skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is it guys, the most valuable company in the world is selling Linux desktop, after decades of speculating finally the year of Linux desktop is 2025!

Joking aside, personally will buy this workstation in a heartbeat if I have the budget to spare, one in the home and another in the office.

Currently I have an desktop/workstation for AI workloads with similar 128GB RAM that I bought few years back that cost around USD5K without the NVIDIA GPU that I bought earlier for about USD1.5K, with a total of about USD6.5K without a display monitor. This the same price of NeXT workstation (with a monitor) when it's sold back in 1988 without adjusting for inflations (now around USD18K) but it is more than 200 times faster in CPU speed and more than 1000 times RAM capacity than the original 25 MHz CPU and 4 MB RAM, respectively. The later updated version of NeXT has graphic accelerator with 8 MB VRAM, since the workstation has RTX 2080 it is about 1000 times more. I believe the updated NeXT with graphic accelerator is the one that used to develop original Doom software [1].

If NVIDIA can sell the Project Digits Linux desktop at USD3K with similar or more powerful setup configurations, it's going to be a winner and probably can sell by truckloads. It seems to has NeXT workstation vibe to it that used to develop the original WWW and Doom software. Hopefully it will be used to develop many innovative software but now using open source Linux software eco-system not proprietary one.

The latest Linux kernel now has real-time capability for more responsive desktop experience and as saying goes, good things come to those who wait.

[1] NeXT Computer:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT_Computer
Hey, thanks for flagging this. I had the sign flipped for Earth's axial tilt. Fixed now!
Mitchell Hashimoto (founder of Hashicorp [0]) did something similar to this, but to find open slots in courses he wanted in college according to his blog [1]. You're on the right track.

From the linked page:
"As I began college, I noticed that the poor technical design of the registration system made it incredibly difficult to get the set of classes I wanted. I developed automated registration software that would detect open slots in the full courses, and notify me via text message. While my friends were spending hours every day refreshing course schedules hoping to get into a full class, I was just waiting for a text message. And I always got into the classes, because a human refreshing a browser can't beat my software that was checking thousands of times per hour. Automation wins again."

I thought I had read somewhere that he turned it into a product while he was in college, but that wasn't mentioned there.

[0] https://www.hashicorp.com
[1] https://mitchellh.com/writing/automation-obsessed
So the police budget is 2B.

The fire budget is ~800M. Pretty significant by itself.

You keep throwing around this 23M number like a 3% change would make a material impact on 3 fast-spreading huge fires in worst-case-scenario conditions.

What do you think the budget would need to be to handle this? In a scenario that goes deep, such as how water pressure is low because of how much demand is coming from so many hydrants? 100M more? 200M? 500M? 1B?

Is committing to that much more annually the best solution here?
Phoneless events are out there. This Never Happened bans phones from every event. I just went to Proper NYE which wasn’t a TNH event but had Lane 8 (label owner) on main stage and there was significantly less phones than other artists.
"Einstein" references are always incredibly ironic considering how much of a socialist the guy was.
So you're saying you want leaders who address climate change. Bad leaders exacerbate climate change.

As the planet becomes hotter and drier, you will see more fires, unless you address climate change.

China makes all your stuff, including bibles, that's why there is more air pollution there. China is rapidly expanding it's renewables deployment and that will improve their air quality and resilience..
> We will have more salespeople next year because we really need to explain to people exactly the value that we can achieve with AI. So, we will probably add another 1,000 to 2,000 salespeople in the short term.”

So why can’t AI explain that?
I would think Salesforce customers are more about sales then development.
Their AI can’t sell?
Seat belts and even vaccines are much more restricted in the kinds of side effects they can cause :

https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html
I took a look at a map of the Eaton fire and its evacuation area and warning area, then looked up several houses for sale in those areas on Redfin. Redfin includes a section that lists environmental risks.

In the northern parts of Altadena it says the fire risk is 33% chance of a fire within the next 30 years. Going south toward Pasadena it gets lower. At the southern parts of the evacuation zone I'm seeing it mostly range from "minimal" to numbers under 1%. "Minimal" is the category for the places with the least risk, and is described as "Unlikely to be in a wildfire in the next 30 years".

In the warning zone south of that, which looks like to goes south to the 210, so far all I've found is "Minimal".
they're public. After searching for "university of washington student web service" thr homepage literally links to https://ws.admin.washington.edu/student/swagger/index.html
> The National Guard - along with thousands of firefighters (many of them prisoners working for $10 a day or less) - have been deployed to help tackle the conflagration.

I hope their compensation is a little more than $10 a day! By the looks of the fire, those guys/gals are heros.
For better or worse it is total dollars for IT/Software salaries vs total dollars for exec salaries. And in this case software salaries is very large number that need to be cut.
> Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, slammed Bass in an X post claiming the mayor slashed the Los Angeles Fire Department’s budget, despite the high risk of wildfires in the region, and raised questions about reports that some fire hydrants in the Pacific Palisades had run dry.

It's kind of rich that a local billionaire would complain about this. I'm going to guess that the $23M was cut due to budget shortfalls. Maybe if the billionaires and multi-millionaires in the area were willing to pay their fair share that wouldn't have happened.
Depends on the impact. In some cases you do, so a class action lawsuit gets some traction.
Bad for Parents: It won't catch people failing to be sensitive enough or favoring their own network with less stringent oversight.

Bad for Content Creators: It won't be consistent, so largely it will be harsh to established players in predicable and game-able ways, while new market entrants will experience either statistical randomness (influenced by time and geographic demographics) or a bias against them in favor of established content.

Still, SOME of that would help a little, if only as a second sort of data channel to compare to other effects.

AI moderation will continue to be game-able garbage until true AI, at which point, please just plug me into the matrix and give me the pill.
Having a lawyer send a letter isn't an automatic win. Once you turn it into a legal threat you force them to escalate to their legal team. Reasonable lawyers would likely roll their eyes and talk the university back from this weird move, but you're not guaranteed reasonable lawyers on the other end. If they feel threatened they might start looking even deeper into into contracts you signed as a way to protect themselves or as legal leverage to silence you with further threats.

I've witnessed a couple cases where things went from hiring a lawyer, to sending a letter, to a stalemate where legal bills started getting so expensive that the only winners were the lawyers. When you're dealing with a big bureaucracy you can't count on them giving up at the first sight of a letter from a lawyer.

The legal route also takes time and locks any further conversations into the speed of both sides' lawyers. Time matters in this case because this student needs to get registered for classes, so anything that could stall that process needs to be weighed carefully.

I wouldn't be surprised if this issue magically goes away as soon as the publicity comes around to local news media and/or some alumni with connections.
Sad news. He did a lot for Debian and Ubuntu.
Honestly who would want to work for them anyway?
My bank has an indicator on the app help page that says "yes, you really are speaking to us" or "anyone calling you and pretending to be us is a fraudster".
By tribes, you mean tribes that run casinos?
I can't wait to read that LinkedIn job announcement post.
I never noticed this until scrolling through this image gallery, but the design of these ads consistently and prominently highlights the first letters of "More Doctors," which was almost certainly intended to visually reinforce the M.D. association.
"Incredible AI productivity" translation: we want to squeeze more work out of our existing workforce for even more super-profits!!!

Welcome to the meat grinder.
Show HN: Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server for ClickHouse
Everywhere I've worked at that had some kind of Salesforce integration, that integration seemed almost incomprehensibly complex or a source of endless problems, and often both. But I've never been (nor wanted to be) very closely involved with any such integrations.

Is Salesforce garbage? Is that just how CRM systems are? Is everybody just doing it wrong? What's the deal?
They apparently paid $20 million for the use of Einstein's image: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-27/salesforc...
Regardless if they all have, that's irrelevant to the point being argued. The articles themselves are not obscene.
> He's selling AI hype

AI hype is exactly what I'm talking about.

I imagine if you demonstrate that you can have AI agents as viciously competitive COOs, CFOs, and CTOs, who never need time off, never sleep, it would be something that would set Wall Street on fire.
I benefited from a UW CSE spot trade in like 2010 and didn't get in trouble for it at the time.
So no lessons learned?
Sorry friend, may your new place be even better.
One common mistake: not playing Factorio and understanding how to scale, maintain, and debug a large factory with friends >>

(this is a half-joke... iykyk)
> It was a different time and people genuinely did not know the harms of smoking like we do now

My grandmother (born in 1928, started smoking at 13) said that, growing up, people casually referred to cigarettes as "cancer sticks".
What is that germane to?
"fair share" is always defined as more than they pay now, I've noticed.
I was in a wildfire once. I was in a grocery store and I didn’t see anything burning. 2 minutes into the store, another person came in saying they saw smoke a few blocks away. I immediately left the store and went back to the car. Before I could leave the parking lot, everything around me was on fire, there was smoke so dense I couldn’t see anything beyond 10 feet and I genuinely thought I was going to die, if not in the fire, then in an accident. Wildfires move very fast and every second is precious.
Stay calm, they will be the ones that will loose a lot and they will end up spending a lot ot time and money to clean-up their mess.

You will get plenty of job offers out of your post, and you don't need their useless degree anyway.

Universities are specialized in bullying from their admins (and often faculty) that have way too much time on their hands.
That's interesting - I read something similar in Bell's 'A primer of infinitesimal analysis' where he said the price for 'Smooth World' infinitestimals is giving up the Law of Excluded Middle (LEM).

Don't really understand why (he said something about unconstrained use of LEM allows discontinuous functions...)

Is there any link to Brouwer's Intuitionism where LEM is rejected too (?!)

Ah it's all an interesting can of worms...
lol exactly
What happens if the majority of the stress isn't work based?
Do their customers value sales more than engineering? It seems like a self-consistent pitch if so.
I do not believe that statements which are obviously opinions need or ought be prefaced with “in my opinion”. I feel that that is poor style. The irony that I’ve done that in this comment (I do not believe…; I feel…) is not lost on me.
Do you need an account to register for classes? Can't you just register in-person like I did back when we roamed the earth with dinosaurs?
yep salesforce has quite the track record of making bold marketing claims until the next hot thing shows up.
My Ban from X Is About One Thing: Elon Musk Controlling the Flow of Information
> totalling almost $2 billion. The LAPD's budget for one fiscal year is larger than most country's GDPs

In case anyone was curious, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi... suggests that ~17 countries have a GDP of less than $2 billion per year. Seeing as how there are 193+ countries, this means that the LAPD budget exceeds the GDP of fewer than 10% of countries. (The median country GDP is ~$50 billion per year.)

For some extra context: while these 17 countries include some very poor countries, the primary reason that they have such small GDPs is their small population. Their combined population is approximately the same as the city of Los Angeles.
AI has seem to chip away at Business administration jobs. Lots of people can’t find jobs in this area anymore
You know them enough to claim they generally are telling lies on a regular basis?
Right. When many jobs could be reduced to interacting with a keyboard and a camera/microphone connected to a computer, I would suggest that software engineers are not at the front of the queue to be automated away. In the AI vision we're definitely there, but we have lots of company.
Doesn't seem to extend to acquisitions like Slack - https://slack.com/careers
I still remember the first one I was supposed to go to. They didn't tell you the location until the day of.

It was a high school gymnasium.

Didn't work out so well.
There is build123d too

https://github.com/gumyr/build123d
During my last job I have formulated what for me are the 2 unquestionable metrics to care about when trying to build long-term maintanable systems:

- Consistency (fully agree with the article here)

- Control

Control to me means that you have to work extremely hard to lose the ability to change the parts you care about. For example:

- Do not leak libraries and frameworks far into your business logic. At some point you want to introduce a new capabilty but say the class/type you re-used from a library makes it really awkward. Now you are faced with a huge refactor. The more logic, the purer and simpler the code should be. Ideally stdlib only.

- Do not build magic, globally shared test harnesses. Helpers yes, but if you give up control over the environment a test runs is / setting up fixtures, test data etc. you will run into a world of pain due to dependencies between tests and especially the test data.

- Do not let libraries dictate your application architecture. E.g. I always separate the web framework layer (controllers, views etc.) from the service and data layers.

- Consistency plays a major part here. If you introduce 3 libraries to do the same thing you have basically given up control over that dependencies and refactors in the future will be much harder.
That seems like it might actually work though.

A company as a something like a collection of guilds coordinated by AI facilitators would be really fascinating.
This is the negative part of bullshit jobs that become harmful to others once their existence starts to be threatened!
"Here's an AI Agentforce that can do all your sales for you!"

"We have to hire thousands of salespeople to sell this AI agent"

Something doesn't compute
UW cs student - most current cs students would still know that this would get you in trouble.
Their ultimate agent product strategy feels like reducing cost of sales... by automating salespeople.

I have doubts that will ever happen, but who knows?

Sales folks are highly-compensated, so even making a few of them redundant (or making existing salespeople more efficient) would be a big win for companies (Salesforce's customers).
Ok, I'm a bit surprised to see no comments here, I guess everyone is waiting to read the paper till after the work day? :)

I thought it was interesting, iiuc the proposal is that you can design a protocol like Paxos that allows you to guarantee that some replica will win in the future, I'm not sure how useful this is in practice though, since you won't know that your (you being the client) writes are winning until after the fact, and no replica could give you the true state until convergence. I find the claim that this represents partial progress slightly misleading, but interesting nonetheless.
The problem with that though is that the overall budget includes big ticket items like pensions and overtime. And cuts often directly are from live services. So even though it’s 2% of the overall budget, the cut could still be significant to the availability of firefighters and crucial things like response times.
NowiPass
Indeed, it's marketing slop as a pretense for a hiring freeze.
lolz.

Having worked at a university your job isn't to get shit done. Your job is to make managers happy, usually by attending meetings, being knowledgeable, polite and always available. Your manager's job is to inflate headcount for the executives, so their empires grow and their ranking among other executives improves.

People at the higher levels literally use words like empire and fiefdom (of x) to refer to departments instead of the departments name.

The first few years I didn't understand this, so I would suggest automations and process improvements at meetings, my manager was always unhappy with me when I did this. I was literally told once that there was value in a human doing a task when I suggested we automate something that could be done with about 5 lines of code.

Eventually I understood and improved. I would automate some tasks silently and then use the freed-up time to prepare for meetings and generally being a better team member. After starting doing this I frequently got highlighted as one of the top 3 team members.
Mind if I ask what AI tooling you are using and how it's increased your productivity?
replicad
But the second those smaller prototype apps become big enough to need to scale or be maintained, you’re back at the same problem.

The whole thing it gets you then is “faster experimentation”, which was something that was /already fast/ if you use modern tools of the day. 1 week vs 2 weeks for a prototype app may build you more prototypes but it doesn’t help when you can’t scale them.

It does smooth some of the processes though - AI is maybe helpful for cognitive augmentation for coders, but it’s not going to be building you apps worth a damn.
If you manage to have them tell you that in an email that will be the jackpot for you.
Let's assume they do. They value sales, they believe Salesforce's pitch that the SF AI will reduce their sales cost.

Yet Salesforce themselves is hiring more people vs simply dogfooding their own AI agents.
It appears we agree that the details of the cuts matters.
You are right. I didn't think about 3rd parties creating accounts on a service they don't control.
“I’m not just the president.” Pause. “I’m a client too.”

Pretty old trick.
Having a gun in your top drawer of your bedside table is not the same thing as holding it in your hand and pointing it at someone. Your analogy is a massive stretch, to say the least.
One source is the news stations here in LA, eg https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/california-wildfires/pali...
Upon testing: no, it doesn't even know it's an ESP board, just some "USB Single Serial" device.
Yeah, a small amount of "organic" mischief isn't bad IMO, but it's problematic on a larger scale.
I presume it works to have the new shiny thing that execs have vaguely heard about. It only has to exist while the hype cycle is at its peak.

I'm surprised there hasn't been a Salesforce AR/VR.
Wildfires, unfortunately, have a way of "not caring in the slightest about what people think of them." Throw in the winds of southern CA, and a wildfire can go from "freshly started" to "a few thousand acres" by the time anyone manages to get their boots on and equipment started. You don't fight wildfires in 60-100mph winds. Firebombers can't fly in those winds (or at night, since it's close to terrain), and even if they did, that sort of wind will scatter your drop before it has a chance to do anything useful.

> With satellite technology, it should be possible to identify wildfires as they begin and immediately deploy hundreds if not 1000+ planes to dump water from the Pacific and reservoirs, while drones go ahead of them to confirm that an out-of-control fire is actually in progress.

Great, you've just put out the fire, and kicked the can for next time. Even if it did work that way, it doesn't fix the root problem, which is simply:

Many western forests need to burn. Not in the sort of uncontrolled canopy fires we see with this sort of situation, but a lower, "clean the brush out, candle off some weaker trees, and open up the seeds" sort of fire. The problem is, for most of the past century, we haven't been allowing them to burn. Wildfire fighting in the US really ramped up and became a capable force with the post-WWII surplus - Jeeps, bombers that could be bought for nothing and converted to fire bombers, cheap spotting aircraft. So, for about 80 years, we've been fighting fires - or, explained differently, "We've been letting fire load build up for 80 years." When those areas light, with most of a century worth of buildup, they go off like a bomb, and your option in high winds is to "get out of the way."

You cannot allow endless fuel growth in a forest without consequences - and we're out of runway on that. All the aerial firefighting in the world won't fix that problem, because it's not the problem that needs fixing.
Given that no one really understands what Salesforce actually does, much less what value it provides, why would it need intelligent engineers?

The company seems like a gigantic hot air balloon, so it might as well use "AI".
I lol’d at 30% boost in productivity w/AI.

Which one? All of them I’ve used produce incorrect code 90% of time.
Big orgs have plenty of people that need to justify their salaries, I mean it, I'm 100% convinced you could fire half the staff of a big organization, going heavy with the management roles and lighter on operational ones and the company would become more productive and efficient.

And the higher the people in the pyramid are the better they are at selling their ideas in their neverending quest for recognition, fat bonuses and promotions.

And once they get them, more often than not by doing pointless and even harmful work, they can then leverage it by jumping to another company.

Gervais' principle at its finest.
I survived multiple "atmospheric rivers" unscathed.

And a super typhoon on vacation.
This is not the right calculation. Housing units per household makes more sense, as the number of people per housing unit has been shrinking since we started collecting data as peoples preferences change. From what I can tell it peaked in 2011 at 1.17 and has declined to 1.12 since, and considering that we expect some vacancy from moving, condemned units, and people prefer certain areas and dont like many others, the trend does not support that we have enough housing. Not to mention the prices clearly show demand is there