skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Quality is a synonym for care. And if the leadership doesn't care, the teams building the software won't care (at least, not as much).

Putting a logistics guy like Tim in charge was great for ensuring Apple kept shipping existing hardware products and growing revenue, but almost guaranteed that quality across the board would falter. For all of his faults, the one thing that Steve Jobs did that's impossible to replicate by force is care.
I'd compare it to dictatorships: In the long run all dictatorships have failed. However, that doesn't mean that they don't cause immense damage in the medium term, that we shouldn't fight against them, or that they don't have significant influence upon society.
When interactive compilers and debuggers started to become more available, my father complained that junior devs would just make random changes to the code until it worked, rather than taking the time to understand it, as compared to when you had to wait for your punchcards to go through an overnight batch process.

It seems that lowering friction will always lower understanding, because industrious people will always try to get the most done, and inexperienced people will conflate getting the most done now with getting the most done in general.
My reply was mostly for the parent comment.

Apple software is still top tier when you start comparing to Slack, Teams, and all the non-native friends. Apple Music does not take close to 1GB of RAM. There are very few native applications these days because of the cost. And lower cost availability is based on the web stack and lower entry level of skills.

MacOS may have bugs but in general they are well engineered. Starting from secure enclave that none of the competitors have, or just raw performance and battery life that is not just hardware. I haven’t seen a single bug in my Watch for over a year. I guess it depends what you use.

The most bugs that we see these days are originating from the choices behind the tech stacks. Python and pure JavaScript are still too popular. Every post here with Rust name on it gets attention because of its promise of some level stability reduced resource footprint.
Came here to say this - or a more distant comparison - air traffic controllers. Also control is a tricky term - are they directly controlling or tasking a semi-autonomous robot.
I don't understand why a self-model would be necessary for free will?

> [...] c) its decisions are for the most part determined by physically internal factors (as opposed as external constraints or publicly available information).

I don't think humans reach that threshold. Though it depends a lot on how you define things.

But as far as I can tell, most of my second-to-second decisions are very much coloured by the fact that we have gravity and an atmosphere at comfortable temperatures (external factors), and if you changed that all of a sudden, I would decide and behave very differently.

> It's tempting to add a threshold of complexity, but I don't think there's any objectively correct way to define one.

Your homunculus is one hell of a complexity threshold.
As someone forced to use a Windows laptop for work with the new job, I've stopped complaining about my Mac. It's so much worse on the other side of the fence...

Working on Windows makes me appreciate the Mac ecosystem so, so, so very much.
> In which other country can a guy cutting hair (out of many examples) afford so many international vacations?

In Europe? They can just take a train. Young people backpack all over Europe on shoestring budgets.
Btw, https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf is really, really good, and I stole some of my points from there.
Yeah. Apple doesn't have to run faster than the bear. It only needs to run faster than the next guy. Which, as it turns out, is not that hard to do.
What were those prior mistakes?
It's not the same. Hand writing allows infinitely more possibilities for annotations and illustration.
It makes testing a lot easier honestly. Also keep in mind that mobile apps and web apps are fairly capability oriented these days, so I wouldn't say no one will work with it...
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Commercial contracts generally don't work that way, they generally pay the market rate (the current most expensive producer).

It means there is no way for an individual consumers behaviour to drive (or be driven by) the green energy proportion, as if the collective demand is too high then you pay the market rate for coal anyway.
Won’t speak for the new models, but my 2018 S is still as great as it ever was, assuming that they don’t screw it up via OTA some day. Not going to sell it just because 50% of the country wants to me, just like I didn’t care when 50% of the country didn’t want me to buy it.
How was she treated that's inhumane? What specifically do you take issue with?

If you'd like to go through the article and provide actual examples I'll help you with being a critical reader. When it says something "amounts" to solitary confinment, that isn't the same as saying she was held in solitary confinment. That's shifty reporting trying to spin the facts without the legal repercussions of directly lying. When you get to the part about her having violent outbursts and punching walls until there is "blood everywhere" you might then ask yourself "could this person be a risk to themselves or a cell mate" or maybe "what are the international consequences if she were to harm herself or someone else while in custody?" The world is never black and white and there are plenty of these points in the article where you should be asking questions and maybe looking to other sources for answers.

The article is using her friend/girlfriend as the primary source, even though she is clearly biased and has no actual information, which she has no right to given she isn't a family member, her lawyer, or the German consulate. It's almost like they are purposely ignoring the actual facts and are trying to manufacture an emotional response to get this to go viral and somehow receive a more favorable outcome. Seriously, find an article that isn't tabloid quality. Even better, do a search of reputable German news sources like der Spiegel. If she were actually being hidden away and mistreated they would be reporting on it in Germany.

From the few facts that are available, it sounds like she would have been released and sent back to Germany had she just admitted she fucked up and plead guilty. My guess, mostly just based on the fact that she was punching walls in jail, she lacks some degree of emotional intelligence, doesn't like the idea of being barred from the US, and thinks she can fight it and win. Now she has to remain in custody until she is tried, which will likely be fairly soon, or a deal is worked out. These are processes that were agreed on (and as the last couple sentences of the article mentions is actively being handled) between the respective governments. Anyone caught doing the same in Germany would face similar consequences.

I think what a lot of commenters here don't realize is that most western countries, including the US and Germany, have artist visas for this specific scenario. These are relatively easy to get and would have allowed her to do what she was doing. Instead she chose to commit a federal offense and is paying the price for that choice. I'm not mentioning this to deflect, I'm directly responding to the article which tries to make it sound like she was "doing everything right" and is being unjustly held.

Jail isn't great but it's not actual torture. It's mostly just uncomfortable and extremely boring. It's not anymore cruel or tortuous than it has to be given the circumstances.
I hate the large scale turbines. I'm sure small scale or other designs are OK. But screw the large turbines. Where I grew up they outsourced the jobs and then we were left with ugly giants ruining the once beautiful mountains. It's on par with strip mining (aesthetically).
A simple robot has neither consciousness nor experiences because it lacks the notion of self-identity. On the other hand, "soul" is itself a concept that is begging the question. If you consider consciousness an emergent property of sufficiently organized matter, then a world you describe is literally impossible.
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Experienced backend Python developer. Would get back into the embedded/hardware field again for the right workplace.
It is more complicated than that as the roles are very different and you need both. You just cannot substitute one for the other.

DJIs with their high zoom ratios and quality stabilised cameras just allow for wide area monitoring which killer drones relies on.

Video from surveillance drones are usually streamed to a teams of analytics far away from front lines for analysis of situation change. People analysing the video data is a significant chunk of the total personnel in this war.

Without having that, killer drones are not effective, since they are very short-lived, have very poor cameras and power characteristics. It is very difficult to find enemy with self-made drones.

So I argue that you can in fact have a civilian drone manufacturing which can be repurposed quickly into a cheap mass produced war-time surveillance drone with minimal effort.

The same goes for software - both sides use civilian service for video streaming and communication which works better than anything "military grade".
I like em.
When I finally got around to reading Seven Pillars, I wasn't too far in before I was convinced Herbert had the book on his desk the whole time he was writing Dune. So many minor similarities, little scenes that don't quite match up but if you squint they do. Even the arc toward eventually committing war crimes, while seeking some great end for the people he's leading, feels like a connection. But also little stuff like the early travel scenes in Pillars reminded me of early scenes among the Caladanians(?) in Dune.

I think the part where I went "OK yeah this was the reference when he was coming up with the core plot and character of Paul" was when I came across the part where Lawrence comes up with his novel guerrilla war strategy: he's sick, feverish, possibly dying, in a tent in the desert, tended by a few companions. When he comes out of it, he's got his Path. It's too perfect.

[edit] Incidentally, it's not clear to me this author has a good picture of Lawrence's background. Lines like this:

> In terms of clothing, Lawrence comes to accept the Arab dress as “convenient in such a climate” and blends in with his Arab companions by wearing it instead of the British officer uniform.

make me think the author isn't aware that Lawrence had already spent a lot of time in the Middle East (especially, IIRC, modern Syria—so, near Damascus) very shortly before the war broke out, and that was a big part of why he was recruited by British intelligence for the mission(s) in Seven Pillars. It was on an earlier, pre-war trip that he'd adopted Arab dress—unlike what's suggested (if not quite stated) in the film Lawrence of Arabia, he was already quite familiar with and comfortable in it.
How do you know that you're perceiving "without thoughts", though?
A literal one but perhaps not an original, authentic one :)
The British economy was doing quite well before Brexit. Now it's absolutely crippled.
You can't have competing companies on rails. Each companies having their own networks would be prohibitively expensive, or they have to share rails between each other which poses significant issues.

You're also left with the issue of unprofitable stations, which is a lot of them.

If you want an example of what a really privatized, deregulated rail system would look like, read about France in the early 20th century. By the 30s, shareholders were begging the state to nationalize their money-burning companies. And it did.

Rail should be a public service. As one, its benefits to society are immense.
> In other words, the Busy Beaver Game is noncomputable because of the Halting Problem, and the Halting Problem is noncomputable because it lacks an upper bound in time.

Not completely. The halting problem is computable for some more limited forms of computation, even if they have no upper bound in time.

In an alternative formulation: for some Turing machines we can prove in finite time that they run forever. Thus your 'lack of an upper bound in time' is not enough.
>Of course, the government says they won't go after the small organisations, but if the wind changes, the legislation is there.

Especially because with online projects, all it takes is an upswing in popularity for the general public to perceive you as a large organization. Would they have ignored Minecraft until Microsoft purchased it if these laws had existed during it's upswing? I doubt it.
Shortwave | Onsite in SF | Full-time | shortwave.com

We’re building the [“strong form”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZpJXHiPwtQ&t=498s) AI agent app for business communications. We’re focusing on email initially, as it’s (1) ubiquitous (2) open and (3) has a diverse set of valuable business data. In the future we plan to expand beyond email to include all essential business communications tools, including Slack, Teams, CRMs, document platforms, project management tools, and so on.

Most people’s experience with AI today involves copy & pasting content back and forth from ChatGPT. Not only is this a terrible UX — it severely limits the transformative potential of AI.

Our goal is to unlock 10x (or greater) productivity gains for the average business user by bringing cutting edge AI together with their business communications in a single app designed for effective human-AI collaboration. With Shortwave, users can give the AI access to all of their data and then allow it to take action while still maintaining total control over its output.

I previously founded Firebase and sold it to Google. This time we're taking it to IPO :)

Hiring for multiple engineering roles. See full listings here:
https://shortwave.notion.site/Open-Positions-at-Shortwave-1a...
I never used any Apple products before Cook's appointment. Why did it go down?
Still in the peak of inflated expectations, I see. Give it 2-3 more years to get to the trough of disillusionment.
Steward | Remote (US/CANADA) or Hybrid (Seattle or Los Angeles) | Senior/Staff Fullstack Engineer | $160k-190k + equity (US/CA range; adjusted for geography if international)

We are a startup in the Wealthtech space looking to hire our 4th and 5th engineers.

We had a good experience posting in last month's thread for a Lead Fullstack position, and wanted to post again--position is functionally the same, we're growing so fast we feel we can add two more engineers instead of just one.

This is a great opportunity if you are looking to build something that leverages agentic AI to deliver practical value for families, and are interested in working on a product that places a high premium on UX.

Requirements:

* 8+ years of software engineering experience

* Familiarity with modern TypeScript and React, + at least one non-TS backend language

* Experience mentoring junior engineers and generally fostering a sophisticated engineering culture

* Track-record of mastering new technologies and diving into unfamiliar parts of the tech stack

Nice-to-haves:

* Experience with Python, Docker, AWS Fargate, or DynamoDB

* Experience writing unit tests for frontend components using tools such as Jest and Storybook

About the Engineering Team

Our engineering culture is collegial, both in the sense of being friendly, as well as placing an emphasis on continuous learning and refinement of our craft. We are very much into internal tooling, improving DevEx, and constant improvement of our processes.

Email CV to samier@usesteward.com
Not the OP but look at the difference between what governments can do when there is a sense of urgency (i.e it is wartime or one is in recent memory) vs what they do when it's not.

My lizard brain interprets this in the following way: Elites in response to external competition or in the presence of existential threat experience strong incentives to make "real" progress.

When there's little external competition, leadership are more concerned with maintaining or slightly enhancing their relative status within existing power structures and this leads to stasis as their interest is mainly blocking or slowing any disruption which could change the balance of power.

Projects often fail because the forces of "keep things the same" beat the team that wanted the change to happen.
One of things that's a concern is the consolidation of industry into fewer and fewer bigger and bigger plants. Not only does that mean a bottleneck in one place is far worse, it also means that there's not the depth of experience available many places. There's a handful of production engineers rather than dozens. And there's not the same number of plants that can be converted from sewing machines to rifles or automobiles to tanks.

I was reading something that said militarily, the US is now in the same position that Japan was prior to WWII because we've outsourced so much of our production.
> The last episode of This American Life[1] really nails it to the wall:

This was also 'on display' in Trump 1.0 with the claim of "the largest crowds ever" for his first inauguration—which they weren't:

* https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38707722

* https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/06/donald-trump-i...

* https://www.factcheck.org/2017/01/the-facts-on-crowd-size/

A bunch of comments then about it being a 'loyalty test' if you were willing to repeat the line.
> Sure there are, but they are very small minority typically.

From your own data, 25% of respondents agreed with the statement: Allow none/only a few immigrants of a different race/ethnicity to come and live in [the UK]. This isn't a small minority and I can guarantee you the distribution of these attitudes isn't equal between leavers and remainers.
> Then, to make killing this political suicide, make sure to mail every man, woman, and dog a check every two weeks called 'CARBON DIVIDEND'.

We effectively did this in Canada and it still became a political albatross.

(Though in practice the cheque was done via direct deposit and a lot of people didn't realize where the money was coming from despite it being clearly labelled. I think cheques in the mail would have been more effective.)
This makes me want to work for their hardware teams (as a software engineer), not their software teams.

But hey Apple would never hire me anyway...
You can dismiss that by clicking on the notification without clicking on either option. It will pull up the System Settings, which you can then close.
"Better At Hyper-Scale Than Micro-Scale"

That's a slightly misleading headline, because it can be interpreted as implying SQLite is BAD at micro-scale. That's not an argument the rest of the piece makes - it's more about how SQLite is great at large scale and people who focus on the small-scale aspects might miss that.
SEEKING WORK

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we’re a few months away from having our mortgage paid off. looking forward to being debt-free. Have no plans to move.

keep in mind that nothing a realtor, or an economist who works for them, says can be trusted. we learned that during the great bubble.
Will give it a listen!

And for posterity, I wrote up my solution: https://grazfather.github.io/posts/2018-11-24-microcorruptio...
I wonder when teenage engineering will sell a 2000 dollar version of this.
what is the better approach?
No,

(1) I'm not setting up your server to repo the issue. I have no idea what all that code is going to do. Is it going to try to pown my machine?

(2) No, I'm not going to use your server as a repo. I have no idea you aren't updating it every 5 minutes with a new version.

There's a reason developers ask for an MCVE (Minimal complete verifiable example)

https://www.google.com/search?q=MCVE

It's not unreasonable to ask for one. Sorry if that sucks for you because it's difficult for you pair down your code but that's where we are. Try it on the other side and you'll start to get it.
I think the problem is "but why?" What incentive would they have when they just need a brief answer or solution, i.e. just make code do this, get the boss their answer on that, etc.?

It's going to be fun when LLM agents do all the communication for us.
This is really bad.

DBs other than sqlite need their own dedicated servers, it says.

A good way to store online chats is db-per-chat, it says.

Sqlite scales great with [fusilade of very specific proprietary cloud services], it says.

Sqlite is great but companies like this seem determined to ruin it. MongoDB all over again.
This is a potpourri of stuff over 7 years, sprinkled on a base of confirmation bias re: the common wisdom has a "perception...completely made up out of thin air", and a misunderstanding that speaking publicly in this individual talk represents a step change or something new.

I would bet, very, very, many dollars it is not coming to Android in any form, Starnix isn't coming soon if ever, and they're not looking to move beyond IoT. Long story short, it shipped on the Nest Hub, didn't get a great rep, and Nest Hubs haven't been touched in years because they're not exactly a profit center.

Meanwhile, observe Pixel Tablet release in smart display factor, Chrome OS being merged with Android, and the software-minded VP who championed the need for the project, moving on, replaced by the hardware VP.

When you mash all that together, what you get is: the future is Android. Or, there is no future. Depending on how you look at it.

(disclaimer: former Googler on Pixel team, all derivable from open source info. I wish it wasn't the case, but it is :/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/01/big-layoffs-at-googl... https://9to5google.com/2023/07/25/google-abandons-assistant-... https://9to5google.com/2024/11/18/chrome-os-migrating-androi..., note 7d views on starnix bugs, all 1 or 0, with the exception of a 7 and 4 https://issues.fuchsia.dev/issues?q=status:open%20componenti...)
In fairness, whilst the article isn't without merit, it's authored by some of the only people in the UK that actually describe themselves as neoliberal. Which is why it's focusing on "green belt" planning policy and ignoring the fact that local government built 150k houses per annum back when we actually built enough houses, something which "neoliberal" policy introduced by Thatcher essentially made impossible, and why the article treats rail privatization as a success story rather than a service British citizens use in increasing numbers despite sky-high prices (and the government subsidising it more than when they owned it!) not least because markets have moved the jobs into London and the affordable housing out of London.
It seems clear to us that the film is playing, but that's the magic isn't it? There is nothing in physics to suggest that the universe is anything other than a film on a shelf, yet we experience it playing. We are the characters in the movie playing out frames in a fixed sequence one after the other (as far as we know according to physics), yet we experience it where the characters in a film do not. We have a souls, or at least you do. For all you know you could be the only one.
I work at a 90% Windows shop. Obviously major benefits to being on the "main platform".

I tried using a Windows laptop for my first two months.

I couldn't do it.