skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Doctors are one obvious example — they have on call responsibilities often more onerous than IT, and depending on the situation don’t always receive additional compensation for it.

My doctor (primary care physician) doesn’t work outside of business hours. In an emergency the recorded message says to call an ambulance and go to the emergency department at the hospital, which is staffed by a different set of people.

So it seems they do have at least some separation of the oncall aspect?

Lawyers are another story, there’s a lot of things wrong with that profession and we shouldn’t be trying to copy them.
> I've known some pretty rich and powerful people. None of them talk this way behind closed doors

So have I, and they absolutely have talked and acted this way behind closed doors and at other times, felt no need to even hide it.
Europe is not a single country, the laws are very different between countries.
I get that leaving the left lane clear for passing is the convention, but is it actually optimal? If everyone stuck to this, then the left lane would be rarely used and we'd be underutilizing the available space, right?

Where I live, there are signs saying "keep right except to pass" but they're neither obeyed nor enforced afaict. And it's never really bothered me tbh (I'm usually chilling in the right lane).
At [company that purportedly highly values candor], I’ve seen multiple people get canned by VPs or directors they’ve criticized internally. Granted, these situations were cases where this was communicated either in a larger feedback meeting that was supposed to be a “safe” space for such feedback, or via other communications that were visible to more than just the person being criticized. These criticisms were definitely high up in the PG pyramid and critical of the direction / vision / execution, not of the person themselves. The people who were fired from this were high performers who weren’t otherwise on PIPs or anything like that. Leadership did the typical leadership dance of shifting blame, re-org, and carry on. It was sad and further eroded both trust and morale of others familiar with these situations.
The real problem here is that people are incapable of weathering a disruption to their way of life for a long term benefit to humanity. Progress is never linear. It is a jagged line with an upward slope.

No major technological leap has been happened disrupting social structures, putting people out of jobs, or causing some sort of moral panic. https://pessimistsarchive.org/

Nearly all of them have dramatically benefited humanity in the long term. Your children will live healthier and longer, with fewer extremes of suffering.

The drama over AI, in my opinion, simply separates those who think long-term from those who don't. On a long enough timescale, issues like hallucination, theft of artistic IP, etc are a total non-issue.

I think it's arguable the anti-AI movement is much more selfish than the pro-AI one. I don't care if I lose my job to create AGI, because the benefit to humanity is worth much more than my job.
People think of (and are sometimes taught) that the left lane is “the fast lane”. If they are going a couple over the limit, they think they’ve earned the right to be there.

Moreover, if they are prone to road rage, telling them to move over is seen as an insult/disrespect that they need to get out of the “big tough guy lane” and can really set them off.
Colorado is bad, especially around Denver, but nowhere near the depths of California or several East Coast cities in my experience.
I hope corporate ling like this stops for good. Seriously. Bad management is the norm, not the exception. We're all suffering from poor leadership at every level; I bet you all can count the good managers you've had on one hand.

I'd rather live in a world where we could give blunt and direct feedback like, "You suck as a manager, why are you still insisting on this?" However, we live in a situation where the system will always push back against any dissenting voices, and in the end, back-patting and corporate camaraderie are what keep the wheels turning.
This an a similar story a few days ago from Science [1] were both flag killed within an hour of submission, then eventually revived by some mechanism.

I'm curious why that is. I didn't see anything in either of them that should be particularly controversial.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42198278
There is a tiny amount of extra capacitance on the net because of the reverse-biased junction of the antenna diode, but that's it. These diodes do get taken into account in when determining timing though.
It's a bit confusing. The plasma is created by RF, but the RF doesn't cause the antenna effect (nor do "chemicals"). The charged ions and electrons in the plasma are what cause the charge buildup. The wire acts as an antenna in a metaphorical sense, not a literal sense, as I mentioned in Footnote 3.
Wow, learning that people are sharing speedruns on YouTube totally made my day!
When did on-call become so accepted and demanded from employers?
Currently I am "Release Captain" for a week: So I have to setup any releases and manage all the related tasks, do automated/manual testing of the release, release (enabling toggles and any config changes).
Then Backup to secondary and primary for a week: About once or twice I am asked to help with tickets.
Then for 14 days we alternate primary / secondary.
Thursday to Thursday is our deal. Every ~40 days I am in one of the above.
It's absolutely miserable.

I have never had this much time spent doing non-development related tasks. For 4 weeks every 1.5 months I can't have a life at all.
This just screams to me that we are forcing broken software/not complete software out the gate a building huge piles of technical debt that will never get the focus.
I remember a time when I would start at 9am and end at 6pm every day and never heard a peep about production issues unless the support engineers couldn't figure it out. Which maybe happened twice a year.
To make matters worse most things are not allowed to be touched in production with the risk of being fired for making changes. So if you want to "fix" any data or call xyz service you need high ranking approval. It's like being tortured!
System on chip or system on package? (1999)
Gosh, and I thought this would be about solitaire games.
And this is very much also an issue in Europe. Though mostly cruising in the middle lane of a 3 lane while the right lane is open.
And god forbid you suggest that cars' maximum speeds should be set to 100. People come up with all sorts of fantasy scenarios in which they might need to go 110, all of which are certainly ridiculous

My favorite one is the "hospital rush" story. I encourage you to try driving 105 on a clear freeway in the middle of the day and see how safe you feel in your kia. Protip: your tires probably aren't rated for that speed!
emacs elfeed
Yeah I mean to generalize even further, these are techniques that can apply to your direct reports, your friends, your spouse.

Giving feedback is definitely an art and a thin line between getting your point across in a clear way vs running up against ego or impatience.

If you care about your org's success it's critical to know your audience, their approach and value system, and how to tailor your message to account for what will resonate with them. It's really tough stuff.
Custom code still derived from q3
> If everyone stuck to this, then the left lane would be rarely used and we'd be underutilizing the available space, right?

Sure, but consider this: if there are cars behind you in the right, then you should pull over.
My non-technical co-founder decided to teach himself coding in the past couple of years.

He can write quite complex logic but he tries to make everything as generic and flexible as it can possibly be and so his code is very hard to read as it invents a lot of concepts. He had to refactor it many times due to bugs or unforeseen technical limitations. Took him months to write. On the other hand, I wrote a script which does a similar thing as his but for a different environment (over a network with added latency, bandwidth limits, network instability) and only covers the essential cases but it only took me about a day to write and has been working without significant flaws since the beginning. Only had like 1 bug for a minor edge case. Also, my code is very short relative to his.

This experience reinforces a rule for coding that I've had since the past 5 years or so. It's basically:

"If you can't explain what your code does, from start to finish, in simple language to a non-technical person (who has the required business domain knowledge), and in a way which answers all questions they might have, then your code is not optimal."

Abstractions should always move you closer to the business domain, not towards some technical domain which you invented and only exists in your head.

The part about "start to finish" is important but doesn't mean "every line". You should have abstractions which may be beyond the non-technical person's understanding but you should be able to explain what each abstraction does at a high level without jumping into each function. You should be able to walk through any major feature by walking through your code, without having to jump around many files and without having to pause constantly to explain abstractions as
shameless plug: https://github.com/0xFA11/GameNetworkingResources
What about the simple, "may I talk to you for a minute in private?" And then clearly state the information that you need to share.
This is "companies do on-call badly".

For the purposes of this exercise presume that our theoretical on-call process is no worse than Google's SRE structure: You are on-call for a 12 hour shift that is more or less aligned with your waking hours, and you are compensated extra for the time you are on-call outside of normal working hours, whether or not you are called in. You are on-call at most one week per month, on average, and usually less.
I really love the website too. Your last paragraph reminded me about this text from this excellent essay Misunderestimating Openness by James Boyle:

> Will we look back on today’s anguish over open content being mined to train neural networks and marvel at how blind we were to the importance of huge, open datasets for democratic, transparent AI? Will we say that the mining of open content is vital if we want models that are less biased than those trained on smaller proprietary datasets? Will we think that open datasets are also vital if we care about barriers to entry in the new world of the data-rich and data-poor?

Source: https://openfuture.eu/paradox-of-open-responses/misunderesti...
At work I always give positive and friendly feedback, regardless of who is asking. I don’t need to put myself in a position in which the receiver didn’t like or misunderstood my feedback the wrong way. What for? I couldn’t care less about their professional development, and I don’t want to be a blocker in their path to promotion.

I do my time, I get paid and move on. Don’t need drama at work.
We need some of these in my neighborhood.
It's probably because I'm just too young to have consciously used "the true early internet", i.e. what people often refer to as 2000-2010 era. Sometimes I get kind of sad I didn't get to experience it.
But at the same time, before covid, I was pretty optimistic about internet's overall impact on society.
I've always thought there was a clever hack to get out of deed restrictions through the use of adverse possession.
I 100% fully agree with you.

I have survived 2 cardiac arrests (almost died) during high-stress times. I've been stable for a few years now, but only after I enacted VERY HARD boundaries around work/life and never cut down on sleep for any reason (among other health-first changes I made). I have a significant increase in cardiac arrythmias any time I don't sleep enough.

I consider myself at this point as having a disability that prevents me from overworking, and I absolutely need my employers to respect that and accommodate that.

I can work normal hours, and that's my offer. If you want to pay me less, that's okay, but I'm not doing on-call unless it's business hours only.

If customers give a shit about uptime at 2am then it's management's responsibility to find people in other time zones to deal with it, or pay extra for people who are willing to sacrifice and risk their health for a customer (I won't take that deal though).
The point isn't to compare random AI art with random human art. The overarching sentiment lately has been that AI art feels bad and has this "Fake" quality to it.

This survey is refuting that argument. AI art can be used in media just like human art and people can't really tell (or care if they can't tell the difference).
Not that I like or agree with the data, but thanks for providing some.

I do recall one of the catchphrases that surfaced around les gilets jaunes: "these people are going on about the end of the world while we're just trying to make it to the end of the month".

It's too bad that doesn't prompt deeper reflection about and anger at just who benefits from such a bifurcation of interest.
That article never says that DOJ sent protestors.

Just that they provided support to those protests which is part of their remit i.e. to reduce conflict by encouraging dialog, mediation as opposed to protesting etc: https://www.justice.gov/crs
And that Amazon didn't stop supporting them suddendly!
The UK has also now passed laws that criminalise hogging the middle or fast lanes on motorways (UK highways). Unfortunately it's not strongly enforced. It feels like a significant cause of congestion during peak hours.
That’s disappointing. So they just don’t care to provide that amount of customer service anymore?

Didn’t Apple have something like this in the Steve Jobs era?
Haha, thanks. I get downvoted just for showing up on this site. I have had to make a dozen different logins over 6-8 years. People just seem to hate my comments for whatever weird reason. (reference phyzome below) ;-P
> The type primed for selective and weaponized enforcement

Theoretically true, but irrelevant because this particular case isn't that.
It was only partially sarcastic (yeah that didn't communicate at all, bad habit on my end), I had googled them but didn't quite understand the winget situation at glance. Thanks for the answer, actually appreciated!
> What would you say to a superior who made a decision that you disagree with, but don't think is worth reversing?

"I don't understand ... it seems it has the consequence of ... My professional opinion in that case would be... and I would advise to... because of... Is there something I'm not seeing here?"

Benefits:

- I'm not faking it.

- I already provide a lot of information up front to limit back-and-forth. This avoids assumptions and also works better for when you WFH.

- The person knows exactly where I stand and where I want to go. It's not chit-chat, it's not politics, it's purely technical and I want to move on the issue.

- If I'm wrong, I can get told right away. If I'm right, it's factual, and we can move on to solving the problem. And if the person's ego/social status is on the line, they can just BS their way out of it, and I'll just add nothing and move on.

- The template drives the conversation enough that they only need a short answer to let us decide if it's worth reversing. And we can conclude on the price / consequence of that and move on if needed.

I'll change that depending on the person. Some people are way better than me, in that case, I'll default to asking what I'm missing because it's likely they see something I don't.

On the opposite, if it's a junior, I'll assume they get it wrong and help them to fix it (unless they can justify it).

And of course, phrasing will depend of how much intimate I am with the person. Good friends will get a playful version, uptight clients will get the more formal one.

Once you have done that several times and people know the routine and the relationship is good, you barely have to speak. You can just nod at something or raise an eyebrow, and start problem solving or get the info.

But note that I can do that also because my clients value my opinion enough, have respect for my professionalism, and also know, because of my past interactions with them, that I focus on the problem to solve rather than blaming.
Wow, this is impressive if actually true. I wonder how accurate their dating methodology is, since they have to do carbon dating on something in that layer, and not on the clay tablet itself.

It does seem strange that the alphabet would have remained isolated for so many hundreds years, and not spread out somewhere else.
I assume the mentioned feedback could be interpreted as critical.

First I'd start by mentioning something they doing well OR something positive about them that relates to their job. Ie they have good attitude or get on good with co workers etc.

Then I would move on to what it was thought needed "some improvement"
Id mention the "positive outcome" that would result if the feedback I was about to give was implemented. I could even tone it down ...with the words "...my opinion ..."

ie My opinion , is if we ( meaning the manager ) where to do "... what ever ..." it could result in this "....more desirable outcome..." I could soften it more by saying .... we tried this at my previous job ... and it gave "...whatever the positive result is "

( Giving effective feedback is a skill. I learnt how to do in a speech training program called "Toastmasters " We had a internal Toastmasters club for the company I worked add ( Not in the US ) with about 30 members. Often the other members where >several levels< above me. Me - a very junior person at the time. So had to give feedback to Senior staff about their speech. )
Which actually works quite well for places like OpenBSD. The lack of a star chamber CoC puts the focus on writing good code.
Any comment on what issues there are with paying somebody to open accounts for you with, I assume- a power of attorney allowing them to do explicitly that?

At that point the only thing at risk is fraudulent use of said POA, and whatever funds are held outside of actual accounts.
A hand-addressed letter with that labeling tends not to be instantly discarded as spam.

Routing mail within large organisations is its own complex problem. What "demand letter" indicates is where the letter should go, and to whose attention it should be brought.

Any organisation of even a fraction the size of Amazon, Inc., will have staff whose job it is to assess the credibility of such claims. Your heuristic is unlikely to be followed by them, and would present significant risks if widely practiced. Courts and juries in particular tend to frown on ignoring such communications.
I've been the on call engineer on my team for 75+% of the last year (most of my team is contractors, new hire not onboarded to on call rotation yet, etc.).

It's not an issue because we don't break prod. I also feel I'm well compensated. When there have been issues at inconvenient hours, my manager has encouraged me to take it easy after resolving the incident. We've also prioritized improving our integration tests and addressing other issues noted during root cause analysis (RCA), which I suspect is why we haven't had any incidents in recent memory.

If on call duties are this frustrating, I'd argue it's team/organizational dysfunction that is the real problem, and bad on call shifts is just one of the symptoms.

Ultimately, somebody needs to be available to fix a production incident. One person suffering from on call duties is better than thousands of paying customers suffering from broken software.
> Speaking for myself, beyond a certain income threshold there has been no substantial quality of life improvement.

I strongly agree with this mindset, and I'd argue that it's pretty well-supported as a phenomenon for most people, if not all. Money is a huge deal up to the point where you can live comfortably and without worrying about the future; beyond that, it doesn't really seem to make anyone happier. That being said, it's still a luxury that isn't at all common for most people, but it doesn't require being a millionaire (at least, not with the current level of inflation).
> what are you really saying here?

that expecting to see the full range of human opinion on any even vaguely controversial topic in a single context is foolish, and that i'm tired of people complaining about "dissidents" not showing up on HN when they clearly do (even if they are (surprise!) in a minority of top-ranked comments.

ps. I never downvote on HN unless someone has actually made a grievous factual error or is being personally abusive.
You have to scroll a kilometer, but the article does finally get around to saying something. I almost gave up.
Culture jamming: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_jamming
Sorry for offending you, sir. I had no intentions of that. I am a pretty simple kind of guy and thought that would help. Have a nice day!
Have you tried https://www.freshrss.org/ ?
> I get that leaving the left lane clear for passing is the convention, but is it actually optimal? If everyone stuck to this, then the left lane would be rarely used and we'd be underutilizing the available space, right?

Right, it depends on traffic volume. There are situations where "keep right except to pass" obviously doesn't help - e.g. streets with regular left-hand turns and congested highways, most notably.
Also, missing a comma.
Your pictures give insight into such a small world, individual freaking transistors on a CPU chip! Reading textbooks and wiki is one thing, but seeing silicon spliced up and photographed up close is another. Very interesting read, and very well presented too, thank you.
Or the worst of highway inventions: "exit left in 1 mile".

There's almost an entirely separate ruleset for urban highways vs rural highways. Rural highways it's dead simple... stay right except while actively passing. Only 2 lanes to be in and not really many corner cases.

Urban highways still have the same general "stay to the right" but suddenly there are a lot of exceptions "except when passing, except when exiting left or taking the left fork soon, except when trying to get to a spot where you can even start to pass the block of semis in the right 2/3 lanes, except when you are trying to get out of the lane that force-exits in 1 mile". Inevitably someone will be going fast enough to be mad you spent 5 seconds in a lane that wasn't the rightmost open one but, unlike rural highways, it doesn't always mean you were actually in the wrong lane.
...Because there are no shady accountants or lawyers more motivated by a quick buck to be made, with the wherewithal to stay reasonably distant from anything blatantly capable of blowing back on them. Surely.
Threat Modelling for Everyone Everywhere
C macros are just a text preprocessor. You could run the C preprocessor on a text file and have the result be Python code. Comments might be a little tricky, but it's doable. Or you can run a text file through a general-purpose one like m4.

For sum types we have enums, and for product types we have tuples (or namedtuples or dataclasses). Sugar could be done with decorators or metaclasses.

For Lisp macros, there's macropy and Hissp.

https://www.gnu.org/software/m4/

https://threeofwands.com/algebraic-data-types-in-python/

https://github.com/lihaoyi/macropy

https://github.com/gilch/hissp
Interesting. I used to work mainly with european developers (dutch, french, germans, russians, spaniards, polish, etc.) and I always could speak my mind, and others would do so. No BS, no avoiding direct confrontation. But more recently I have been working with ex-faang american developers and I don’t like it. It’s not that they are like indians and the like, but definitely not as direct and straightforward as europeans.