skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
RTO full time just isn't possible for my family and I suspect I'm not alone. It has nothing to do with productivity. It's just the economics of childcare don't work. We live in SF both work tech jobs. We make above median income relative to rest of the country. Our 2 kids (< 10 years old) are in public schools. Kids need to be dropped off at 9.30 and picked up at 3.30 and 2.30 on weds.

The bare minimum for pickup/drop off help is ~ $2500 a month.

Frankly I don't know how people are managing.
Ask HN: How to Find Customers?
Hi, throwaway account here. Running a startup, and we’re struggling tremendously to find customers. We have some paying users, but we’re using the tool for them. They generally seem satisfied with the deliverables (Excel lists of companies), but as a technical founder, finding a marketing groove is tough. I have around 11k Twitter followers, mostly from shitposting, and I’m wondering how to improve. So far, I’ve tried Reddit posts, Twitter posts, Google Ads, and cold emailing—all without meaningful results.
Tech and Software adjacent professions have to be ones that are least likely to unionize.

There was an internal survey (unofficial) at my workplace right after a mass layoff 2 years back about how many were interested in forming a union. There were 3 options - Interested, Not Sure and Against. The option with most votes was "Against".

I could go into the reasons which were submitted in survey but in short most were related to hyper individualism that is so pervasive.
Totally agree with this model, and I’ve seen it work.

As usual, the best model is not an extreme “easy answer”, but a nuanced take (in-person environments have tangible benefits, but also tangible downsides — and the same for fully remote environments).

It seems like our society (at least in the US) only has room for “easy answers” now a days … to the detriment of most.
try groq (hyperfast chips) https://groq.com/
Humanoid robots are coming:

- Figure: https://youtu.be/Z3yQHYNXPws

- Unitree: https://youtu.be/iULi4-qz22I

- 1X: https://youtu.be/uVcBa6NXAbk

and those are just the ones I know about. I'm sure the US and Chinese militaries are weighing up their options, too.

Of course, they don't need to be humanoid in the end: that just helps them maximise compatibility today. As they take over more of the process, they can specialise and scale up. Once you have robots working the entire process, the sky's the limit.
No, from my point of view this post is just another executive grift trying to make people feel better about why they do the things they do.

Yes they live different lives, but they know they are different from their average worker, they just don't care about them. Making money and their success come above all.

When they make these decisions it is not because they're out of touch. It is because they actively opposed people below them taking an inch. They know it fucks with them, they know they don't like it. They do it anyway.

As an executive this person is excellent albeit trained at corporate speak. They're trying to gather sympathy for execs and it is all bullshit.
Cities benefit from people being in office and thus, in the city spending money. In 2024, SF had a new business tax plan to incentivize employers to bring people back to the office, and I wouldn't be surprised if other cities did similar.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/s-f-economy-tax-plan-...
There is reasonable risk, and then there are the gamblers that still live in there parents house...

Most small businesses start with "why isn't there an X for the Y I need right now?", are launched with "a tax strategy" for money you would have to pay anyways, and end with knowing when to execute an exit strategy.

Wise to keep the day job even if part-time, and follow a strict disciplined schedule with reasonable hours. Eventually, revenue may swing you away from your job to a new venture... but most of the time it won't.

Small business is not for gamblers, and Apps are a fragmented long-tail market.

Rule #23: Don't compete to be at the bottom, as you just might actually win. =3
I've always used IntelliJ/PyCharm/Rubymine for my Git needs.

That handles 98% of what I need to do. For the remainder I sometimes stumble pretty badly, but figure things out.
Historically the ruling class never gave a shit about what the masses thought. This is why the french killed their divine king in the late 1700s, the king did not think he was so hated where this would be possible.

Today, the equation is flipped. Rather than ignoring the masses, the rich have been indoctrinating them for 3-4 generations now. Pacifying them. Removing their own ability to generate their own thoughts and replacing them with thoughts purchased and dispersed through advertising channels.

On top of that westerners haven’t been truly poor in about a hundred years. We allege that we can just go back to french revolution sentiments where we are all poor and stealing, well that is a lot harder if you have never had to steal or be good with a knife in your life thus far. The western mind and body have both been coddled. They are not the grizzly parisian of 1789 in a Phrygian cap. They might have never even thrown a punch before.

Given this, why should the rich be worried? We are cattle in this generation, not wild bulls.
What is your model of this group of people behind DOGE? If it's a group of radical right wingers with libertarian leaning who want to smash the bureaucratic state, that's probably accurate and most people (even supporters) can get behind that characterization. Do you think this group of people, ushered in by Donald John Trump, want to dismantle the military? If not, then why would they purposely try to lose control of the nukes? There probably exist some radical libertarians (or even left-wing anarchists) who would actually advocate for let's say decommissioning the nukes, but I think it's pretty clear that that's not who's in office.

What I see is a ham-fisted approach to slashing the Department of Energy. That's the actual goal. Plenty of anti-Trump outlets report it that way. The idea that they actually want the nuclear weapons to lapse is a pretty bold implication, assuming I'm not misunderstanding the argument.
Did you think it’s possible they spent a few days “cleaning” their feed with content you’d approve of? That’s the first thing I would do if someone was criticizing my browsing habits.
i had turned off the data collection and today i noticed after updating the browser, its back on and studies are on too :(
Sorry downvoters, I'm no MAGA cultist, it's just the worst slogan ever.
This is insane town people. This will result in a total dystopia.
This is a good list, but it needs examples.
This attitude seems more easily explained by the belief that, unlike you, the peons haven't earned their perks yet.
No general model is the frontier.

Thousands of small, specific models are infinitely more efficient than a general one.

The more narrowed the task - the better algorithms work.

That's obvious.

Why are general models pushed so hard by its creators?

Their enormous valuations are based on total control over user experience.

This total control is justified by computational requirements.

Users can't run general models locally.

Giant data centers for billions are the moat for Model creators and corporations behind.
Black Panther has a rating of 96% at Rotten Tomatoes. So whatever the scale is, nothing is really meaningful. I've been in the cinema with about 60 other people and a friend. statistically one of us should have enjoyed it but we both found the movie shit. So no, 10 stars is not more meaningful as 5 stars. 2-4 should be enough to still be wrong about taste once in a while.
It's debatable this was the motivation for Netflix. More stars ==> more nuanced ==> more qualitative reviews ==> much more effort and time to decide if you should consume. Netflix is long(er) form TicTok and wants to optimize for continued consumption without friction. I wouldn't be surprised if they drop ratings all together and only offer a personalized AI curator stream. They could do this just based on viewing time and engagement and avoid even the minor disruption of "up/down". Don't make the sheep think.
Obligatory mention of Randy Pausch's Last Lecture [0].

Very inspiring.

[0] https://youtu.be/ayPMfopCe1g
Propably that's because trump politically attacks anyone who has an independent thought.

I also expect more informed people are wary of cult of personality type contrarians, like trump or musk, who have weaponized the social media contrarian reaction engine to an extreme
This is one fast coup! Congrats, Putin! You won
Google was so much better than AltaVista that I just can’t buy that it was marketing that pushed them to the forefront of search.
Centralized is much easier to set up as decentralized. You are on HN just by accident?

Same goes for democracy, it is a very complex system. That is why it is always under threat.

The way I see it, first tribes were fighting. In middle ages, cities were fighting each other. Later states started to fight. Finally we have a handful of superpowers fighting. It is part of globalization and earth is getting too small to scale that mechanism further.
Well, Checks come from the Check Republic. A region and culture that has had its own trials and tribulations in the past century, getting over taken and reformed a few times.

Balances, on the other hand, were from old lost Balancing Empire. This was really just a stubborn remnant of the Roman Empire that didn't want to admit the party was over.

Together, the refrain "Checks and Balances" is normally to remind us of our ambiguous and ephemeral place in history. Are we hardy folk like the Checks who will remain even as the political landscape changes? Or are we Balances left twisting in the wind?

Then, I think the earlier poster was expressing his own sense of loss in proclaiming there aren't even Checks anymore. It's no longer ambiguous, we are un-Checked and out of Balance.
I think this release is for the researchers who worked on it and would quit if it never saw daylight
The Era of Solopreneurs Is Here
It's a great reminder to tech people that they're still peasants.
In fairness to Apple? Did they port it? I think you mean "in fairness to the maintainers"
Changes in brain's 'sugar shield' could be key to understanding effects of aging
I just use Librarything. The web site has more features than any other tool out there, and the community and admins are better. Plus, it's completely free. I've been using it since 2007, and can't say I've ever had a bad experience.
State highways are well maintained because the federal government demands it in exchange for significant funding derived from federal gas tax. You've had a taste of utopia, but you haven't bathed in it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_Trust_Fund
https://xcancel.com/EthanEvansVP/status/1895845734177452369

Non-xitter link since that site hasn't worked in Firefox for quite a long time. It'd be nice if HN rewrote such URLs automatically.
> you'd also be committing wire fraud in the process

No, it’s a commercial dispute being litigated—for now—through private channels. I and the others who have with me collectively donated seven figures to Mozilla over the years feel we were materially mislead.
That also means people won't use it. Way to shoot yourself in the foot.

The irony of a company that has distilled the word's information complaining about another company distilling their model...
LiveView just has fewer libraries. For example, we use a rich-text editor called TipTap, and I’m not sure there’s anything similar for LV.

Yeah, search is currently by book title and series name. It should handle typos pretty well—Meilisearch allows for up to two—but I still need to tweak it further
Why isn't the inheritance tax 100%? Or say 100% on anything that isn't real property? Inheritance made sense back when most peoples' estate was land, and you needed an orderly arrangement to keep land in the hands of the people who would work it. But why should the government provide legal means to transfer say stock ownership after death?
> The phenomenon was irrational brainwashing using euphemisms and disinfo to whitewash unethical ideas, done by the US rightwing media and its corporate backers.

How exactly did a country that elected Obama twice fall to this brainwashing? How exactly did the liberal media fail to counterbalance the brainwashing? Perhaps you could excuse it for the first Trump presidency, but how exactly did all the smart, well-intentioned liberals fail to address the problem and stop it from happening again?

They failed to offer any hope to the people who were seduced by the dark side. Liberals failed. And to keep characterizing this failure as simply a "successful brainwashing by the other side" you completely remove any responsibility from the "good guys". And even worse, you completely remove any opportunity to learn from the situation so that the "good guys" can do something different next time. You've turned the entire left-wing political and media apparatus into hapless innocent victims of an evil empire, who were faultless in the face of an all-powerful right-wing brainwashing regime that had absolute power and was impossible to defeat. That's the most childish of assessments possible.
You can stop campaigning, it's over.

Also, the period where Biden was President may have been competently run (subjective) but Biden himself was not competent when running for re-election so running on his record didn't really work.

Harris wasn't Biden but, despite what VPs say, they don't get much credit (from voters) for their administrations accomplishments. In fact, VPs tend to get the worst assignments (Border Czar) to take the heat off if the President which they usually fail at (because they were set up to).

People saw Harris as the worst part of the previous administration who was selected by committee to be their candidate.
> If the board of my company (my CEO’s boss) showed up in Slack and asked ...

You would write "Ask HN: my company has thousands of employees, a board member showed up in Slack and told everyone to write him a weekly summary, or we'll be fired, what to do?" and everybody would be like "WTF that's beyond stupid, name the company, also it's time to polish your resume!" yada yada.

Don't be obtuse.
Glad to see Shopify continue their sponsorship.
Oh come on, not a single one of these people is working anything anywhere close to 40 hours per week, let alone 60.
AUTOMATE HR AND RELATED MANAGEMENT NOW.
Ironically, mainly to check for irregular voting patterns like brigading.

Not dissimilar to what Steam implemented, which is basically Bollinger bands for ratings.
This is just an executive trying to gather sympathy for themselves, and make others "empathize" with their decisions.

But it's sugarcoated. The only part that makes sense is the fact they are sociopaths who only care about work success.

The rest of it is just sugarcoating the fact that they make these decisions because they simply couldn't give a shit what their peers below them think. They know it fucks with them and that they don't like it. It's not some "oh we don't understand cause we're too rich" sob story.
> The phenomenon of strong gravitational lensing has been first discussed already in the late 1700s

That's kind of surprising to me. I assumed in the newtonian picture gravity would not bend light.
Amazing work every month, somehow.

RISC-V runners soon, hopefully.
> Nothing in Mozillas behaviour is changing, they had to reword the ToS for legal reasons.

The legal reasons appear to be that they are and/or have been and/or will sell user data:

> In order to make Firefox commercially viable, there are a number of places where we collect and share some data with our partners, including our optional ads on New Tab and providing sponsored suggestions in the search bar.

- https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/update-on-terms...
> You think the freedoms granted by Free and Open Source licenses are a problem?

No, I’m saying the inherent conflict of interest in a free product that’s expensive to maintain is a problem.
> For government offices were I know workers, firing is based on 100% seniority, completely independent of performance or email responses.

Reductions in force due to mission/budget/etc. changes, etc., which are based on seniority, not firings, which are (where civil service protections apply) exclusively for documented misconduct or incompetence and have due process protections.

It’s true that private industry (at least outside of unionized workplaces) leverage at-will employment to blur the line between mission/budget-based staffing reductions and for-cause firings, but the civil service isn’t at will and the line is a sharp legal distinction.
What’s the problem with WebKit?
Which is ironic because they manage our time for us to force us to have less of it.
https://github.com/andrewarrow/aaai/tree/redo/examples/vibec...
If I understand you right, I think all the Jetbrains IDEs do this. They actually analyze code (not just syntax) and point out various errors in logic, scope, references, parameters, etc.
Not yet, but we’re rolling out a way to add missing books later this week!
I think a lot of the return to office mandates are either meant to force people to quit, or to protect the value of real estate. With JP Morgan, they’re looking to protect the entire commercial real estate market since their business depends on it.
Yes, and it’s actually even worse, it wasn’t just ‘not building them’ with Ukraine, they were stripped of them.
Agreed. No static typing. Everything is global. Super easy to accidentally break a thing on some other page that you aren’t aware of. It’s just a brittle stack. Tailwind is by far my favorite bandaid for dealing with all of that. Perfect? No. But it’s the best thing I’ve used in almost 25 years doing this professionally.
I would guess that with experience and age preferences change. What's the point of a 10 star rating system if you have a 10 star rated book that you wouldn't rate the same after being ten years older?
Admitting in a survey that you're pro-union might be (rightly) perceived as high-risk, no reward.
To keep things simple (for them) they get rights to everything :(
HR are professional gaslighters and internal-PR masters. I'm not even surprised by their ability to twist things anymore
So my impression is this: in a vacuum, if everyone hired only minorities, then non-minorities would be at a disadvantage, instead of minorities being at a disadvantage. Your argument seems to be that since there is still so much discrimination against minorities, some companies only hiring minorities serves to make the job market as a whole more fair for them, by "balancing out more" against those who only hire non-minorities. If those companies "only" treated everyone equally, then everyone else only hiring non-minorities would have even more of an impact, and the job market would be even more unfair for those minorities. Do I understand you correctly?

(Also: sorry for constantly using the term minorities/non-minorities. I don't have a better word to use here. I know talking about things this way could be seen as being part of the problem.)
The option I don't see listed in your post is for the developers to do nothing except for maintain, fix bugs, fix CVEs, maybe comply with new standards, maybe find ways to make it faster.
I agree with everything in your comment about regulation.

However, if you are implying that only companies, and not nations, can fail and be replaced, I'd disagree. This has happened many times in the past.

I really liked this history video on the topic, which is rooted in how the founders of the USA were very familiar with a theory about how that happens called anacyclosis and they had originally designed the constitution to avoid that, where the theory proposes that democracies tend to dissolve when a populist demagogue takes over: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqsBx58GxYY

James Madison and Alexander Hamilton both very much feared that allowing the public to vote for more than members of the House of Representatives would eventually lead to the "uninformed, overly emotional public" to elect a demagogue.
The podcast is super fun! It takes the “Engineering Podcast with Slides” model that WTYP originated, but instead of having one knowledgeable person and two comedians, all 3 know different parts of the industry.
Both parties actually target a bimodal IQ distribution. The D distribution covers most of the left tail and the upper-mid, and the R distribution covers the lower-mid and most of the right tail. You generally expect interleaved affiliation like this; it's just a question of how many bands there are. R avg is actually slightly higher, although that doesn't tell the full story. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...
It doesn't matter that if he allowed comments initially if the final (current) specification didn't allow them.
Gitbutler is great.
> You donated a seven-figure sum to Mozilla that you are going to chargeback?

I helped with fundraisers. The pitch was privacy. I and the others who donated feel we were mislead. (I was never a major donor. But at least one who charged six figures on his Amex has initiated a chargeback.)
How hard is it to fork an open source project?
The same lack of context is what (I think, if I'm feeling charitable) makes these people think AI is real:

If you spend your entire day in meetings, you might reasonably think that you'd be better off if all your meetings were face-to-face.

If you only touch a computer to write and respond to emails, the email summary parrot might reasonably seem like some omniscient god.

The trouble is I don't feel charitable. These people got to where they are by behaving like narcissists and sociopaths. That's because they are narcissists and sociopaths. It's about controlling other people and hurting them. Full stop.
yep agree 100%. i think around 80 people is where individual accountability starts to fall off and people make self interested decisions they sense they can get away with in the context of the larger group dynamics.
As Laszlo Bock (head of HR at the time) quipped at TGIF when he announced Obamacare cuts to Google's healthcare coverage: "But hey, you get unlimited colonoscopies".
Is there a single government service or dept which has been privatised and it’s turned out cheaper in the long run for tax payers? I can’t think of a single example.
Yeah... how long do you think librewolf is going to survive if Mozilla dies?
4o has been out since May last year, while omni (now rechristened as 4.5) only finished training in October/November.
Yes. I also discovered this, and was also forced to blow through my credits in a rush. Terrible policy.
Very excited to see my JSON objects start to hallucinate new properties!
I’ve seen seniors do the same thing.

The root cause always seem to be the same.

Pressure to get things done now. No time in the future to correct things. Possibility of getting fired for falling behind your peers that make the same shortcuts while you attempt to do things better.

It’s always an issue with management that doesn’t care about doing things correct. So the incentive to keep your job is always perverse.
Perhaps linking a greater share of pay to success would be a good idea. How about $200,000 + $1 million per percentage of Firefox market share? In recent years, CEO pay has doubled while Firefox appears to be in terminal decline.
If someone doesn’t use the CLI, they are a newbie? I’ve never needed to learn or use the CLI, the GitHub tools built into JetBrains IDEs and VS Code have always worked fine for me, and I’ve been a professional developer for nearly 30 years.