skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We are taught to never lie. The problem is that the military is also a vast bureaucracy and is a bit schizophrenic in that the left hands knows don’t do that again but the right hand keeps doing it. One example is that the Army has been struggling for decades with impossible to achieve unit mandatory training. We call it pencil whipping, lying to ourselves, and it is a known problem and yet the problem keeps growing. The best we can do is to follow the letter of the regulation.

https://www.ausa.org/articles/no-time-literally-all-requirem...
This is a great point. Toxicity is entirely orthogonal to performance. And you rarely have to worry about toxic low performers: if you're unlucky enough to hire them, they don't stay around for long.

But toxic top performers are IME one of the biggest challenges a manager will have to deal with. You have to root them out the moment they land in an organization because given enough they'll push out the non-toxic top performers, leaving you with a toxic asshole and a bunch of flunkies. And you have to convince everyone outside the team that yes, they get things done, but they're enough of an asshole that you'd rather risk hiring someone to deliver less but also destroy less.

All this reminds me of the quote attributed to everyone under the sun (Clausewitz, various US civil war generals, Omar Bradley, you name 'em) but apparently was said by Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord[0]

> There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff. The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking; he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always only cause damage.

Turns out this problem is quite old, indeed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-Equord#Cl...
It shakes up people, reminding them how shallow their vocabulary really is.
GoPro Hero 5
> The short term, however, may be different. After decades of insubstantial change — all those alarms notwithstanding — a few indicators point to a genuine drop in numbers of friends, or activity with friends in the 2010s

Seems a bit like cherry-picking to say 'the short term' when it covers a decade and a half of data, including the current period which is spurring the latest concern. This period directly contradicts the title and as a parent I can definitely see this issue is real, at least for my extremely limited sample size. Maybe a better title should have been 'The Myth of the Loneliness Epidemic is Finally Coming True"
Making money hand over fist.
My career experience has been that there's low correlation between TC and talent, especially at the high end of the talent spectrum.

While I know some really smart people working at various FAANGS making great TC, nearly all of the people that are truly something special are grinding away on hard problems, relatively unknown, getting paid "fine" because they'd rather work on truly hard problems than make optimal amounts of money.

My experience has been that the high TC crowd is above average skillwise, but attracts far more people whose number one concern career-wise is maximizing TC. These are often people that chose technical work because they did the math and felt it was the highest paying per effort required but aren't really passionate about the areas they get paid in.

Truly brilliant people, especially ones from less traditional backgrounds, tend to have a hard time surviving in high TC orgs because they aren't aligned with the culture. Likewise whenever I interact with someone in a high TC role, I'm undoubtedly disappointed by how little they care about their area of work. For them the point of the job is to make money, and they make a lot of money, so there's nothing to talk about.
The Mustang that parks my street and operates 100% of the time in Sport Mode is the loudest vehicle I hear on a regular basis.
Remembering Dewayne Hendricks
How to Run Effective Design Reviews: A Founder's Guide
With this framework, you can run design reviews that foster clarity and collaboration — helping your team build products that make business sense and users love.
Perhaps you'd make local friends, and a found family.
TIL How to Easily Hard Reload a Web Page in Chrome
Some care are loud. Especially those modded exhausts.
The dichotomy serves the military. If someone has a health condition and they lie about it then the military is not at fault for death or injury of the liar. They want to set extremely tight controls on health conditions and then have recruiters tell recruits to lie (only that part isn't explicit ). That way they aren't liable. Someone just didn't get the memo before implementing Genesis.

It's like speeding, if everyone is always speeding, then a police officer can always pull you over for whatever secret reason they have. If everyone lies to get into the military they can always blame the victim for lying.
> If this is on hardware however, then I don't know whats going on there.

It is. Bare metal install on the server in my closet, with plenty of resources (CPU/memory) to spare.
This is exactly the kind of claim the article should've rebutted, if it's a myth. If they can't (because it's true) that makes it seem like there is a loneliness epidemic.
Cheers, angst as US nuclear plant Three Mile Island to reopen
im not sure what you mean - the embedding model is independent of the embeddings themselves. Once generated, the embeddings and vector store should exist 100% locally and thus not part of any secret sauce
Fat Cells Remember Obesity, Driving the Yo-Yo Effect
Completely agree. Yes, great engineers tend to be compensated well, but only slightly more than the median performer. In other words, a 10x engineer isn't getting paid 10x more. It's probably more like 1.5x to 2x. If we somehow invent a magical way to track productivity numbers exactly, I suspect we'd see something closer to Price's Law [1] (Pareto distribution) which is essentially what this post is about, where something like 20% of workers contribute to 80% of the results. However, that doesn't means the other 80% is expendable which relates to your second point.

Paying what employees "earn" for the company is incompatible with our economic system where companies want to be profitable. Paying employees what they "deserve" based on contribution is probably also undesirable. I think you'd get the same income inequality dynamics but within companies. There is an averaging effect when you work at large corporations. That's either a good thing or a bad thing depending on the person. Individual contributions are averaged out, but so are responsibilities. I think Paul Graham articulated this wonderfully in his essay on what a job is and why some prefer to work for startups [2].

[1] https://www.kienbaum.com/blog/prices-law-and-the-trouble-of-...

[2] https://paulgraham.com/wealth.html.
The data says otherwise. It says the lack of online interaction would spur you and your friends to meet up more in person, or for you to seek out friends that you could see in person. You can't take just one part of 'if this didn't exist' and assume nothing else would change.
> If you think you're not getting paid enough you should quit and start your own company.

I'd rather eat a bullet, thanks. I have dignity and I'd like to keep it.

> The fact that google/apple/amazon make 5-10x per employee is not proof that you're underpaid.

That's exactly what it means.

> The chef at French Laundry makes $$$$$$$, does that mean the apple farmer who supplied the apples for $ is underpaid?

The chef is paid for their labor. Shareholders contribute nothing to society.
I understand that. I’m giving an example that is an instance of the sibling commenters’ claims that more transparently rebuts the idea that quantum codes cannot use redundancy because of no cloning.
See my reply to hn_throwaway_99. The example is overly trivialized and should expand to more complex relational logic as well.
It's investing in your workforce and demonstrates a level of respect and supports loyalty. No, the lack never stopped me from learning. Professional experience however is valued more highly than... yes I fired up ABC at home. Or I led a team doing XYZ and now can do that for my employer.
More concretely, if Russia is allowed ANY success in Ukraine, it puts the nail in the coffin of nuclear non-proliferation. If the only thing the world does is bow to anyone who can hold it hostage with a nuclear threat, the only defense is your own nukes. If you want to avoid countries fighting nuclear war, you are better off fucking over Russia right now, and understanding that their nuclear talk is all bluff (for now) rather than wait until hundreds of tiny and unstable countries have nukes that they want to fire at each other.

If the West defends Ukraine from a nuclear armed nation, then we can convincingly tell the rest of the world "You don't need nukes, so don't build them".
One thing I dont understand.. does this rely on vector embeddings? Or how does the AI interact with the data? The example is a sqllite satabase with prices, and it shows claude being asked to give the average price and to suggest pricing optimizations.

So does the entire db get fed into the context? Or is there another layer in between. What if the database is huge, and you want to ask the AI for the most expensive or best selling items? With RAG that was only vaguely possible and didnt work very well.

Sorry I am a bit new but trying to learn more.
Here's the trouble with this article. I fear this problem will only get worse. In the first paragraph, various authors are quoted from the 20th century. Except for Putnam and a few of those after, I've never heard of any of them. Yes, it is clear that the idea of a loneliness epidemic is not new, but simply because it was mentioned and/or identified in the past, without more context around the citations (there have always been "fringe" authors, even the Greeks had them), it is not convincing that it was a mainstream problem before e.g. Putnam and others.
Based on what an ex-Google developer said in conversation at a party at the weekend (the discussion was about the choice of First Language for a Computer Science degree course, yes, I do go to exciting parties, many of those attending have never even been a CS lecturer):

Some years ago Google decided that Go projects were similar engineering effort, better performance, lower maintenance, and so on that basis there was no reason to authorise new Python software and their existing projects would migrate as-and-when.
They asked a rather simple question, it's weird that you seem to be dodging it. It's unlikely your good-friend was turned away because they were were ideologically-opposed to the military having any social programs for housing, or for healthcare, or for family support, or for post-service education.

So again, which "social programs" were you referring to in your argument?
It's been terrible for me the past two weeks. Every day I get a message about the site being at high-capacity, or I get rate-limited well before the supposed 45 message limit.

Today, Claude's responses have been so error prone and incorrect it's quite disappointing, as now the LLM is struggling giving correct answers that wouldn't have been a problem previously. For example, it kept insisting that I use `chmod` to take ownership of a directory.

I am seriously considering cancelling my subscription, since the service has only deteriorated since I have subscribed.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/big-battery-storage-map-of-austr... ("Battery Storage Map of Australia")
True, but your example is very targeted at a specific page. With local storage, you can have a simple short function that works everywhere and just sends everything back to your server. No need to specialize, works everywhere.
Arguing got it down to $7.5k and beyond that I needed a lawyer. I paid it, and kinda regret it, because not only is it a refurbished battery, it's basically useless on a trip/supercharger now as they cap the speed to absurdly low levels. Like 10%/h. Car only had 70k miles on it, too.

I appreciate that you didn't call me a liar, which has been my past experience anytime I mention something negative about that company
This seems to be an explanation of what /etc/hosts is, but for TOR.
Eh, if I need a different identity[1], I just use a different identity[2] (ideally different machine or host when feasible).

I'm not a fan of mixing identities, like for example mixing a personal identity[2] with a work identity[1].

[1]: Git.

[2]: OS user.
That’s on par with most data science projects I’ve seen in my corporate job.
How We Optimize LLM Inference for AI Coding Assistant
>And this is the one big argument in favor of Hi Res audio

It's really not. For redbook, fs/2 is 22 kHz and while human hearing maxes at 20 kHz, it's not a hard cutoff: combine our low sensibility to high frequencies (cf ISO 226), the average listener's hearing not going much further than 18 in reality and frequency masking by other simultaneous notes and the small aliasing/imaging issues near fs/2 aren't a real problem.

But the real important factor rarely mentioned is material: the amount of music with meaningful content at a meaningful volume at those frequencies is statistically negligible.

Hi Res audio is snake oil designed to sell the same thing multiple times, period.
Yeah I think this is the end result of defining people more by their group membership than who they are as individuals.
I read that as compensation wasn't correlated to your performance relative to peers. Which is I think what most people would appreciate in an ideal world. I don't think they meant absolute performance and compensation weren't linked.
It's entirely possible to need to lay off people for one type of work while being unable to staff up for a different skillset. I would expect software developers, of all people, to understand that we're not commodities.
Nice project, but I've been using the "Earth View from Google Earth" extension for Chrome for more than 10 years I think and I find it really difficult to part ways with it no matter how many features the new extension in the block has, maybe someday someone will add that feature to a new extension and I will be able to replace it.
That's not even realistic. India is part of BRICS, and one of the main goals of this group is to increase trading between members. I agree part of Indian society doesn't like it, but it won't make any difference.
> Employers strive to pay employees the minimum they can bear, on employer's terms

I don't think it's worth thinking like this. An employee's salary is floored by their value to any company, and ceilinged by their value to the company currently employing them.
> Cars from Japan, 2000 or current that are clean aren't street legal here because they don't meet the safety standards

I've seen this repeated for 25 years now, and to be honest I think it's simply not true.

Can you list one safety standard they don't meet?

The GT-R is identical as sold in Japan and the USA (well, actually, the US version has wider seats - true story).

Even when that one guy homologated the R32 Skyline into the USA he barely modified the front bumper at all and it met crash safety standards as it was.
> What might look like low performance in a corporate environment can just be someone setting boundaries and refusing to let work infringe too much on their personal life.

Another is poor fit between the employee and the job. One the lowest performers in a role can sometime be a great in another because they do/don’t care about clean code, long hours, spelling / grammar issues, minor aesthetic issues, minor bugs, speed, etc etc.

The universally perfect employee basically doesn’t exist as much as organizations want everybody to be interchangeable cogs.
I do the same as you, but I know of plenty of people (even some developers) whose computing workflow looks like this: Boot computer, log in, start web browser, make it full screen. And that is where they work/play for the whole day.

That describes ChromeOS users of course, but there are Apple and Windows (and presumably Linux) users who have the same workflow.
Yes, this has always bothered me. IQ doesn't easily correspond to any measurable real-world quality.

For example, if we would postulate that height is gaussian, we could measure people's heights and just ordering them we could create a gaussian distribution. Then we could verify the hypothesis of height being gaussian by mapping the probability distribution function's parameter to a linear value (cm) and find that these approaches line up experimentally.

We could do the same thing with any comparable quantity and make an order of them and try to map them to a gaussian distribution, but we would have no knowledge if what we were making actually corresponded to a linear quantity.

This is a serious issue, as basically making any claim like 'group A scores 5 points higher than group B' is automatically, mathematically invalid.
> I don't think the HR team gets credit for reviewing applicants and running interviews that don't result in one/both of these.

Considering that 95% of hiring is interacting with people you won't actual hire, this cannot be true.
Summary of "Improvising cellular playgrounds in Realtalk", Aug 2023 [video]
Parable notwithstanding, your comment is a critique of the standard usage of the expression "cried wolf". To cry wolf specifically means to sound a [false] alarm when there isn't a need for it.
It depends on the job. If you are interested in the American caste system you should read this classic

https://www.amazon.com/Remember-me-God-Myron-Kaufmann/dp/B00...

Which tells the story of a Jewish person who fails to persevere against prejudice in a multifaceted and sensitive way. In one scene he gets a job as a bank teller and then realizes in some jobs you’ve got the potential to screw up but no potential to distinguish yourself. The world needs people to milk cows every morning, a job you can screw up but not do it 10x better than competent, there is no Pareto or other “exceptional events” distributions for many essential jobs. ER doctors, taxicab drivers, astronauts, etc.

(Productivity is a product of the system + the people)

I worked on one system that had a 40 minute build if you wanted it to be reliable, the people I picked it up from could not build it reliably which is why the project has been going in circles for 1.5 years before I showed up. With no assistance (and orders that I was not supposed to spend time speeding up my build because it didn’t directly help the customer) I got it to a 20 minute build.

Other folks on the team thought I was a real dope because my build took too long and I was always complaining but they couldn’t build it reliably at all.. I mas two major releases of a product with revolutionary performance in one year at which point I felt that I’d done the honorable thing and that I’d feel less backlash anywhere else whether or not I was creating more value —- so I moved on, and was told by recruiters that they hadn’t found a replacement for me in six months.

Had the place I was working at had a 2 minute build they might never had hired me because they would have had the product ready long before.
Unfortunately, the extremely weird and idiosyncratic use of Latin script for English means that straightforward transliterations are usually pronounced incorrectly by people who try to pronounce them according to English rules.

And, on the other end of the spectrum, you have attempts to spell phonetically following English orthography, which then causes issues because it's tied to a particular dialect of English. E.g. the traditional Korean romanization of the name "Park" has "r" there solely so that "a" would actually correspond to an [a] sound in British English - but then, of course, American English is rhotic, and so it ends up being incorrectly pronounced as [park].
next on the list are the js frameworks called "vanilla"
Didn't know about Oracle using Node as an example of them building/selling things utilizing the "JavaScript" trademark. I think the post's framing of this being fraudulent is accurate, but even if it didn't legally qualify, it is at the very least extremely dishonest and unethical.
Divorce the wives then.
it doesnt feed the whole DB into the context, it gives Claude the option to QUERY it directly
Children are like a hardmode tamagotchi for more than a decade with essentially no or very delayed economic payoff for the parents. Now an uncomfortable idea could be that you make the lives of (voluntarily) childless, reproductive-age people so difficult that just having 2-3 children is the easier path.

Not only could this have terrible side effects, it's also very much against the idea of finding good solutions via self-organization. Maybe there's deep biopsychosocial wisdom in the fertility crisis that we aren't seeing yet.
Microsoft is not going to subsidize AI forever, they'll need to make a profit, and last quarter the spent $19B and only earned $2.5B from it. People are cheaper in the long run, probably forever.
Cool yeah. I think the thing I was most interested in was interacting with Bluesky through rust. Is there a decent sdk for that?
> In essence, the point here is that if a corporation decides it can live without X% of their workforce

The open secret is that layoffs are also used as a gentle way to fire low performers.

By including people in layoffs, you can give them a potentially very generous severance package and you allow them the courtesy of saying they were laid off as opposed to being fired. They get mixed in with all of the good performers who were laid off due to budget cuts.

Putting a lot of restrictions on a company that does layoffs creates a perverse incentive to fire these people explicitly instead of giving them a gentle landing with a layoff. You would see far more people fired instead of "laid off".

At the extreme, you incentivize companies to start firing people to make budget cuts.

So, this is actually a very bad idea. You do not want to start putting handcuffs on companies who do layoffs instead of constant firings.
No. You sound as if you’re familiar with the culture but it’s clear that you’re not.

The problem with comp.compression was always that its Eternal September is new people showing up every week claiming they’ve found a universal compression algorithm that compresses everything - the perpetual motion machine of information theory. Having gotten tired of explaining to people who think they’re fighting “dogma” not the laws of the universe, people start trying to find other ways to make them put up or shut up, so they could have some peace and quiet.

Like sending them a file full of RNG output and wait for them to realize this was their teachable moment.

Winning the challenge - without engaging in out of band bullshit (compressor + output should be the giveaway) doesn’t prove you have found a universal compression algorithm. It only proves the RNG is flawed. Which would be very interesting but not break Shannon.

The problem is compressor + file means “no out of band data” to a reasonable person and we have already established we are dealing with unreasonable people.

Not

> My main motivation was to "out-trick the tricker". I thought the chances of me making any money were very remote.
A San Francisco Navy lab became a hub for human radiation experiments