, I recommend they grab their guns and go!
The assumption of the hypothetical is not that they can deliver any feature, which I consider (maybe you disagree) more open-ended and less automatable than porting and optimization.

If you think that’s an unrealistic assumption, please feel free to propose another!
GeoClue TZ: Privacy-First Linux Location Service
Disaggregated Storage – A Brief Introduction
There is a future where this is within the realm of the possible. All it takes is one good AI capable of doing this which can then be duplicated many times to work on this task. An AI engineer which knows how languages compile down to machine code and understands the intention of the blueprint, which the slow app would be. 5 to 10 years, maybe?

I mean, we currently think in the context of programming languages as written text, but AI has shown that it's capable of doing speech-to-speech "tasks" (for lack of a better word), where tokens are not only present in the form of text tokens, but also audio tokens, which skips the TTS step. It might become able to do video-to-assembly tasks, where it sees what an electron app does, maybe also reads the code, and then knows what needs to be done to convert this into optimized assembly code.
Wheels, developed by copper miners from the Boleráz culture of Slovakia, 3600 BC; as indicated by clay figures of wheeled baskets. This presumably spread east to the indo-european cultures.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.240373 -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baden_culture
yeah. both
> The very second that ML models begin to consistently beat humans at diagnostics, it would be a moral imperative, as well as an absolute requirement by the terms of the Hippocratic Oath, to replace the humans.

Why is HN so brainrot shit at times man wtf. And you're just proving that you're exactly the type of arrogant techbro I was talking about.
I like fp and array programming and logic programming (and the overlap) to solve problems that are (considered or for real; I don't usually know going in) really a bad fit for those and then implement them shorter and faster than in their imperative implementation. For some things it does not work obviously, but it's a really nice exercise for when in the gym, walking, cooking, driving and such; the performant or LoC optimising parts fit in my head so I can do the rewrites there and find ways to make them fit. For instance; going from an imperative piece of code to array programming (k/j), you have to find a way to translate the problem to a vector/matrix manipulation problem and that you can do while doing something else entirely. When you find a good one fit, it can be many, many times faster than the original just like that.
My Excel to the rescue story is the time I worked in a locked down environment with limited access to programming tools but needed to make physics-based simulators.

I made an aircraft flight model that made heat maps of line of sight vectors to the ground as a plane banked and flew its looping flight path over a city. I included an overhead view animation tab by plotting the lat/lon over a scatter plot with a map as a background image and walking over each point via the arrow keys. Wrote some VB to output the image frame to files then stitched them together as a gif. Funny enough it worked great on everyone’s machine except the conference room computer attached to the projector. Turns out it was due to it not having a printer driver installed so some screen inch to pixels system variable wasn’t set.

I did all of the problems in the Fundamentals of Astro dynamics book (BMW) via excel by using the cel copy via mouse drag to perform iteration based calculations.

A co-worker made a complete battlefield simulation in excel that was amazing.

Another shrunk the row and columns cells into pixel size and made some pretty cool looking animations by using cell formatting to turn them on/off with color.

Today, the only modern toolset that would come close to being able to made those examples as quickly would be Jupyter Notebooks. Another tool “professional” coders hate. Maybe Matlab with some costly modules but that breaks down once you leave its linear algebra comfort zone.

I truly hate Microsoft but Excel is an amazing piece of software. Which funny enough started on a Mac.