skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
HN "bros" (in the ugliest sense of the word "bro") showing their sick nature by viciously downvoting a perfectly innocuous comment.

Seems like many of them have nothing better to do, probably because of layoffs and statistics and linear algebra and 'predicting the next token' (hee hee) in the input, based on gigantic corpuses of data, masquerading as "AI", and many of those bros were/are worthless anyway.
It is darkly amusing to me that it took the FDA well over a decade to conclude what was immediately obvious to anyone who has ever tried phenylephrine: that it is not worth taking
Gaslighting the population isn't a road to victory. People have eyes and see reality just fine on their own.

Dial down identity politics. Most people are put off by it, especially when taken to the extreme as has-been the past few years.

It's ok to disagree and/or hate policies of the opposition - but it's not ok to label opposition every *ist word you can think of. This pushes people away.

Stop trying to be "Kingmakers". Harris was anointed by the party's elite class and everyone was told to get in line. People don't respond to that well either.

Lastly - run an actually decent candidate FFS. Literally zero people wanted Harris as the candidate - but Democrats had no other choice but to vote for her in the election. This caused Democrats to suppress their own electorate. Coupled with rhetoric such as "we're saving democracy" etc (see gaslighting above), and the results speak for themselves.
Not really. They dosed rats with amounts that no consumer or even an agricultural worker can receive (120 days of 1.75 mg/kg) and observed no real difference in most of readouts.

And a sidenote, a murine model study with less than 100 specimens in each group is trash-tier, unless the effect is on the level of "We tested it on animals, and none of them survived".
When recording live audio performances, some guarantees that the thread that records the signal will always get some attention for the scheduler, would be nice. Otherwise the recording program will miss on the signal, and the recording will have cracks.

We sidestep this problem because our CPUs are insanely fast for this task, so as long as you don't game, compile and record audio at the same time, you should be fine. But we don't have any guarantees.
I thought they were implementing countermeasures to just grabbing the .apk from the Play store via the web and then sideloading. Like not even using the .apk format any more.
You're not wrong. A Staff Engineer might manage people, but if that were their main desired focus, they probably would have the title Engineering Manager instead.
Thanks for the link. I'm keeping it for future reference. My ideal weather is "slightly warm and slightly humid" all the time. Alas, I live in a place where we have 7 months of winter each year. One day....
Though in principal I love the idea, it would kill backwards compatibility. But maybe each major version revision should have a vote on keeping or removing some older features.
Maybe it's just the Uconnect infotainment system. The PDF I linked above is the in-depth Jeep hack run-down, and a huge huge huge part of it is playing around with the many many many many DBus services.

Is QNX just a kernel, no userland for it? I would have assumed it might include higher level offerings, including I would guess, to be helpful, some cross-system messaging options. Until now it's been impossible to guess. But yeah, it's quite likely this DBus stuff is just Dodge's repurposing of (not fantastic but reasonably ok and well known) messaging tech, DBus, layered atop.
Running out of cash as a result of poor founder business experience, financial mismanagement and ill-defined goals and objectives.
I know you want to promote (synthical.com), but the readability of that site is very poor.
Yes! Government is even funnier.

There’s a whole hierarchy of Assistant, Associate, Deputy Commissioners. Is it better to be a Special Assistant to the Associate Commissioner, or the Assistant Deputy Commissioner?
Interesting, I always naively assumed that those cheap calipers measure distance mechanically, with something like a wheel and an encoder. The actual method is much cleverer.

Also, nitpick: „ I’m stuck in the local optima of …“ should be „optimum“.
This is why we try to keep state as small and isolated as possible.
There's a very long history of trying to establish merit-based selection of government officials in, e.g., china. That's not to say there wasn't a lot of nepotism anyway, but I think it's also undeniable that the state was trying to reduce it, rather than just accepting it as normal and unavoidable.

Nowadays I would also guess that the majority of people across the globe live in societies where nepotism is conceived of as bad. There might still be various amounts of it but people generally tend to discourage or punish nepotism when they can.
In Nethack, there is a command (i think under comma or semicolon) where you stand on an item and it tells you what it is. That is, what the character knows about the item. It helps when I run into an unfamiliar term.

It was quite unexpected that a hatchet is used up after you kill a monster with it and you need to go find another one. Same with boots/mitts, they somehow disappear, and I’m not sure they should. There is no descriptive message to know when exactly this happens, too.
The next parts I vaguely remember: swim _very_ slow past an octopus arms (there's a hint but it's not necessarily clear that you have to be barely moving at all), hit key crystals and then the corresponding ~door crystals, and push a rock to drop and follow after them to avoid getting pushed back by the current.

It's generally a series of puzzles of that form and there's some ~light combat stuff.
As someone who has been a private tutor, the only advantage most kids got was that they passed the class badly instead of failing it. They were not standouts. The kids who are standouts - and I was one of them, which is why I was so recommended - need guidance sometimes, but largely get it on their own (and especially when they have to teach their fellow students - if you can't explain it, you don't really know it). I tutored a few smart students who were just weak in one area and needed to reinforce their basic understanding, but most of them just didn't care about wasting time and money, because it was my time and parents' money. I needed the cash, though. I never lied to parents about potential and I really tried to help. But there's only so much you can do when an ADHD kid won't attend to the lessons, or has some issues with their parents.

One of the things that modern life has messed up is the idea that you should always be happy. No, sometimes you just have to accept that what you are doing sucks, that you will have to power through it, and that's life.
I'll play devils advocate because it's more fun but this:

> The pipeline didn’t record many metrics. The ones it did have made it look like things had gotten worse. My bug discoveries caused the overall bug count to increase. The pipeline’s failures increased because I made it fail fast on anomalies instead of silently passing along bad data.

I understand why the author might think this is better, but all software have bugs and a lot of data is tainted by those bugs. Was fixing the pipeline an actual priority? Was it critical? If so, how were the downstream internal customers dealing with the new exceptions? Why were they not raising a ruckus about it? Why was the author allowed to move on to a different project if there were so many bugs in that pipeline deserving of a promotion?

I have met more people in life that made a big deal out of ultimately unimportant details than the opposite. Internal pipelines usually have a lower bar and the downstream consumer may not even care about 75% of features that are just there and unused. Being a senior engineering is also knowing when to leave good enough alone.

> My other work didn’t look so good on paper either. On several occasions, I put my projects on hold for weeks or even months at a time to help a teammate whose launch was at risk. It was the right decision for the team, but it looked unimpressive in a promo packet. To the promotion committee, my teammate’s project was the big, important work that demanded coordination from multiple developers. If they hornswoggled me into helping them, it’s evidence of their strong leadership qualities. I was just the mindless peon whose work was so irrelevant that it could be pre-empted at a moment’s notice.

Is that conclusion really wrong? It's a bit uncharitable for sure but that is indeed what happened not just how it appeared to have happened. If your project was such a low priority that dropping it for several months does not flash a red light in someone's dashboard, then I am sorry but that does not seem promotion worthy.

The little comic also has good examples that things that imo are not "senior" work. Writing E2E tests for a product that is already shipped is worthwhile, but unless it's something very special it's not complex enough, does not require enough design to be considered "senior work".

Again I don't know the guy, maybe he did get an unfair read on his body of work, but reading the entire blog I mostly get the vibes of "I worked 2 years at Google and then wanted to be a senior so I rushed my promo packet without a cornerstone project" and the committee refusing that is just the system working as intended.
> Same as every other title.

Is this really true? There's usually quite the big difference for line manager vs director, Head of XXX where you operate on much bigger scope, plan budgets, etc.

For ICs it is true that many times "Staff Engineer" is basically the higher pay band for Senior Engineers. But many times from Staff+ you expect them to be able to lead projects or programs, act as an architect and advisor to management. In general bigger scope stuff than just being a specialist in a given technology.
Goddamn there's a lot of comments on this crap...

I didn't realize that I was such a big deal.

I wish there wasn't so much so I might actually read it. It's paralyzing.
I still vaguely remember hearing all the people saying to switch to plastic bags to save the trees. Huge ad campaigns, videos of sad animals and burned down, gutted forests on the TV and news all hours of the day.

25 years later and we are drowning in plastic, carrying it in our brains and gonads, it falls from the sky like rain, it is in the food we eat, our newborn children inherit the plastics from their mothers.

If I were a trickster god or the devil himself I couldn't have come up with a better joke than this.
I honestly think it's on that order, yes. Anyone who has had a respiratory infection, a sinus headache, or seasonal allergies. Anyone who would take NyQuil. Over the course of 18 years. Why is that so hard to believe? In fact, now that I think about it more, it's probably a lot more.
I'm not sure where you're getting the billions in taxpayer cost per rocket. It sounds like to date SpaceX has spent a few billion on the whole program. They did receive a ~$3B contract for Artemis, but as I understand it, that's a fixed rate for delivery of a functional spacecraft, regardless of how many they lose in development.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship

It's also making meaningful progress with each launch. Comparing it to Saturn V seems like apples and oranges. This is a functional full flow liquid fueled rocket and booster at the current stage of development. They've also always been open about an iterative development approach (i.e. blow up more rockets). It's not Saturn V, so I'm not sure why we'd expect the same number of launches during development? Seems like a pretty arbitrary metric.
Tried both before and after updating to the stated version and I see no change: can still see history from more than 14 days ago.

More importantly, why do you jump to the assumption that "Chrome decided to censor" and suggest appeal to the IFF?
That’s not a question about the underlying rules of a fictional work but your perception of how they are created. It’s possible to have a completely well defined fantasy setting with exact rules without the reader being aware of what those rules are or even knowing it’s using well defined rules.

Consider The Martian, early versions where posted online and the author changed what resources the character had to work with at the beginning. So what feels like a creative solution to limited resources was really giving the character exactly what they needed after a solution was found. Only examining a work we can’t distinguish ‘soft’ physics updated as the plot demands from a story based around fixed rules.
Oh yeah especially if you swallow the seeds whole it's totally ok.
It's not enough to strive for people to be reliable and adequate. You need a system that selects reliably for such people. Being groomed for a job from childhood is not reliable enough. Many people will be good enough for the job, but many will not. The problem becomes bigger the higher up you go in the society. Meritocracy won, both in economy and in war, because the people in charge in non-meritocratic societies are too often grossly incompetent.
I like that, but then what is a senior engineer?
Who will be Trump's top military advisor, what is their plan for Taiwan, and will Elon Musk contradict whatever that is?
And when it doesn't work... well, bacteria die all the time. Humans are less tolerant of random death.
People with the “real engineer” chip on their shoulder want to die on this hill.
Yeah its not quite clear.

„Its a thing to paste before your prompt that makes the llm act funny, in this particular style.“

„This particular style“ being the weird schizo markup-infused stuff.

Here is a tutorial: https://x.com/BLUECOW009/status/1831536252480295256
> TLDR: <0.02mm should be possible w/open source using cheap fabs.

What does that have to do with a Fab? Isn’t a fab the thing that creates ICs? PCBs aren’t made in a fab.
Pillars of Dwitter (drawn with 140 characters of Javascript)
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Would love your feedback! DMs open on Twitter: x.com/yacinesir

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A particle on the surface is moving at about 0.1c
Interesting, what are the opportunities to make money from Guyana, it is understood that they have lots of oil and they have the fastest growing GDP of any country.

Any ideas?
https://github.com/element-hq/element-docker-demo in the end
I wish there's a way to restrict math notes within a bounding box. I use notes with pencil to help my kids with their math homework and it started randomly trying to solve what I was writing. I like it but wish there's more control.
To be clear, I definitely agree with you, I just don't think ThunderSizzle would. So it's ThunderSizzle's ideal that I am confused about, and trying to clarify. I think ThunderSizzle has asked for a (to my imagination) impossible-to-reach standard, and you have provided a very practical compromise, but exactly the sort that they would probably reject as infringing too much on existing car infrastructure.
I don't think there's a single easy definition of "Staff Engineer" and it's usually just a title. But it might be still good to think about why those folks keep talking about this specific title.

From my observation, there is a certain inflection point in a senior level engineer's career where their expectation rapidly grows in that no one can realistically match it alone. The quality of your work will saturate and it's physically impossible to "work harder". Some extraordinary engineers could delay that point a bit but they will be eventually there.

At the moment, they will need to figure out a consistent, reproducible way to scale their contribution. If they want further career progression. The most direct way is becoming an engineering manager. Someone may develop a technical and organizational skill to influence high level decisions and prioritization. Or just become an engineering genius...

There are many other possible ways to achieve this, but the point is that further contribution at this point usually needs a radically different way. I do see that many companies tend to grant a title of "Staff Engineer" to those folks able to figure out how to handle this situation.
An engineer that makes less impact than a staff engineer but more impact than a junior engineer.
If people have updates to this let me know! I am working on some revisions. I've already spotted a few for Clickhouse.
The 18.2 beta shows you the equation Apple thinks you wrote as soon as you draw the = .
It's one of those low reward high impact jobs.

Companies should fall over themselves to fund projects like this
Having EWD as a dissenter also seems a rather low bar, to be fair. (One might say he was a bit of a Edsgerlord.)
Algol 68 was certainly too much language for the tiny machines of 1970, but on a 2020 box it might be fairly decent.
did you measure the freezer after? It expanded :)
Really appreciated the time someone spent putting that together, good article.

R.I.P Stiver
Hold a contest to determine which performer lip syncs the most realistically to their recordings and go with them.
Not sure but I believe it’s possible you may have read the parent comment unintentionally in the inverse? I might be wrong but I believe you posited their desired focus is to manage people from parent comment, but I actually think it’s opposite. They don’t want to manage people (especially career wise), instead they want to manage and guide the work of teams and people across one or many teams.

My interpretation of it was to pursue the type of work and things you focus on as an Engineering Manager in terms of getting the most of out teams for the goals of the organization but doing so without the need to manage people directly. Which I would agree is nice since it’s really hard to wear the technical hat and also directly manage people, so separation of concerns makes for far less context switching and folks to naturally align doing the part of the job that they do best. I also agree with this definition since it’s how I think of it too.
This is such a tired, pedantic retort. Nobody believes that taxpayer-funded services are "not paid for". OP obviously meant "pay for fully by the individual at the point of sale."

And yes, as an American, it also boggles my mind that we have to pay for emergency health services including ambulances[1]. My wife, who is not from a stone-age civilization like ours, didn't realize it either the first time we needed to hit up the emergency room. Thankfully I was able to convince her to not call for an ambulance, and I drove myself to the hospital.

1: individually, just so I'm clear
WALRUS: WebAssembly Lightweight RUntime
Hopefully this will incentivize LLM designers to stop heavily censoring and limiting output and acceptable answers.
Yeah, this. Also, in most advanced societies, it isn't particularly likely that your kid wants to work at whatever you were doing.

But there are a bunch of services helping "teach the test" for kids going to college/grad school, and in very, very many ways, middle class (or better off) parents do strive to give their kids tons of advantages that other kids do not have. Is it fair that my kid had access to their own computer and all the books they wanted to read, etc., when others didn't? No, but parents are still going to help their kids.

If we had something resembling a really fair system, kids and adults of any age would be able to take classes and learn whatever, with as much help as they needed. It would be expensive, but fair. That isn't what we have.
Whilst more the personality side, found https://www.folklore.org a fun read of the early times at Apple.
problem is now that the election is over no one will take about voter id anymore. for a large population base the time to do it in good faith is now when you have most chance of uptake. but the way id laws get brought up is basically near the finish line so the only conclusion that can be drawn is they are there to discourage voting by 'undesirable' groups.
It's an interesting reality check that in 2023, six years into his journey as a bootstrapped founder, Tiny Pilot made $225K in profit on ~$1M on revenue. For 2021 and 2022, it made roughly a $5K profit; the rest was all losses. He quit Google because he couldn't get a promotion presumably from L4 to L5, but $225K is less than what an L4 makes.

This might also be a microcosm of why the working class is pissed off in America, because looking at this experience, the optimal strategy for revenue is to blow smoke up the ass of a wealthy corporation until they give you a fat stock grant, then claim credit for the work of others so that they give you more.
> If I relocate you to the moon without support infrastructure, you would die too -- and yet (I think?) you are probably alive.

It seems to me that the alternative to people being alive quite quickly reduces to nothing is alive by way of information theory.
This article feels a little bit pointless to me. ryandvm said it perfectly - a staff engineer is just what happens when you have a senior engineer who deserves a promotion, but wants to be a technical leader not a people leader. How that actually fits into the company varies heavily company to company, specifically size and maturity.

I feel like this article wants to talk about the performance matrix through the lens of four pillars, and just arbitrarily chose "staff" as the role to talk about since it's a very senior engineer.
Exactly what law requires disc drives to be built in?

Also, you can add a disc drive. It’s an option.
Critical Veeam RCE bug now used in Frag ransomware attacks
AI demos have gone so wild that managers are apparently mistaking demos for products.

I miss Steve Jobs, he would get the team back on track and drive the field forward more quickly by demanding reasonable UIs.
(Not saying it for this person, as I don't know), but there is a case also where you can be a very average performer, just hiding in a large corporation (or retiring, as some people even say), then you will be very well paid, and highly considered. Then once you leave to create your own projects or join a small start-up, reality hits.
> does arguing the semantics of what label you put on it really add much value

Refining the definition of something often helps provoke new understanding and tests of the limit of that refinement. It seems like a critical requirement in the "form a hypothesis" step of the scientific method.
I'd be happy to, world you like to offer a suggestion?
They were in 2008. It's largely just people's mental models changing slowly, as well as selection bias of people who still believe Google has world-class engineering being overrepresented among people who still work at Google.
But not really - lots of new stuff was added - structures, unions, pointers, function pointers, operator definitions, a heap - all stuff that hadn't appeared in a language spec before, things we all see and use every day.

The big problem was that the language spec was incomprehensible (I've done a language implementation), trying to embed syntax and semantics into the one spec - the maths guys went a bit overboard there. The other main problem was trying to solve the reserved word problem by defining effectively multiple fonts/type faces for different parts of the language .... at a time when even lower case wasn't really an option for most people