skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your argument, while valid, also kind of misses the point of the original post: to know where your career ends, you also have to know what the general trajectory looks like. Basically, you cannot "coast" ever upward "naturally" anymore, because we've learned that's a bad concept (hence the term "failing up").

We pressure people into management roles who have no reason being there other than "that's where more money is" or "that's how you create change". If someone's "end state" is a highly competent and flexible IC, then why isn't there more money for them to continue succeeding at that role as compared to an ineffective manager? For all the talk that tech is a meritocracy, it obviously isn't, otherwise we'd be rewarding the best talent without forcing them into bad roles or hollow titles.

Motivations aren't restricted to money alone, either, as we've seen post-pandemic with the WFH-RTO conflicts. A plurality of workers have realized their time is more valuable than their work, and are refusing to take chump change for multi-hour commutes from affordable suburbs just because their employer is arbitrarily demanding butts-in-seats in a pricey city. Others want their employers to be more involved in politics, or at least acknowledge that choosing to be a for-profit business is in fact a political statement in and of itself; hiding behind faux-neutrality in times of crisis isn't sufficient response anymore. The times are a changing, and the workforce is increasingly making its frustrations known.

Which brings me to your last paragraph:

> ...for most techies, the most useful goal is to make money fast in a way that doesn't drain your life energy.

I would like to proudly stand up as one of those not in that "most techies" crowd. I do this work because it comes easy to me, is incredibly interesting, and allows me to work in infrastructure in a way that isn't building roads or laying pipe. I identified my career ending way back in High School: acting as the jack-of-all-trades IT guy for the school or district, grey hair and hoarse voice, gradually nerd-sniping the kids who, like I was, are bored out of their skulls and looking for a challenge. The money certainly helps (even if it's not nearly enough to buy a home close to the office), but my career begins and ends in ultimately the same place.

And that's the point of the post: identifying where your career ends, and the arc it takes to get there. It's why I'm doing the leadership courses and trying to beat a new path upward in the corporate world, one where highly-competent ICs who are also good leaders are recognized as such and put into long-term positions within an organization, to weather the storm of cyclic leaders and fickle shareholders, and ultimately build a stronger, successful, and sustainable entity as a result. I need those years/decades of leadership and money to reach that position where I have a paid-off home, decent retirement savings, and can finally dedicate my remaining time and talent toward building a better future for the next-generation of people.
To consistently generate the same image, we’d all have to agree on a standard model, which I can’t see happening any time soon. They feel more like fonts than code libraries.
Positional goods
Volkswagen's main factory is also pretty large:
"Spanning more than 6.5 km², the Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg is now the largest automotive plant in Europe, employing more than 60,000 people."[0]

[0]: https://www.volkswagen.de/de/marke-und-erlebnis/volkswagen-e...
Is There New Evidence in the D.B. Cooper Case?
Discussion (74 points, 1 day ago, 101 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42221688
Even ls isn't standard on all machines. GNU ls is different from BSD ls.
The mistake I see people make it _not_ ending their career out of narcissism, pride, ego, etc.

I am not a religious person but it is good to remember you will die. You should have some better stuff to put on your tombstone than your job title.

People aren't going to care who you were in 100 years and people aren't going to remember you in 1000 years. Your tombstone will crumble in the dirt.

Spend time with people you love, spend time with your family and friends. Find meaning without economic strings attached.
Presumably, this one assignment wasn't the entire grade and the C+ was for the entire course.
> The goal of many software engineers is to build software / systems they can be proud of.

Maybe for people <30. Priorities change very fast, as you age. I’ve met a good chunk of very talented engineers through work and other venues who acknowledged that they stopped caring after some point.
Electricity is a bit of different in that it is an general utility, closely attached to government for delivery and production, and historically dependency on natural resources or caused pollution (social impact). Electricity is also essential in many places for human survival, and is critical for economical growth and social stability. During war, electricity is treated different from other commodities in a very clear way.

But my point is that all that isn't necessary the important part. The voting population are not always rational participants in the market, nor are companies. There are Nash equilibriums and strategies with local maximums that results in irrational consumer behavior. When there are major social consequences from irrational behavior then people will look towards social, ie political solutions. That generally means regulation, subsidies and if all else fails, government control. The only way to avoid that is to either eliminate the social consequences, or eliminate irrational behavior.
What if there were no hypothetical questions?

That is, you can ask hypothetical what ifs all you like, but unless you have a concrete plan for getting there, you're just writing fantasies.

And, management decisions get reviewed before implementation all the time. It's just not a code review, precisely because management decisions are not code.

Why aren't they code? Because people aren't computers. If you're going to treat them like they are computers, then I don't want to work in your company.
My guess is they've never built a birthday input, and possibly never had to use one.

Or rather their LLM has never.
I always opt out of the scanner (even have a special shirt [1]), and without fail they always stand me by the intake (radio-leaky-end) of the baggage x-ray machine for 5+ minutes.

[1]: https://www.davisr.me/projects/art/tsashirt.jpg
Automation and scale? You can't imagine how technology that allows a small number of people to automatically surveil billions of people can enable horrors that would be more difficult if you needed to use a labor force of hundreds of thousands of humans?
I am kind of not sure what article even means.

Surely, LLMs are professional tools as for now. Internet was for scientists in first days.
GPUs were once for gamers. Then gamers and CAD/CGI professionals.

Today my phone uses gpu to show pretty unlock screen and internet is... internet. Most people don't even distinguish GPU and internet from their device.

My prediction: at current pace in 20 years average user won't even know if he is using local LLM on his device or not. It will be just how computers work. Very un-chainsowy, very inconspicuous, very 0 training required.
Oh and by the way: you might die sooner than you think. It happens all the time. Are you spending time the way you want?
Malaria vaccine delivered by a mosquito bite
It depends on the application. For some applications, a problem in an assert-less production application is easy to reproduce in an assert-ful debug build, because the relevant inputs are easy to capture and replay.

The reason to not default to leaving all assertions and logging enabled is that performance-sensitive applications are pretty common. They're not performance-first, but the performance of any user-facing application matters. If leaving the asserts in provides good enough performance, do that. If dynamically enabled asserts provide good enough performance, do that -- at least you'll be able to quickly retry things. And since different asserts have different costs, do what the article says and distinguish between assert and debug_assert.
Discussion (54 points, 3 days ago, 42 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42209736
Author here. Someone beat me to posting this lol. Was planning to share it on Monday. Happy to answer any questions.
This. I’ve known many an engineer who thinks their manager is bad because they don’t do what this IC (who has never been a manager or knows that is happening at the company above them) would do. The kind of people who think Elon is a bad CEO. Results are what matters first and foremost in tech
What does it mean to "pool" embeddings? The first article seems to assume the reader is familiar
> if they weren't muslim, gotten the benefit of the doubt instead of being hauled off to the police dept.

I don't see what that had so to with him being muslim? I don't see how bringing a most prototypical looking bomb-like device and not listening at least twice to the teacher put it away, then proceeding to set off the alarm on it, could have ended without the police involvement. If anything, the first teacher showed quite a bit of restraint and compassion, trying not to get the kid in trouble. So did the second teacher, up until the point the kid started to disobey and proceeded to set the alarm on it. Sure we can make fun of Texas being Islamophobic or backwards, I don't see how this would have played any better in California, or NY, for instance.
This is also one of the reasons I write C++ with vim without any auto-completion nor fancy plugins (I do use syntax highlighting though, but I think it comes by default with vim nowadays), as well as using GNU screen -- not every machines install tmux by default, surprisingly. In case I need to login into some random Linux box, I'm sure I'll be almost as productive as I am on my own machine.
Maybe that explains why people aren’t aware of this impending big deal since platitudes and simple forecasting are unconvincing.
Quantifying the Kevin Bacon game: a statistical exploration of Hollywood's MOS
For my previous job some stuff is public, and I can see it's still being used as it gets commits. I left about five and a half years ago. For the non-public stuff I wrote a lot of the foundational code, and I'd be surprised if all of that that been replaced.
To have verifiable elections you need three properties:

1. The public should be able to identify who voted with some PII (so that people can audit for ineligible voters, deceased people, fake people, etc.)

2. The votes themselves should be private to the public, but verifiable to individuals.

3. There is an incentive-based consensus mechanism to prevent vote administrators from flipping a small number of people's votes (but significant enough to throw an election) and hoping they don't talk about it. This is where I think blockchain has a real application outside of finance.
Of course, but adding something like that wouldn't stop the questions. If anything, it would amplify them.
Why is that? Monoculture I assume? Everyone works in tech so you never meet interesting people who work in completely different fields?
Big Bang Theory was all the rage when I was working at CERN. I know exactly what you mean.
Just because you've heard it for 30 years doesn't mean it's not still true. Some things move at a glacial pace, and I see it too.
Logging systems often have the specificity you're describing, with selectors for modules etc. You could expand a logging system to handle asserting. "Log the current state, which should never be Running."
Why are monopolies bad? In general, monopolies are bad because they can leverage their power in ways that are worse for consumers - ie they make the usual market functions break down. (If the market continued to work correctly, consumers would be able to switch to a competitor)

There are many cases where we like monopolies because it's more efficient to only have one entity do a thing (eg build infrastructure)

It's useful to correctly punish illegal things monopolies do, but in this case, google has created a browser that is good! Better than alternatives!

If you spin that browser off, it will need to figure out how to monetize. It will get worse due to that monetization effort.

Google has other services that would be competitive without Google: drive, YouTube are easy examples.

If we made them spin off Gmail just because Google is too big, that doesn't make sense! Gmail is useful to Google in its current form, but there's no way it's pulling in significant profit (possibly as part of drive - I'm not certain).

You can't just pick a company you don't like and attack it with a hatchet. That's worse for consumers than the thing you're attacking, and the number one rule here should be for regulators to make things better, not worse!
Is it plagiarizing when you copy stuff that isn't even factual?
Merriam-Webster:
> : to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own : use (another's production) without crediting the source

I guess so.
I think you’re overstating the usage of Haskell.

Hardly everyone uses it.

Jokes aside, I think you’ll be surprised to learn that the DevOps effort for most official programming language resources are surprisingly alike, regardless of their popularity.
What's sad is that the school district spending its limited money to fight frivolous lawsuits like these directly impacts all other students who are just trying to get a good education. Stuff like this won't stop unless the helicopter parents are made to pay the school's legal bills.
Everyone I knew who watched the old Office Space movie thought it was funny; I never liked it because it was too much like real life (at the time). Same with the TV show The Office.
I just wanted to highlight that he was also an entrepreneurship professor at NC State and shaped many students' views of what they could do with their lives.

I was one of those students. I now own my own company as a result of his teachings. He was very influential and a wonderful human being. This news is tragic.

RIP Marshall. You were loved.
> he received Saturday detention and a grade of 65 out of 100 on the assignment

The student still received a passing grade for the assignment despite some of the assignment being AI hallucinated text. From my experience, plagiarism is an automatic zero for the entire assignment or course, but there are tons of counterexamples when the teacher/professor doesn't want to deal with the academic integrity process.
Ubitium is developing 'universal' processor combining CPU, GPU, DSP, and FPGA
This has led to work showing that models can do better sometimes if you decompose these into their constituent characters, e.g.: https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.472.pdf
Because that's what authoritarians invariably do.

They abhor liberal democracies and seek to extend their domineering control over as many people as they can.

The CCP is an absolutely tyrannical organization that denies their own citizens the rights that you and I take for granted. Why would they ever desire their neighbours to have what they deny their own people?

Look no further than Hong Kong and North Korea to see what China wants for their neighbours.

South Korea only exists as it does today because Western forces repelled Chinese supported North Koreans from conquering it.

Japan only exists today because of American rebuilding after the destruction of Imperial Japan during World War 2.

Taiwan only exists as it is today because of American support.

China would have subjugated these entities and destroyed any chance of prosperity and independence that they had if not for the efforts of people who believe in individual autonomy and liberal democratic values.

China only has the power that they do to day because of authoritarians in the west who tricked the world into thinking that globalism means that we should engage in trade with undemocratic societies.

Because that's what authoritarians invariably do.
> I use emacs and vim for my editing, so I doubt those will every link into copilot.

https://github.com/yetone/avante.nvim
Highly successful people like Elon Musk and Donald Trump succeed in part because they push the rules really hard, and they win enough in the cases when it matters. So it's a proven strategy, though it doesn't always work.
How about the IED part? I thought that was clever. L
Discussion (95 points, 13 hours ago, 123 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42226185
Sad to hear a brilliant man decided to take his own life. He seemed increasingly dark on his later takes, and it's a testament to the evils of unrestrained high-IQ and no guard rails.
It's too much work to keep some in the trunk? You can buy plexiglass with external silicone support structures which are much more practical and less noisy to have in a moving vehicle.

But yeah less takeout is an okay choice too. Like, I love the taste and texture of meat, I'm designed to, but I abstain from eating it because of the environmental and ethical impact of the global meat industry. It's a sacrifice, one I'm often ridiculed for down here in the Southern US as well.
The things I take for granted. This is a breath of fresh air! Way to rethink the fundamentals!
Not the same thing by any means - they don't indicate something is wrong with kernel or hardware.

The zombie process state is a normal transient state for all exiting processes where the only remaining function of the process is as a container for the exiting process's id and exit status; they go away once the parent process calls some flavor of the "wait" system call to collect the exit status. A pileup of zombies indicates a userspace bug: a negligent parent process that isn't collecting the exit status in a timely manner.
Correct, which increases the land value even further.

Trivially: If you imagine a plot of land next to One World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan that for some soil/geological region can't sustain a building taller than 2 stories, that lot will be worth far, far less than the lot upon which One World Trade Center was built.

Another example: If you imagine that elevators were outlawed for some reason, suddenly the value of all high-density developable land would fall.
Not to mention that they are disgustingly messy.
I don't think the number of open tracks diminishes. But I do think we generally focus.

When one is 55 it is probably not too interest to attempt to go into the race to become and investment banker. Not because it is inherently impossible, but because there are more interesting opportunities.

Or at least: I think this narrative is the most productive, and the one I will stick to.
Amen. Often when out with coworkers for drinks I'll spill 1 or 2 of the amazing experiences I've been a part of and folks are incredulous. As long as I am making enough to live the kind of life I want to provide for my family who cares if I'm middle management or some executive. When I get bored I'll spend 6 months on some new adventure, then go back to my staid boring life in industry. Don't need the headaches that come with becoming an executive or running an independent business.
I haven't used PHP in years, but I always felt the user examples section made their docs better than the Python docs which are still somewhat wanting for common use case based examples.
Pretty much if you ever double your salary you will come out ahead as everything else doesn't double. (And even if it does, your savings also doubled so you can retire to a lower cost of living and come out ahead).

If you go from say 120k to 240k in salary your housing may go from say 1k (12k/year) to 3k (36k/year) but at the end of the year 120k-12k is 108k while 240k-36k is 204 which is a net gain of 96k!

Of course you still need to eat and stuff but when you check out the "Regional Price Parity" [1] you'll see that nowhere do things actually become twice as expensive. So you're really getting a 2x boost in salary in exchange for a 1.3x increase in expenses.

[1]: https://www.bea.gov/data/prices-inflation/regional-price-par...
It's not about fairness. It's about the fact that countries which have huge emissions per capita can't rest on their laurels if they have relatively low total emissions. Instead, they need to take an active role in reducing emissions - both their own, and those of people in the developing world. If Germany or the UK or Norway or France (not to mention Canada or the USA) want to reduce emissions more but can't realistically reduce theirs as much, then they need to, for example, start donating green energy solutions for developing countries, to allow them to grow their economies and comfort while keeping their own CO2 emissions lower.

What these countries can't do is start pointing fingers at others and claim that people in India say, who emit 2T CO2 per capita, are the real problem compared to their 14-7.
They want a hug box, not actual discourse.
> Where do you think the Chinese will build the factories that spit out drones en masse to invade their neighbours?

Where they're currently building drones.
There are "many" places where people would pay US$200 to run an air conditioner for one hour?
It is interesting and paints rather annoying future once those are cheaper. I am glad this research is conducted, but I think here the measure cannot be technical ( more silly guardrails in software.. or even blobs in hardware ).

What we need is a clear indication of who is to blame when a bad decision is made? I would argue, just like with a weapon, that the person giving/writing instructions is, but I am sure there will be interesting edge cases that do not yet account for dead man's switch and the like.

edit: On the other side of the coin, it is hard not to get excited ( 10k for a flamethrower robot seems like a steal even if I end up on a list somewhere ).
Have you checked Paddle.com or 2Checkout?
Yes. Mainly wear causing loss of compression. So piston rings, valve seals and seats. Also dirt/soot accumulating in air passages, disrupting or eventually blocking air flow, leading to inefficient combustion.
His excitement is infectious. It's hard to not feel giddy at seeing it finally run after all that hard work!

I can't wait to see the kinds of programs we can run on a machine like that, along with discussions about tricks when writing programs for serial memory computers :D
- "but there are tons of counterexamples when the teacher/professor doesn't want to deal with the academic integrity process"

That's a good point: in this particular case, the teacher of the course was subpoenaed to federal court and compelled to testify about their grading. Incredible burden, for someone else's problem.
> Lao Tzu teaches: the best fighter is never angry. More important than the blow is knowing when to strike

Seems like a fake citation https://www.taoistic.com/fake-laotzu-quotes/fake-laotzu-quot...
It's self-evidently the case: go to any city in the world and you will find people in poverty regardless of the city's productivity and, as nradov points out, countless more who fled as the baseline cost of living overtook their own productivity potential.

An extreme example is Palo Alto where local productivity is so high that a family income of ~$200k/yr qualifies for public housing assistance. These are people who are outputting massive amounts of productivity but in dire need of public assistance.

Why? Rent.

There is an equilibrium between rent prices, people's willingness to live in a region, and the productivity of that region.
The engineering pool is broad enough (or the Bay Area shallow enough) that they can hire everywhere and get the same quality of engineer.

Since the wages paid are based on _local_ prevailing wage, and the Bay Area has the highest prevailing wage, Google will get cheaper engineers.

This also avoids the US immigration system, which is a terrible, expensive, stress inducing (performance sapping) thing for staff (and businesses) to interact with.

Finally, by distributing engineers to other countries, they counter some of the political "They're not _local_" arguments being made in various countries.
Well for starters having the technology for prefect recycling.