skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So the question becomes how do you get to the interview and stand out among the hundreds of people applying for the same position?

I don’t have a good answer for that as a software developer. I looked for bog standard remote development jobs as a Plan B with 20+ years of development and deep AWS experience last year and the year before and it is a shit show out there now.

Luckily, I have deep experience in my niche - strategic cloud consulting + app dev and a stint working at a BigTech company in the consulting department that opened a lot of doors.

I think the play may be to stay in analytics and get into a well known company.

Also, make sure you are taking on assignments with bigger “scope” and higher “impact”. Don’t be a ticket taker.
> Twitter, which was arguably the hub of wokeness

This is a fake news. Research shows that Twitter algorithmic amplification favored right-wing politics even before Musk made it even worse. See: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2025334119

> On the other hand, the people on the far left have only themselves to blame; they could tilt Twitter back to the left tomorrow if they wanted to.

Being this much clueless in pg's position is not possible. I can only assume he's consciously lying. He can see front row what Musk does with Twitter and how the "free speech" he's supposedly defending is actually "what Musk likes to hear speech", and he perfectly knows Musk is strongly aligned with the far right that he supports however he can all over the world. See for example: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/europe/article/2025/01/10/musk-dou...
Please reformulate your argument, and I will check back tomorrow:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNSHZG9blQQ

LLMs are rules based search engines with higher dimension vector spaces encoding related topics. There is nothing intelligent about these algorithms, except the trick ones play on oneself interpreting well structured nonsense.

It is stunting kids development, as students often lack the ability to intuitively reason when they are being misled. "How many R's in 'Strawberry'?" is a classic example exposing the underlying pattern recognition failures. =3
The problem comes from deciding what's true. It's factually true to say that a higher percentage of black people than white people are convicted felons. It's also grossly negligent to describe that as a cause ("black people have higher tendencies to become criminals") than as an effect ("centuries of systemic racism held higher numbers of black people in poverty, and poverty highly correlates to the kind of criminal behavior that gets you arrested, and also lower quality legal representation, which makes it more likely that the next generation will also be poor; lather, rise, repeat").

Is it a lie to say "black people are more likely to be felons"? No, but if that's all you have to say on the subject, then you're probably a jerk and shouldn't be talking about it at all.

TL;DR I'm weary of people saying things that are factually true on the face of them, but that utterly distort the conversation. See also: "scientists don't know how old the universe is" (but have a broad consensus of a narrow band of values), "vaccines can harm you" (so can water), "it's getting cooler in some places" (global climate change doesn't add X degrees to every location uniformly), etc. etc. etc.
I had a cubicle setup next to a set of west-facing windows with no blinds. My first day working there, in the afternoon, I couldn't read my monitors (old office monitors that probably peaked at 200 nits) and I promptly took the moving boxes and used the cardboard to block off the window so I could get some work done.

Someone promptly told me to take down my unsightly cardboard, and promised to install window blinds. In a month, blinds were installed, but they were the perforated blinds which did not cut the glare to an acceptable level. More complaints were raised, and then window film was installed.

These half-measures didn't work when faced with the direct view of the sun, and I would receive no more special treatment. I basically abandoned my desk in the afternoons, working in an empty desk in the interior of the office. It was also more than ten degrees cooler; the temperature at my desk would routinely reach 78 degrees.
Oh man … stay in your lane. Capitalism. The human condition can seem very hopeless, for sure.
not really for paper though... We've largely solved efficient recycling of even complex mixed paper/plastic/coatings, a piece like this should be less expensive, and not shipped 1/2 way around the world to a market that has massive amounts of both new and old paper.
“Costs” often ignore externalities like environmental damage and inequality. Landfilling or dumping plastic may be cheaper now, but it shifts the true cost — centuries of pollution —onto vulnerable communities today. There is a reason the clothing dumps are in Ghana and Chile, rather than wealthier nations like the US or Germany.

If the price to companies profiting from plastics included exteralities I could possibly agree with you but as it stands these costs are normally paid by disadvantaged individuals or marginalized ecosystems.
Author here: Thanks for the explanation. Intuitively it does make sense that anything done during "post-training" (RLHF in our case) to make the model adhere to certain (set of) characteristics would bring the entropy down.

It is indeed alarming that the future 'base' models would start with more flattened logits as the de-facto. I personally believe that once this enshittification is recognised widely (could already be the case, but not recognized) then the training data being more "original" will become more important. And the cycle repeats! Or I wonder if there is a better post-training method that would still withhold the "creativity"?

Thanks for the RLHF explanation in terms of BPE. Definitely easier to grasp the concept this way!
And they'll be able to run Doom too.
I still have my boxed copy (along with everything Loki produced) in a big box in the garage.
Multi-armed bandits make a big assumption that effectiveness is static over time. What can happen is that if they tip traffic slightly towards option B at a time when effectiveness is higher (maybe a sale just started) B will start to overwhelmingly look like a winner and get locked in that state.

You can solve this with propensity scores, but it is more complicated to implement and you need to log every interaction.
I remember during covid and after when we had nearby wildfires. even during a mass shooting event a few years back how useful twitter was for realtime information sharing between public and agencies. There was a few years I'd regularly know things before radio/news picked them up. I also remember how during major world events twitter would explode in volume and reactions to the point third party systems would struggle (I once upon a time worked on one of those third party systems)

Now I struggle to find regular updates and half the accounts I used to follow are idle. By the time that third party twitter processor I had worked for shut down, the cadence of posts were so scheduled it was obviously driven by bots and not organic reactions. Even major world events would be gamed by bots as fast as real reactions which had significantly decreased on their own.

I haven't found a replacement to be fair, but I definitely see the enshittification of it from an incredibly useful short form broadcast channel to an engagement-gamified advertising megaphone.
Physics and Feynman's Diagrams [pdf]
You could write to a separate header file and use a script to copy to the right place only when the header was modified.
Fine-Structure Constant
Woodward is the intelligence community type of professional who knows not to ask why 4 of 5 Watergate arrested were CIA.
Not sure about 'I can do it because I am morally superior'. Is it required to be morally superior to have an opposing view?

> other folks can't because they don't get it like I do

His point of view undoubtedly resonates with 'some folks'.
Boards will sometimes write a severance package into a CEO's contract with an eye towards a possible future sale. When the company is acquired, the CEO will most likely lose their job. The Board thus wants to ensure that the CEO doesn't have a financial incentive to block a sale. A good severance package can increase shareholder value. (This is just a comment about severance packages in general, I have no idea what happened at Sonos.)
You (or other people) will thank yourself in a few months/years when refactoring the code, knowing that they don't need to worry about missing edge cases, because all known edge cases are covered with these non regression tests.
if you give more visibility to one group of people's speech, that means you are giving less visibility to another group of people's speech. Which is just another way of saying you are censoring their speech.

Not at all - the difference here is choice. You can choose to pay or not to pay. And if you don't pay you are still seen.

There was no choice wrt visibility under the old regime, WrongSpeak was censored - you couldn't pay to be heard.

Now that doesn't mean the current situation is optimal, but it at least allows for the possibility of diversity of opinion. Left and Right can both choose to pay.
> Having worked in an all-glass tower and also a "normal" office building, my personal experience is that the natural light that giant windows let in and the external views that they afford are both phenomenal improvements to the atmosphere. It's really a much more pleasant environment to work in. The only catch is that the interior or window treatment design needs to consider glare from sunlight directly hitting computer screens and/or eyes.

having worked in both well designed and poorly designed glass towers, I can say this: I personally appreciate a well-designed not-glass-waterfall. Being in Seattle, a lot of new towers have gone up that are just sheet glass panels. I've worked in various towers in Seattle and I've come to prefer some of the older style ones. The oldest of them do have issues with light, I'll fully agree with that. There is a difference between that and the absolutely insane floor to ceiling glass panels that make up some of these offices.

Glass towers just... They make monkey brain go scream on the inside and they're just aesthetically displeasing on the outside. They all look alike at one level and become hard to distinguish from one another. I hate walking through Downtown Seattle trying to remember which of the badjillion glass monoliths is the one I want -- unless I'm looking for one of the more unique buildings that is steepled brick and granite.
In "The Age of the Essay"[0], Paul writes:

"An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.

"Figure out what? You don't know yet. And so you can't begin with a thesis, because you don't have one, and may never have one. An essay doesn't begin with a statement, but with a question. In a real essay, you don't take a position and defend it. You notice a door that's ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what's inside.

"If all you want to do is figure things out, why do you need to write anything, though? Why not just sit and think? Well, there precisely is Montaigne's great discovery. Expressing ideas helps to form them. Indeed, helps is far too weak a word. Most of what ends up in my essays I only thought of when I sat down to write them. That's why I write them."

So there's your answer. PG is thinking "This is something I don't know; I should write an essay to figure out an answer."

It also makes sense to me that when he writes an essay connected to an area he knows well (like startups), the result is maybe full of unique perspectives and is broadly insightful/useful. Whereas an essay on wokeness isn't likely to bring much to the table to anyone who has been paying attention to diversity for several years.

Maybe it's still useful to engineers who've been living under a rock and haven't paid any attention at all; I don't know.

[0] https://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html
There are often product limitations
The comparison between religious fanaticism and wokeness is incomplete. One big difference is that religion can be deeply meaningful to an individual without them needing to express their beliefs publicly - religion can often be an entirely private affair. Many a loud preacher of religion has retired to a private life of quiet worship. Wokeness would have no meaning at all as a private affair, it's entirely based around shaming others in the public discourse. That's why PG's proposed solution of "allowing expression of beliefs without enforcement" might work for creating religious tolerance, but will not work for combatting priggish wokeism. If you don't allow their policing of words, there's nothing left to wokeism.
Your way of thinking definitely isn't entirely incorrect, and I think a lot of times people forget that prices, while they can certainly have an arbitrary component, are largely driven by market forces, which at the very least will tell you something about the supply and demand of a product. However, I disagree with this:

> And all these additional costs likely make it the "wrong" decision since they likely contribute to carbon emissions or otherwise wasteful use of the earth's resources

I think this doesn't often hold true, yes, an efficient market begets economically efficient resource allocation, but there's more to environmentalism than efficient resource allocation. Your example is good, it's certainly more economically efficient to use less petroleum when transporting goods, and that efficiency can be reflected in final costs. But let's look at another example:

Say you're buying lumber to build a house. There's a local lumber farm that sustainably grows and cuts down trees. Since its close, transportation costs (and associated emissions) are low - largely coming from amortized land costs and labor. However there's another company that buys cheap land from farmers in the Amazon, with cheaper labor, ships it up via freight, and sells it for marginally cheaper. The costs in the latter example are largely driven by transportation - and while cheaper, has a significantly larger carbon impact.
Applesoft BASIC only uses the first two characters (!) to distinguish one variable name from another. WAGON and WATER would be the same.

(page 7)

https://mirrors.apple2.org.za/Apple%20II%20Documentation%20P...
> In fact there's an even more ambitious goal: is there a way to prevent any similar outbreak of aggressively performative moralism in the future — not just a third outbreak political correctness, but the next thing like it?

Yes. It requires the willpower to disengage from the performative point scoring of internet discourse. Most good conversation must now happen in private for many reasons, much of that has to do with the technology PG himself has previously supported.

Presently, you are seeing social media forking into red and blue (x and bsky and fb and truth social). This is bonkers. A superior format for discussion is a place like HN which is tightly (and opaquely) moderated. Another great development is the use of 'community notes' which, for all its imperfections, is superior to straight censorship.

Ultimately I'd like to see people like PG invest in high quality journalism where the mission is a dispassionate reporting of the best-available facts, supported where possible with data, and presented in such a way as to demonstrate transparency.
Codestral 25.01 by Mistral.ai
You could tax companies using AI more.
And there I was, reading a comment earlier today about how HN is better than the other places because it prefers technical articles over "politics".
Funny, I was thinking this was a "go all in or Wayland" and stop using X.

But I already did quit, remobed my X ID a few months ago.
I'm assuming you're exaggerating for effect at least a little but with that caveat I couldn't agree more. CS Lewis has a great argument for this in his introduction to Athanasius' On the Incarnation. Paraphrasing his argument: Time naturally filters out the nonsense and what we're left with are the books that are worth reading by virtue of the fact that they have stood the test of time. Truth or at least the closest we can get to it naturally bubbles up to the surface over time.

https://thecslewis-studygroup.org/the-c-s-lewis-study-group/...
Are you asking on a public forum, on how to get around using a product for a commercial setting by using the non-commercial version of the product?
"Woke" was originally an AAVE term, popular in the midcentury civil rights era and beyond. Literally meaning "awake [to what's happening to you and your community]," as opposed to being ignorant and asleep. Not really a statement about your own behavior so much as an acknowledgement of what other people are doing to you—it just meant you're well-informed.

Perhaps not a coincidence that reactionaries have now co-opted black slang to mean "things minorities do that I don't like."
I imagine if you polled all HN users vastly more would sympathise with this essay than not. But the YC flag (and voting) system still seems relatively straightforward, and consequently enables small groups of activists to have quite a significant capability to censor (or promote) topics/comments.

This is one reason I think community notes style algorithms is where we'll probably see pretty much all community voting/moderation head over time. It's just objectively better since it basically fixes this 'glitch' in straightforward systems.
Which sounds pretty great because you could make a whole career off of being the contractor that comes in to fix it when the jr devs who only know LLM prompting can't fix it.
Why does woke like set people off like this?

Someone should study the anti woke they way these people focus on woke so much. I don't get it? If it's truly just words why are so bothered by them, let them go for the worthless words they are.
Demo of World Sports Cars Editor from 1998 [video]
He doesn't argue it's unimportant. If you took that away from the essay you didn't read it closely enough because it contains sentences like:

"College students larp. It's their nature. It's usually harmless. But larping morality turned out to be a poisonous combination."

If you're describing something as poisonous, especially if it's the behavior of a large group of people, then you're saying it's important.
As someone who doesn't like to see history lost via "rebase" and "squashing" branches, I have had to think through some of these things, since my personal preferences are often trampled on by company policy.

I have only been in one place where "rebase" is used regularly, and now that I'm a little more familiar with it, I don't mind using it to bring in changes from a parent branch into a working branch, if the working branch hasn't been pushed to origin. It still weirds me out somewhat, and I don't see why a simple merge can't just be the preferred way.-

I have, however, seen "squashing" regularly (and my current position uses it as well as rebasing) -- and I don't particularly like it, because sometimes I put in notes and trials that get "lost" as the task progresses, but nonetheless might be helpful for future work. While it's often standard to delete "squashed" branches, I cannot help but think that, for history-minded folks like me, a good compromise would be to "squash and keep" -- so that the individual commits don't pollute the parent branch, while the details are kept around for anyone needing to review them.

Having said that, I've never been in a position where I felt like I need to "forcibly" push for my preferences. I just figure I might as well just "go with the flow", even if a tiny bit of me dies every time I squash or rebase something, or delete a branch upon merging!
> he did destroy several political dynasties by now: Romneys, Clintons, Bushes, some argue even Obama's minions are dead in the water

This isn’t vindictive, though. In some cases it was straight-up competition.

> If Zuck insufficiently bends the knee, that's what's going to happen

This is transactional, possibly corruptly so. But it’s not really revenge as much as exerting control. If there were nothing Zuckerberg could reasonably do to avoid Trump’s wrath on account of what Zuck did in 2020, that would be vindictiveness.
I agree with this. At some point you need to work on a hard project, with minimal support, for an extended period of time. The skills you'll learn will be indispensable. Open source can help, but it's hard to replicate being immersed in a difficult role for 40 hours per week.

The more important thing is that you have a genuine interest in the field, which should take you where you need to go. But without at least a small amount of hard software experience you'll be stuck at an intermediate level.
Which encrypted cloud storage with lifetime offers can you recommend?
It is important to me that the cloud storage is encrypted. I would like to store important files long-term.
It’s interesting to me that a certain type of person is so susceptible to buying into this fable of wokeness, especially when it pertains to universities. Almost like there is a woke mind virus, but it’s not infecting the people they think it is.

I attended university in the mid 2010s, so close to peak “wokeness”, and I never witnessed or heard of anything like what pg is describing. In my experience it was totally fine to hold just about any political/ethical view as long as you were a decent human being to your fellow classmates. There certainly was no political correctness police forcing us to assimilate.
True things which make you a jerk (to some) shouldn't be censored to avoid "distorting the conversation". Respondents can explain the context.
What is the "appropriate amount of risk"? Please be specific. How do you quantify that? Should politicians decide that rather than shareholders, Board members, and management?
Cardboard furniture brought to mind Frank Gehry:

https://www.vitra.com/en-us/product/wiggle?srsltid=AfmBOooT-...

Expressing patronage of sustainability is emotionally equivalent to expressing patronage of artistry. Functionally a $10 chair from Goodwill will support a person equally well (and also be an expression of patronage for a person with options).
The real frustrating part is that workers who were hired remotely are not being granted funds to relocate. The company has basically responded, "well you can choose to leave." On a positive note, they did (thankfully) give some lead time before enforcement started, which has made job searching a bit easier.
You also get car and truck exhaust, insects, dust....
Thank you. Yes this was my exact vision for it. Like a spider's web so that you can easily see which objections to any claims. And yes with some kind of voting feature. I just figured this would be an easy place to start and see if people were interested in it.
What are some true things you cannot say? Enumerate some, please.
Gentrified is one thing, while rule 34 is another, while. the misuse...

"One of the guys had brought a comic book porn magazine of the ******."

The current system protects the rights of the owner for a while, and the opportunity for nefarious use by trolls, while it prevents the innovation for other beneficial uses like the association with benevolent organizations.

This is not a hard problem, its a very hard problem, for which the current frameworks used to be merely inadequate, are not woefully inadequate, to the point of being very damaging to the intent of the artist, and to the artistic process.
What are you talking about? A "yaml formatted string" is just a string. And the Costco shareholder meeting notes/ballots that the GP posted is not YAML either, it's a pdf.
Neural Magic Acquired by RedHat
good point, and countries that do this on a massive (clean) scale count it (probably correctly) in their efficiency and non-fossil fuel stats.
We really under-report the cost ($$$ and energy) of the full recycling chain, both complicated parts like plastics that should probably be burned and capture/treat the results, and simple things like glass; other than reuse it should NOT be recycled.