skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you do the maths, the average manager receives 250k a year in benefits.
This is true. I've also found that there are perverse incentives when it comes to (especially upper) management. Building up enough political clout in your organization that aren't answerable to many people, and managing your image among the few you are answerable to, is the best skill one can have if the outcome is steady long term employment. Providing value to your company and coworkers doesn't correlate as much with surviving corporate haircuts like these.
For that matter, what if you're the tenant and you think the landlord isn't doing something they should?

In either role, if it's month-to-month... either of you says to the other that it's not working out, give whatever the statutory notice is? And if the landlord didn't collect the last month's rent at the outset, maybe they end up eating a couple months' rent they would have made otherwise? And the tenant needs to scoot to find a new place, but like, it's fine?

If either party wanted the security of a lease for a longer term, they could have entered into one, but they didn't, so... that's the deal, right? Except for really egregious stuff that the law would have something to say about?
> because those are the abstractions that browser APIs and application servers still maintain

Because semantics are the same for every version.
A manager decides to spend their energy managing their relationships up, down or sideways. The very worst will focus solely on managing the upwards relationship, but that's precisely what makes them hard to dislodge: Every second of their day is spent on efforts that helped their job security by relationship building.

So it's not just that the best manager is also the best at finding a new job, but that every second they spend improving their org's performance is a second they don't spend trying to fool a typically not-so-good middle manager into thinking they are indispensable.

This is also why, every time I've seen manager culls, I have found that it was rare for upper management's idea of who was easier to replace was to match that of peers and reports. The ability of the bad manager to hide the truth from the exec is much stronger than people realize.
Okay, then, you're just using your own personal definition of "black box" instead of the one everyone else uses.

Something that's a black box is unknown to the speaker. It's not understood to be unknowable to anyone.
This would be all well and good except that society is not actually constructed by neutral arbiters outside the world, as much as certain parties have their pretensions to that -- they are created by the interactions of interested parties. In other words: class struggle.
that's the definition of an incompetent / mediocre manager.
Most organizations expect their employees and managers in poarticular to be "breaking doors", which is the opposite attitude to blindly following any internal process.
I think the idea of free trade is that more wealth is made through comparative advantages and trade, meaning everyone contributes less "blood and backs" and gets more wealth in return [1]. Not sure how this applies to military assistance, but it seems likely Japan and EU would not have the peace dividend they've had since WW2 if US wasn't subsidizing their defense.

1. https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/ap-macr...
I'm interested to hear what type of structure you prefer over one that has managers overseeing developers.

Or are you saying you just need to find the good managers? I might have misunderstood.

I'm honestly interested in alternatives.
Nah, they're both downstream of complexity. Complexity creates both managers and politics. But managers do create more complexity and more politics.

The problem in companies like this is there are often few incentives for reducing complexity, even in a company like Amazon that claims to value eliminating it.
It sounds like they want to hide congressional investments and stock trades from their constituents, or at least this could be used in a way to achieve that.
> 1. Every demographic commits petty crimes and code violations at about the same rate (things like parking violations and music piracy).

What? The rates of parking violations and music piracy vary dramatically with age and gender.
1. Amazon announces new IC to Manager ratio target. Meeting this target would mean an overall reduction in the number of managers.

2. Someone at Morgan Stanley assumes that lay offs will be the mechanism used to reach the target ratio and does some math that says this'll save $XX billion, based on the number of employees at Amazon and the average manager salary.

3. Business Insider reports on the Morgan Stanley memo.

4. This trash article re-reports on it for some reason.

In reality, teams were re-org'd, managers became ICs. Maybe some were PIP'd. No large layoffs though.
(Context: I’m an IC and told my
Manager multiple times that I’d quit if they ever make me a manager)

If you truly believe that, please do yourself a favor and read “The tyranny of structurelessness” to understand what a managerless place becomes. everyone and no one becomes a manager, and there’s no explicit avenue of recourse. There’s a good reason management arises. We can discuss good management vs bad management, but pretty fundamentally there’s no such thing as “no management”.
Show HN: Ragpi – Open-Source AI Assistant for Chatting with Your Developer Docs
I’ve been working on Ragpi, an open-source AI assistant that builds knowledge bases from docs, GitHub Issues and READMEs. It uses PostgreSQL with pgvector as a vector DB and leverages RAG to answer technical questions through an API. Ragpi also integrates with Discord and Slack, making it easy to interact with directly from those platforms.
Some things it does:

- Creates knowledge bases from documentation websites, GitHub Issues and READMEs

- Uses hybrid search (semantic + keyword) for retrieval

- Uses tool calling to dynamically search and retrieve relevant information during conversations

- Works with OpenAI, Ollama, DeepSeek, or any OpenAI-compatible API

- Provides a simple REST API for querying and managing sources

- Integrates with Discord and Slack for easy interaction

Built with: FastAPI, Celery and Postgres

It’s still a work in progress, but I’d love some feedback!

Repo: https://github.com/ragpi/ragpi

Docs: https://docs.ragpi.io/
For a guy who has made misleading or fake videos in the past (e.g. the glitter bomb stuff), is it really surprising he would do the same again?
> That's nice of you, but you owning the place means that somebody else cannot.

If this “somebody else” has the capital, then they should build or buy.

Obviously there is an issue of lack of purchasable land/units in certain desirable areas, but that’s a zoning issue. That’s not the problem and shouldn’t be the problem of someone who had the foresight to invest their capital many years/decades prior.
Motherboard dies after marathon 100-hour BIOS update process
Nvidia Patches Vulnerabilities That Could Let Hackers Exploit AI Services
This is a really great piece of wisdom. Thank you!
> Anyway, this kind of thing is only useful if people adopt it. The people who are likely to install this tool and use it probably already avoid this issue while the people who have this issue will never hear of this tool or will not consistently employ it.

I could see projects adopting this, or something like it, in their CI pipelines.

Both for open source projects, but also at companies with a lot of internal repositories with Python code – especially if it is common that other people with little experience for some repo contribute code to it.

In the case of an open source project if it’s a popular repo that a lot of people are users of and different people frequently contribute to for the first time.

And in the case of company internal repositories, if it’s code that different teams only touch now and then, with only a smaller group of people intimately familiar with all of the inner workings of the code and the other people being mainly focused on other repos in the company but still having to sometimes contribute changes because their code is relying on the code in that other repos.
> human ticket classifiers

Are there alternatives? I ask this as someone who spends a lot of time doing just this. Your addition of the word "human" gave me hope there is a better/alternative system?
Weird that this got downvoted, considering that Amazon is currently rolling out Alexa+.
Padme meme: by hiring more ICs, right?
Just finished it. So true.
Yes, it is annoying. You can run VS Code on a PI and have an amazing Rust environment, or Zig, or any language. Except for .Net. Why MS? What is the benefit to your business to make .net suck without your closed sourced bits?
Yeah the existing managers left behind will probably be overloaded, because one person cannot scale over so many direct reports. So then perhaps Amazon has figured out how to scale middle managers so they can effectively manage multiples more. Perhaps an AI/ML tool of some kind, which would seem kinda dystopian, but might not be awful... who knows, this is just wild speculation.
There's a lot of truth in this. We haven't figured out how to automate complex systems. Instead, systems operate under partial automation, and exceptions are handled by humans. This is also true of any bureaucracy. Because automation is invisible and humans are visible, it will always appear that bureaucrats are spending most of their time taking care of the failures of unnecessarily complex systems.

The engineers working on complex technology systems are doing a lot of the same kind of things. Technology is disturbingly similar to bureaucracy.

Consider the many HN threads to the effect of "<Service> just deleted my account for no reason and there's no escalation process or human to contact." Now imagine of Social Security ran that way. Health care does, to some extent.
The person in charge is irrelevant. If you think that the other companies I mentioned aren't in the business of selling surveillance on you as well, your head is in the sand. It's the primary business model of several.
A dropped packet requires a retransmit which is effectively a round trip. Introducing shared fate by bundling many requests into a single TCP connection results in more requests being delayed by round trips per dropped packet.
I was actually going to look into this but the x86 install instructions are literally: 'dd this disk image you downloaded onto your boot device'

Is it really open source? Do you really trust the entire operating system you are forced to use and not build yourself is what they say it is?

[0] https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/generic-x86-64
From a surface level it seems like they've operated like this since... forever. AWS is still a very nice product, at least for the use cases I have for it. I have a hard time reconciling those two things.
I've been to three dozen of these things and I haven't even seen small-scale protest vandalism like paint on the roads or fire extinguishers sprayed on cars.

All the violence I've seen has been from police, and one case of counter-protestors throwing clods of dirt. Which continued for hours since the police did not stop it and the pro-palestine protestors did not escalate or even fight back.
Or the 28,000 tons of coal [1]. Unrelated to LLM (except for the part where I asked Gemini to find the link) but somewhat relevant.

[1] https://thedailywtf.com/articles/Special-Delivery
The tricky part is who are you showing the door. My experience is that layoffs is a highly political event as well, and the "most political" managers are the one who stay.
Which is natural, as they are the ones who leadership has more visibility to.
That team-player, hands-on manager, is worth nothing if (s)he didn't play the politics game.
So the company might be worse after this.
Bezos.
I've been checking out https://reticulum.network/ which does the same thing as meshtastic, but encrypted. Looks like it's in the early stages though.
Also some finance guy gets rewarded for making that much cost savings, and they have meat to give to the shareholders, it’s an endless cycle. The finance folks only get the gain, the revenue/quality loss of their actions will not be measured accurately and will not be traced back to their actions. Only upsides.
You’d need to provide a text alternative for those images too. Given that idea, I’d embed the screenshots into documentation/wiki pages where you can embed them in their entirety and provide the alternative text needed as well as any other information needed.
> What is your process for automating this checksum twice a year?

Backup programs usually do that as a standard feature. Borg, for example, can do a simple checksum verification (for protection against bitrot) or a full repository verification (for protection against malicious modification).
I don't understand why they are even trying to bail out Columbia. Cut off its funds and let the university either fund itself via its endowment or die.
Yes, but the essence of the problem statement is client interactivity so it boils down to JavaScript calling web services. MVC only abstracts the server part. If you want something modern in that space you could try blazor - C# with WASM on the client.
Yeah I know I've lived in three countries and the details vary but the police suck shit in every one. I assume it's universal.
Bun uses BoringSSL. Bun is mostly compatible with Node.
You give your server.exe away for free, and make all of your revenue in value-add hosting, and maybe professional services stuff to specific customers. You still have to maintain server.exe -- fix bugs, add features, etc. -- which requires engineering resources, time, money.

Someone else comes along, downloads your server.exe, and offers hosting and professional services themselves, as a competitor. To a customer there is no difference between you.com and competitor.com, they're hosting the same thing on different domains. And the competitor gets their revenue the same way you do, but they don't have to spend anything on server.exe, because you're doing all that work already.

Again, this math doesn't work out, at least not for you. The competitor will always come out ahead.

If the claim is that you have some unique ability to produce revenue that isn't available to third parties that download and use your server.exe, then whatever that is, it's not part of the server.exe, just by definition! You've got the server.exe you offer freely, and a different my-server.exe that only you can operate and which has value that only you can extract. So we're back to square one.
Fair, the actual M2 version linked would not be what would be used beyond convenient development.

The actual TPU chip itself from the M2 card is sold individually as a surface mount chip and that is what would be used in a "serious" design.

https://coral.ai/products/accelerator-module

I did a cursory search and I can find zero other products that compete with that module, within an order of magnitude of power consumption/price/etc
Threatening to or actually removing federal funding is one thing, but this is absolutely bizarre:

> In a letter sent Thursday night, federal officials said the university must immediately place its Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department under “academic receivership for a minimum of five years.”

The federal government has no business trying to claim control of an academic department in a private institution (nor in public but state-owned institutions).
Is this book
"Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism" by Sarah Wynn-Williams?

If someone can confirm this, then I'll make sure to tell everyone to avoid it.
I read OP as change the management to change the culture, not remove it.
How do I explain the impacts of this change to my grandmother who has become reliant on it to remind her to take her medication?
Telegram is Russian owned and run out of a monarchy. Telegram is not anyone's friend. "delete" is also not a black and white concept. There are many degrees of deletion.
What's a decent european enterprise?
The most egregious office politics I've ever experienced came from the company that had a pathological aversion to managers.

They aimed for minimizing managerial positions to an extreme. The result was that a lot of ICs were playing hardball politics with nobody to keep them in check.

Really opened my eyes to the reality of office politics.
That functionality would actually be useful in all sorts of games, but that's probably a lost cause at this point. We've settled on other paradigms.
Expanding on this, even a little, would make your comment much more interesting.
I mean, because frankly, the administration can't tell them what to do if they don't re-offer the funds.
The teary-eyed CEO, of course.
I think this is a simplistic take. In companies where there are clear management structures there are clear and obvious ways for managers to fuck around and play politics. When there aren't clear management chains, people with probably similar characteristics fuck around in different ways - it's just less obvious to some people.

Management is a tool used by people with their own motivations to acheive their goals. But a lack of management lets those same people acheive those same goals in different ways. Whether that's starting up duplicate projects and products, causing chaos and confusion by inserting themselves into topics that don't concern them, or simply picking fights. The same people get along in any organisation, the tool of management is just the easiest to spot from below.
Spin by Robert Charles Wilson is based on this premise.
JS is the only true cross-platform UI; sadly.
The key difference between a speculator and an investor lies in their financial goals, not the number of stocks they hold. A speculator seeks short-term profits, often through high-risk trades, while an investor focuses on building long-term wealth through, steady, strategic investments.
If the complaint was that the product wasn't profitable, wouldn't adding expensive LLM inference costs potentially make the problem worse at least at the outset?
Which is dumb because that still takes very little time and effort. You can pirate any paper book in like 10 minutes with a decent sheet fed scanner if you don't care about keeping it bound. What a hurdle.

But hey, Grandma Martha can't read her Kindle version on the new Kobo her grandson got her without buying a new copy. Fantastic.
Middle management _is_ the culture of a company. A regular worker interacts not at all with the CxOs except reading their emails and every day with their managers.

Middle management is also the memory of the company.
Hm. I'm trying to see how these examples here match what the article focus is.

The article focus is the shape and structure of useful documentation, provided by the project or by third parties, that, the article doesn't say.

Now. Skillets are a commodity. Training material is completely detached from the product, except maybe for cleaning and maintenance. For motor vehicles, driving instruction is detached from the product. The vehicle manual focuses on how to use _this_ car (in contrast to how to use _a_ car, e.g. in traffic). And violin expertise needs a personal trainer.

And likewise, for some programming languages, for example a C compiler, the user manual just teaches how to configure _this_ compiler. It won't teach you C. You buy separate books for C.

But for a new language? a new paradigm?

Let's look at an apples to apples comparison, what would be real-world products of comparable complexity? Advanced Games could be an example. Physical Games that is, like Settlers of Catan.

And of course these come with documentation, because of course they'll desperately fail if the documentation isn't helpful.

We could argue if the presentation of how to get to useful documentation fits today's attention span, I think both the article and the linked resources are very chatty, but the contents is worth reading if you want your technical software product to be successful, imnsho.
>It may be a blind spot of my own, but I can't think of many examples of fantasy with truly common folk as the primary perspective.

How common and how fantastic?

Conan is a hillman. He just becomes more accomplished over time.

Fafyrd is from a frozen waste, trained as a skald. Notable only because he left his tribe interested in civilization.

Vaatzes from KJ Parkers Engineer Trilogy is foreman. A really good engineer, but replaced instantly when he is banished.

Sort of inverted with Saevus Corax, where the main guy is trying really hard not to be royalty, and so he scavenges dead people on battlefields for a living hoping no one will find him.
What happened to tomshardware.
Even if they do, they've culled those that they deemed weren't a good fit, possibly changing the hiring criteria. If the criteria for both is rational, purging can be very good for an org, and the employees. Crap managers make jobs suck for everyone involved.

edit: I'll say, I've only ever left a job because of a manager. Shortly before leaving my current job, due to a crap manager, the previous manager was fired. The entire org benefited.
Linux 6.14-Rc7 Released with v6.14 Final Expected Next Weekend
The paper tray is very small, like 75 pages which is annoying. Everything else with the EcoTank is great.
There's also s2n-quic.
I maintain a combined error and resource state per thread.

It is first argument to all functions.

If no errors, function proceeds - if error, function instead simply immediately returns.

When allocating resource, resource is recorded in a btree in the state.

When in a function an error occurs, error is recorded in state; after this point no code executes, because all code runs only if no errors.

At end of function is boilerplate error, which is added to error state if an error has occurred. So for example if we try to open file and out of disk, we first get error "fopen failed no disk", then second error "opening file failed", and then all parent functions in the current call stack will submit their errors, and you get a call stack.

Program then proceeds to exit(), and immediately before exit frees all resources (and in correct order) as recorded in btree, and prints error stack.
I tend to agree with Amazon leadership here, as they increase the management layer on a company, the team accountability and ownership gets lost. A more horizontal company is able to do more (per capita) and faster.

The tricky part is what to do when you scale, as you can't simply leave teams to their own devices as they will run their separate ways, so you do more and faster but in the wrong direction.

But then again, when you add management layer you start a chain reaction that creates this complex cake that might stop everything from happening.

It is a complex balance.
Not just that. People had ".plan" files that could be viewed with finger, and they would post updates there. I specifically remember John Carmack sharing daily news and updates on his account. It was the first form of "Twitter" back in the 90's.
Simple wins. Always.

I've backed up on just about everything going back to QIC-150s, but today I just use a set of 4Tb drives that I rsync A/B copies to and rotate offsite. That gives me several generations as well as physical redundancy.

The iteration before that, I made multiple sets of Blu-Rays, which became unwieldy due to volume, but was write-once with multiple physical generations. I miss that, but at one point I needed to restore some files and even though I used good Verbatim media, a backup from a couple months prior was unreadable. All copies had a mottled appearance and the drive that wrote it (and verified) was unable to read it. Did finally find a drive that would read it, but finally pushed me over the edge.

I wonder how the author's 18yo media will compare to modern 5yo media. It's been a long time since we have had the rock solid Taio Yuden gold disks ...
Only $10/mo? Where can we go to cover a month