skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not my intention to discard the whole article for this problem but...

calculateTotalPrice(100, [5, 10, 15]);

And so, a base price of 100 and applying discounts of 5, 10, and 15, produces a total price of... 3000. Odd kind of discount, innit?

I mean, either this is a bad example not well thought out, or the original function is doing something completely different and the supposedly good naming is actually a very bad one since it appears to make sense but doesn't. In either case not good.
Look at the site in 2020, when many of those people signed up:

https://web.archive.org/web/20200630201639/https://www.withy...

The idea was just an online bank that paid interest on savings in the form of raffle tickets.
I don't mind if you disagree completely, but I have been studying ancient history and archaeology for about two decades now and it's pretty glaring to me. Following this intuition has given me great insight in analysis, strategy and overall making sense of trends and data.
It surelly used to exist, I have settled returns, refunds and reacheduling of deliveries through their chat in the past. Last time was 5-6 months ago
Amazon accepts subpoenas and other legal summons. You just need to engage an attorney.

Whether it’s egregious enough for that I don’t know, but you will definitely get in contact with them if you use one.
There was a subset of us “old” 90s nerds who failed to take certain elements among us who would be:
1. Enriched an empowered by having the right skillset at the right place and time to achieve fortunes (and by direct purchase) political power unrivaled since the Gilded Age and
2. Still traumatized by not being at the cool kids table in middle school, never emotionally progress past being 12 year old boys

We didn’t need the bullies and autocrats to discover technology. They were among us the whole time. We just didn’t take them seriously.
you don’t write policies based on guesses…
I disagree, you're not including mental fatigue. I can say something like "I have a server OS upgrade that needs to be done by X date. The server uses XYZ technologies. Here is the list of stakeholders and their roles. Design me an assessment and implementation plan and outline the key milestones and their dates." Could I think through that myself? Yes but it may take a couple hours. I just got 85% of the planning work done in 2 minutes.
Vikings gonna viking.
Those are more for the supply part of the equation. I was thinking of reducing demand.

I don't think that the energy needs that will emanate from "AI" stop at LLM training/inference. I think this recent burst of demand is a starting point.
I don't think tip toeing around people like this is a solution at all. But I've never worked in the US.

Some important questions:

1) Why are they a leader at all?

2) Why are they your chosen leader?
I had an item vanish in transit to me (in the UK) and support chat (after fighting through some robotic stupidity) very quickly and without fuss gave me a refund on the spot. So humans do still exist and have agency and are reachable in parts of Amazon at least...
I don't think that's really true in practice, though at a competence level it absolutely is. Except at the biggest places, even low level programmers are both empowered and expected to make architectural decisions that have big impact on maintainability, testability, and performance. Addition of a bad-but-fast coder to a team is the worst possible outcome because they are really productive at screwing up the whole codebase in ways that will take even more time to peel apart. It's actually worse if their code is in the "functional but ugly" category, since PMs love those people as long as they're really fast, and they hate when other engineers complain about their work.

In construction, the random guy pulled in to swing a hammer may cut something wrong once or twice and waste a little time and money, but he's never going to be trusted to design the way the support beams hold up the whole house, so the damage is very limited. Software is not like that, we expect everyone to do some amount of design and engineering, whether or not they have any ability to do so. If as much software dev was driven by very low-level grunt work as is the case in construction, LLMs would already have revolutionized the field a lot more than they have; as it is, we've probably got another couple years to wait.
HN is useful for discussion on cutting edge stuff. It's a great place to overhear conversations about what's important to tech people. I've learned a lot from this community. But you're right -- certain insular, minority opinions seem to get unusual airtime here. They make the discussions unbalanced.
Would sending a physical letter to their hq be ok?
Increasing hand-offs by 7x is sub-optimal and interferes with folks wanting to take continuous vacation time. Again, I can see for ops teams that could be true, but very much disagree that on-call should be a "natural" thing for dev teams in the first place. It can be a necessary evil that should be minimized (the personality of people who like firefighting and quiet development are quite distinct and there are people who actually like the former.) On the latter point, I think that benefit is very much a mirage. If there's a flaw in the system causing a "bad week," it actually might be easier for the first person who gets the hang of it to deal with it than to try handing off and teaching the next one in the rotation.
pretty interesting. i think i fall on the blunt end of the communication spectrum, so this gave me some things to think about.
Get together with your friends and watch stuff.
> The chainsaw is a poor fit for, say, ripping down a sheet of plywood for that new shed dormer you’re trying to add onto the house. A chainsaw shouldn’t be used to dig a trench for an irrigation line.

both of those statements are false. While not common, some proiessional construction crews do use a chainsaw instead of a circular saw - the vast majority don't but some do. Likewise a trenching tool is just a chainsaw with a large blade - not the same chainsaw as you would use for a tree, put clearly a chainsaw if you look.
Deep Dive into Linux Networking and Docker – Bridge, VETH and IPTables
When I buy products from Amazon, there's some "Get help about this order" button when I see order details. If you pick correct choices you escape the automated chats and they put a human on the chat with you.

You can then explain your issue.

Amazon always fixed my problems, including refunds, replacements. Their chat support is so good I tend to buy with them even when they don't have the best price.
there are many positives of WFH but climate change is not one of them
Israel ponders giving aid distribution management in Gaza to US private firm
Can you try from Amazon app, there is an option to click to customer service after the click the second button (from the right) on bottom nav bar.

Then you will have many options, scroll down to something else and you will find chat with customer service and then you want to tell the bot straight that you want to be redirected to an agent. From there you can talk to actual human and ask to be redirected or even ask for a call. Though I am not sure if this will be different if you are not prime member. Also there is a way to do that from website but steps would be slightly different.
> sane not-hyper-polarized political discourse

Polarization (as the word implies) is not outcome of the tech but side-effect of two-party system.
Support chat exists, you need to jump through hoops and always select "other" and "I have a problem" and stuff like this. I've talked to them multiple times
Thank God I didn't have to write all of that myself :)

Well said!
How to Learn Morse Code, the 'Secret Handshake' of the Digital Age (2023)
You should rent a tractor and eject horse manure at their offices, this might make them slightly more inclined to look into it.
It's not just due to an employee being H1B. It's that 80% of your peers are Chinese and Indian H1Bs who bring that culture of deference to authority into the US.

I don't even feel like I'm working in the US when I'm working for any tech company these days. If I'm at ads for FB, I may as well be in Beijing. Some others, I may as well be in Mumbai.

It would be nice to work with Americans/westerners for once and actually be able to speak up about something without getting fired.
I don't see any real evidence that either AI or crypto have had "major negative impacts for society."
Private trackers might he considered organized crime.
In the Bay Area six figures ($100000) is poverty level even for a single person. Officially. An average software developer supporting a family on a single income in the Bay means a below median family income. No, it's not starvation. But I would hardly call living paycheck-to-paycheck "lucrative".
I still love technology. It's only getting more amazing all the time. If you view just that, we're not just living in the future, but way beyond.

The application though, both by others and what I do at work? Meh.

So am I pessimistic about technology now? I think that's a valid way to put it. And yet I also feel "out of place in the tech world" with my viewpoint. Sure there's others with similar positions, but I feel this is not a majority.
Pro-AI comments regularly get downvoted. I find this amusing or sad. Or maybe both.
Registered mail, return receipt.
> have had major negative impacts for society in particular the vulnerable

such as?
If you removed the reference to the 70s, This comment could have been stated at any time from 1750 to today and only by grammar would you be able to pick out when it was made.
Haha yeah, more like "look - it's a bunch of dorks playing on their computers"
Nothing? Do you expect people to be coal mine optimistic too?
It's not a senior leader if they aren't spending a lot of time prying out this kind of information from their team already.

Looking at their web page this author seems like a professional bullshitter that pivoted into enabling other bullshitters, for a fee.
This is the biggest casualty.
Send a letter to 410 Terry Avenue North, Seattle, Washington 98109-5210 [1] with your state attorney general [2] copied. (Note the AG's Cc in the letter.)]

(If you had property damage or a crime was committed, get a police report. Now. You lose nothing by documenting. Waiting could damage the perceived quality of any testimony and seriousness of the allegations.)

[1] https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001018724/0...

[2] https://www.naag.org/find-my-ag/
I don't doubt that it can be a problem in some cases with bad connections but personally I have never had any issues using TCP-based (TLS) VPNs in the 15 years I have been using them, even with MPTCP, which I routinely use to bond several different connections together.
Manna shaped a lot of my worldview on tech and humanity. People with vision like that are extremely rare.

He will be sorely missed.
Pedantically that's not true, they're ';' delimited https://cmake.org/cmake/help/v3.31/command/list.html#:~:text...

The confusion comes from the fact that set() automatically coerces space-delimited items into a ;-delimited list

set(ONE alpha;beta)
set(TWO alpha beta)
list(LENGTH ONE one_len)
list(LENGTH TWO two_len)
message(FATAL_ERROR "one <<${ONE}>> length ${one_len}\ntwo <<${TWO}>> length ${two_len}")

emits

one <<alpha;beta>> length 2

two <<alpha;beta>> length 2
Most programmers know that women have been involved in the design of many programming languages. Not to cast shade at Lovelace, but Grace Hopper is particularly well known in Govt, Defense, atmospheric & climate IT, as well as compiled languages given the extensive usage of COBOL and her creation of the compiler, which is more important arguably than the creation of a singular language. That is akin to inventing operating systems in general.

I can’t help but think this is one of those fraudulent & ridiculous papers intended to trick reviewers and make a gotcha moment!
Are the antenna diodes only there to reduce damage during manufacture or is there also impact runtime in an electromagnetic noisy environment?
I'll ask my delulu question here but: where are the angel vestors who DO in fact what to help humanity. Do they exist and are just working "underground"? Or do you just get absorbed into the system once your net worth is past $X million dollars?
Just like there are plenty of employed, bad devs there are employed, bad leaders/managers.

Maybe they aren’t good at it, or maybe they’re new to managing and this is one skill where they will get better.
> profoundly harmed people and society in really visible ways

such as?
Most of those examples (not giving enough direction, not training new hires enough, not being clear enough on priorities) are probably not going to be surprises for the person, and if you give feedback that shows you want someone to behave differently without having given some thought about why they aren't already then your feedback talks more about your own lack of experience and empathy than anything else.

To give good feedback to anyone you need to understand something about the pressures and challenges that they are facing. And remember that everything is a trade off. For example, perhaps they're incredibly busy, and would like to spend more time with new hires, but are struggling to find time because they aren't getting enough blocks of concentration time to work out clear priorities and they have been told they need to give their trusted colleague more opportunities to grow so they delegated it to someone.

Most likely, if you think something is a problem then they do too. They don't need to be told that or criticised for it, they need help solving the problem that causes the problem.

Imagine the difference between "I want to give you feedback that you aren't spending enough time with new hires" vs "I know you've been wanting to spend more time with the new hires, why don't you take them for lunch and send me to your status meeting over Tuesday lunch time this week."

As I started doing more leadership, I became aware that a lot of the things I might previously have cited as predictable examples of leadership incompetence causing problems were not surprises to leadership. They knew that this course of action would cause problems. The reason that they went ahead anyway was because they believed that the problems caused by the other courses of action available to them would be worse.

Of course, there are situations this advice does not apply, maybe the leader genuinely is clueless or evil or mistaken about the severity of a problem, but a good leader when presented with a problem elsewhere needs to start from a position of respect and learning and if you want to give advice to a leader you should start by trying to model good leadership yourself.
I am not there yet to retire, few more years but there are … after fishing/golfing/boating so not planning to do just that… I am little stunned honestly we are discussing whether having financial means to not have to get up in the morning and stare at screens (best case scenario vs other professions) is not something most humans would want to achieve…
Leaders don't hold all the power. As others have said, I think this is a good approach for everyone - showing a bit of empathy and "you don't know what you don't know" when corresponding with people. In fact it's good leadership 101.

Edit: can anyone suggest any good (free) tools for eliciting 360 feedback? Potentially anonymously?
I disagree with much of the premise and frankly don't think this person should be giving advice. Some of what's in there isn't bad like "be thoughtful about what you say". However, if you already feel something needs to be changed to the point where you're thinking something needs to be said but then you follow the article to force yourself to ask questions like

> “Can I live with this? How much does this bother me? Is it worth giving them feedback and what are my chances of success doing it?”

and doing multiple rounds of this you are compromising with yourself at an early stage. This frequently leads to things escalating (the problem didn't go away and in fact got incrementally worse because there was no negative feedback) which makes it a much harder situation.

This article is also written with examples like, if you don't make small changes to your wording, you'll get responses like "You think I don’t know that I need to give new hires guidance? I obviously gave them guidance. GTFO." which clearly catastrophizes outcomes based on small nuances in your own already inoffensive language.

Feedback is like gardening. Take care of small problems early and gently but relentlessly. If there's a wolf in your garden you should probably do something about the wolf instead of working around the wolf and spending your life in fear, even if that means finding a different garden.

I will recommend the book "The Coward's Guide to Conflict" which helped me get a healthy perspective.

https://www.amazon.com/Cowards-Guide-Conflict-Empowering-Sol...
Know what supports organized crime? The copyright-supported media titans that closed ranks to cover up the career-spanning crimes of all the Weinsteins, Cosbys, Diddys, and Saviles of the world.
That number is NOT an Amazon number. Do not call it. It is a scam. Search Google for that number and you will find numerous reports.
Rich countries may well have stock of H5N1 vaccine following the dangerous situation in the 00s. For now it's believed that the antibodies those vaccines induce would be somewhat useful against the current virus, at least one could hope they will prevent disaster until an updated vaccine can be developed and deployed.

A couple of example articles here (Probably abstract only unless you're hooked up with a good library. Sorry!):

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03189-y

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03256-4

Influenza is an RNA virus and thus less stable and particularly prone to change. I find it somewhat remarkable that the old vaccines are not useless by now, but they're pretty tenuous protection against this problem, so developing better and specific measures against what we're up against now is urgent.
I want to be a techno optimist, and my feelings are that the potential that tech could be an enormous positive utility for humanity. This falls apart not because of tech, but because of human flaws: desire for individual power, categorical error (cultivated in an extreme way in the drive for engagement), and a slew of other human weaknesses that leave many without the critical and emotional facilities necessary to live in the current world facing the onslaught of misinformation.

It was possible to build tools that increased human happiness and connection, but by definition such tools would ultimately lead to each fulfilled person reducing engagement in the interest of actual face to face connection with others. There is no profit to be made in producing such a utility. It doesn't help that the human brain is addicted to novelty, meaning that a technical utility that did this cannot compete with utilities that are work primarily towards engagement.

Ultimately, we need critical faculties, emotional intelligence, and real community to negate the negative effects of engagement driven tech, but these are extremely difficult to develop when this technology is already driving the population towards the easy path: categorical "reasoning", emotional content, or just feeding vanity.

Ultimately, I think we had a small window when Facebook did a study in 2012, where it manipulated the emotions of a number of people (60k) and wrote a paper on it, to declare this practice of algorithmically managing content to be illegal psychological human experimentation.

We didn't, and now I really do feel we suffer under its shadow.
How do I get to live chat? If I search for "customer service", click the link, and keep clicking "Help with something else", I get circular links that go nowhere.
I had the same issue when a driver let themselves round the back of my property, opening a latched gate by squeezing their fingers through a gap in the gate, then trying to open a door at the back. The door happened to be a bedroom with en-suite so the possibility of seeing someone naked was nonzero. The gate also can’t be closed again from the outside even reaching fingers through, leaving it open to anyone and everyone once they’ve left (I’ve since patched the holes as several delivery drivers have now done this). They dumped the package in our greenhouse, breaking a plant and leaving the door open. I only caught all this as we have a camera pointing at the back to track our cats, feeding into Frigate.

I also had trouble contacting Amazon by email so I spoke to a rep on the live chat. They put me through to someone on the delivery team who asked for video evidence. I had to send the video by email to some random Amazon address, then they credited my account with £10, apologised profusely, and said they would feed this back to the delivery driver.
I hadn't been to howstuffworks.com in years. It's...very different now. Much more ad heavy, sensational, "the fourth one will amaze you", "doctors hate #7", and just icky in a way I don't remember it being ten years ago.
The CoC committee was long overdue. The decision here is both lenient - it’s only one release - pragmatic and necessary. We should aspire to more friendless not some weird tolerance for behaviour which would he unacceptable everywhere else.
In aviation this is what Crew Resource Management is about, and in particular, how to make sure the monitoring pilot, who may be the least experienced one, can effectively supervise and review the actions of the other. Many crashes were the result of copilots' fear of speaking up.

Business life could learn from this. The person in charge is not a king, they're simply the person tasked with making decisions. There is nothing scandalous in having another person evaluate those decisions against a set of principles or common sense, and speaking up when something doesn't feel right.

Better that than crashing into a mountain.
> to think that the bullies and autocrats and sleazebags of the world were too stupid to figure out how to use the Internet to their own ends

This.

There has always been a distinct classism in human society: one class has always been able to do certain things to the other class, but not the other way around.

Right now the latest addition is mass surveillance and spying. Governments and corporations know everything about you but you can't really know anything about them except what they want you to know.

Only through bloody revolutions did the classes ever change places if at all, or at least get shaken up and mixed a little, but there's never going to be a revolution again, because the might of arms on one side is the most disproportionate it has ever been.
A lawyer could advise you. My guess is that getting a registered receipt for certified mail addressed to their general counsel would be sufficient evidence for the courts that you had notified them but your lawyer will know better than I do. I have occasionally resorted to sending certified mail with receipts requested and if nothing else it sends a message that I'm serious.

It wasn't my idea though, the last time I got into a dispute with the IRS they did that to me and I thought "hmm, I bet they do that to 'prove' you knew what they were asking of you."

That said, I'm really sorry you have to go through this. More and more I've been working to move off Amazon ordering for this exact reason.