skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd be particularly interested in cases where unionization led to better products and processes. Like in a world where management just wanted to ship everything half baked, the union gave the workforce the voice required to insist on accurate and up to date documentation, comprehensive testing, proper dependency tracking and security practices, etc.

I feel like almost everyone I talk to in tech says that behind the scenes, their company's development workflow is a nightmare, so this doesn't appear to be a problem that's fixing itself under market pressures.
Sorry I have not heard of a single instance where a foreigner was denied entry into the US because of their beliefs about January 6, I think you're going to need to support an assertion like that when you say it has happened "lots"
Speculating on Common Knowledge
Gift link: https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/hamptons-school-principal-gift...
This seems overly-catastrophizing to me. I don't deny it rings true for many, but I think some of the statements here really depend on your team and company.
>> Water is fungible

I call bullshit & shenanigans on this. Water is not money. A certain grade of crude oil can be fungible, but what about after it’s used?

There are many types of water: potable clean water being essential to human existence, but other less pure types can be used in agriculture and industrial applications.

Once water is used, or before it can be reused, processing and transportation is necessary, and that represents significant cost. The cost of processing or transporting money is negligible enough to make it really fungible and usable. Water is heavy, wet, and more volatile than that quarter in your pocket!
People have a lot of opinions of javascript because it really is the Statue of Liberty. You really can know a subset of Algol and have portable apps in the browser asap.

Well gosh darnit, then everyone and their mother is going to come to America

It's an age old envy.
That makes the questionable assumption you’ll always be accounting for all attack vectors someone might come up with on services that you don’t think of as dangerous. It only takes a single, contrived way to daisy-chain a way into another system using that innocuous messaging platform you signed up for eight years ago that can now be coerced to send spoofed emails in your name.

A password manager with randomly generated passwords and 2FA is the only sane response to millions of automated attacks.
> And for games like Overwatch, I don't think improving is a moral imperative; there's nothing wrong with having fun at 50%-ile or 10%-ile or any rank. But in every game I've played with a rating and/or league/tournament system, a lot of people get really upset and unhappy when they lose even when they haven't put much effort into improving. If that's the case, why not put a little bit of effort into improving and spend a little bit less time being upset?

Interesting read, but I feel like the author could've spent just one more minute on this sentence. How good you are at given activity often doesn't matter, because you're mostly going to encounter people around your own level. What I'm saying is, unless you're at the absolute top or the absolute bottom, you're going to have similar ratio of wins to loses regardless whether you're a pro or an amateur, simply because an amateur gets paired with other amateurs, while a pro gets paired with other pros. In other words, not being the worst is often everything you need, and being the best is pretty much unreachable anyway.

This can be very well extended to our discussion about SWEs. As long as you're not the worst nor the best, your skill and dedication have little correlation with your salary, job satisfaction, etc. Therefore, if you know you can't become the best, doing bare minimum not to get fired is a very sensible strategy, because beyond that point, the law of diminishing returns hits hard. This is especially important when you realize that usually in order to improve on anything (like programming), you need to use up resources that you could use for something else. In other words, every 15 minutes spent improving is 15 minutes not spent browsing TikTok, with the latter being obviously a preferable activity.
> Live your own life to the fullest. Don't even worry about dating / the apps.

This doesn't work. I mean, it seems to work for you because you travel a lot or live somewhere where a lot of outdoor hobbies are possible.

For nerdy men, if you're not careful about hobbies you're going to pick some where you will literally never meet a woman into it, or else only strange or highly autistic ones who aren't good for you, and this isn't always obvious ahead of time.

I don't mean anything stereotypical about this either. Like "women aren't into video games or anime" isn't true, but they're not into it the way you might be into it. (In my experience they're healthier about it and like creating/producing things themselves, whereas men like complaining about them online. But this part is a bit stereotypical.)

You do need to know what women who are your type are into, and you need to genuinely be that kind of person or at least be able to appreciate it.
What happens when a culture becomes overwhelmingly individualistic and becomes blind to the at-scale harms?
First principles don't equal speculation.
> I resonate with all of these problems, but the "fixes" sound like a politician saying, "elect me and I'll solve your problems."

Damn you have a way different ear for people than I do. Unions actually have an incentive to please their constituents. Politicians generally don't (at least in america).
The solution to this problem seems pretty straightforward (if potentially technically very tricky to implement): Restrict the use of LLMs for this and similar purposes, at least without anchoring the LLM's answer in a web search and make it quote its sources.

If an LLM then, due to its training and various input and output filters, declines to e.g. compute a credit score for John Doe, because it can't verify whether its training set contained non-scoring-permissible data (which is regulated in many countries), I'd say it's working exactly as expected.
What if your cookie is compromised and you want to ensure the attacker cannot log into your account anymore?
I use Piper for one of my apps. It runs on CPU and doesn't require a GPU. It will run well on a raspberry pi. I found a couple of permissively licensed voices that could handle technical terms without garbling them.

However, it is unmaintained and the Apple Silicon build is broken.

My app also uses whisper.cpp. It runs in real time on Apple Sillicon or on modern fast CPUs like AMD's gaming CPUs.
They’re still not an auto company.

A lot of tech companies make no money at all for the first years or even a decade of their existence. This one decided to make some money, giving themselves a longer runway to do very hard things (like building gigantic automated factories that can build automated things that can build automated things).

You’re right that a company that sells cars is a car company. But investors tend to invest in future prospects, and Tesla’s future is not as a car company.

The adage goes, “you can be right or you can be rich”.

I’m not saying Tesla will succeed or even that it’s a good bet.

I’m saying there’s a valid investment thesis that posits P/E for Tesla is a poor metric.
Nice writing and summary there.
As an author of stelvio I felt the same. It's not that there're no tools. But none of them is covering enough AWS surface while being truly focused on Python devs. Some are general infra tools (CDK, Pulumi) focused on infra people, where python is not primary language, some are Python tools like Chalice (likely abandonded) and some are meant for Python devs but use json (Zappa).

I wrote my own thinking here https://blog.stelvio.dev/why-i-am-building-stelvio/

I 'm working hard on Stelvio hoping it can become the best tool to do infra in Python.

Btw. If you'd be willing to share more details about what you want/miss in python cloud tooling could you drop me an email at michal at stelvio.dev ? I'm happy to talk. Applies to other interested people too!
Half of those problems disappear in Europe, quality of life and happiness skyrocket. Sure, you won't have some carrot-on-the-stick IPO games but I don't need to, I am not on the verge of burning out, I have plenty of time for my family and kids and also myself. Kids education is free including top notch unis, (almost) so is stellar healthcare, no need to massively save up for that regardless of what can happen.

I had a big paragliding accident last year with both legs broken, tons of treatment, mris, various physiotherapies... still ongoing and cost 0 nothing, in even rural US those costs would be brutal. My (early) retirement is very well taken care of if all works out, we will probably have more money than we could reasonably spend plus some serious assets, all just our work from 0 in past decade and a half, both just employed at companies. Criminality is a topic on its own. I could go on for a looong time.

I couldn't care less about unions, I never felt oppressed or disadvantaged in any way in past 20 years across 3 different countries and many jobs, in contrary.

Good luck putting a price tag on such things, if you don't get it wait till you are older. Thats how advanced modern society should look like IMHO... the stress of being american with family and without massive cash reserves must be quite intense and relentless.
As a fairly progressive news outlet attracting staff with certain sensibilties in the NYC area and selling views to people who are the same, the NYTimes board of directors has a vested PR interest in tolerating unions with the large amounts money they have to pay for the privilege. I'm not convinced the company is better served by unionized employees over the rest of the tech scene, which has to innovate to stay solvent.

Knowing someone in tech there who refused to join the union, I was told these guys aren't particularly the best or smartest colleagues she's ever worked with to put it mildly.
My company firewall blocked this for reason ()

Uh, huh...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40580037
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40087723
cowspiracy is a great documentary on this
Corner Inverter – SVG inverted corner generator tool
Doctors have unions [1] ("among actively practicing physicians, approximately 70,000 currently belong to a union, representing 8% of physicians" [2]), lawyers have essentially guilds. If your wealth is closer to Brin’s than the median, than you’re an outlier whom I would not expect to need nor value a union (congrats on your luck). Unions are for the median, not the very wealthy and lucky [3].

The median annual wage for physicians and surgeons in the US was $239,200 in 2023. In May 2023, the median annual wage for lawyers in the U.S. was $145,760, with the lowest 10% earning less than $69,760 and the highest 10% earning more than $239,200. Stats shamelessly stolen from the US BLS website.

[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/doctors-unionize-as-health...

[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9616465/

[3] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/a-visual-breakdown-of-who-o...
I agree. Both items are only useful in situations where extensive jamming is happening.

The far more dangerous thing would be explosives and those are not available from the listed sources. Weapons of war don’t do much if they don’t go boom.
That's correct. Just because it doesn't make sense doesn't mean it's not correct, it's because there are opposing pressures you need to follow.
My company doesn't speculate in stock market gambling so we have literally zero problems
Any plans to make a Chrome extension variant? Been looking for a high quality and cheap TTS extension for ages (like ElevenLabs Human Reader, except with less absurd pricing)
Hey mousematrix, I've tested with 3 concurrent sessions all writing to the same table - and with "BEGIN TRANSACTION" for each.

I opened a TPC-H SF1GB database with GizmoSQL, started 3 concurrent client sessions, and had each session run:

BEGIN TRANSACTION;
INSERT INTO lineitem SELECT * FROM lineitem;
COMMIT;

None of the 3 sessions were blocked - and all were able to insert into the table, and read the results of their inserts before committing.

It was very cool to see also that writes do NOT block reads from other sessions - the other sessions just could not see uncommitted data.

After committing in one session, the other sessions could see the data that was inserted.

I haven't stress tested the system to get limits, but I thought this little test would prove useful information for your question.

I'll work to do some benchmarking on concurrent inserts, etc.

Updates to the same data by multiple sessions behave a little differently - see details from page: https://duckdb.org/docs/stable/connect/concurrency.html

Thanks for your question!
Maybe we already have Universal Basic Income, you just need to have a pointless job to collect it.
I still don't get why Claude needs my phone number to sign up. Feels gross and is a such a shame, as their LLM seems great.
Definitely. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen some horrid login flow and cringed to think about what it’s like for people who have visual or cognitive impairments, use a janky old phone they got on one of those lifeline plans, etc. If I’m remembering right, one test with SMS codes with a short expiration (10-15 minutes) had lose to half of older users struggling with delays and the challenge of copy-pasting or remembering only the code within that time limit.

We have really lost our way as a field for some basic user experiences and that really shouldn’t be acceptable for government services or companies people need to deal with like utilities, banks, etc.
In my experience, most contemporary managers also think they know everything now because they can write genAI prompts without realizing the AI will tend to agree with whatever they put into it.

Micromanagement has gotten really horrible in the past few years. They hire SMEs then discard everything they suggest.
Fine, I ordered three.
> so if it is causing pain people should find a way to contact the website operators in question

Yeah, no. That's silly and no normie knows how to contact website operators, or are likely to even understand they should. Also how would they find the contact of they can't access the website. This is exactly the same situation as their captcha giving you an infinite loop.
Thanks for the spell check!
Good conversations have lots of doorknobs (2022)
Venezuelan Soccer player, Jerce Reyes Barrios was deported to Cecot prison in El Salvador for having a Real Madrid soccer tattoo.

"none of those who enter the Cecot ever leave on foot"
Ideas:

- Make it generate cryptucurrency, so that the work is not wasted. Either to compensate for server expences hosting the content, or for some noble non-profit cause - all installations would collect the currency to a single account. Wasting the work is worse than these both options.

- An easy way for good crawlers (like internet archive) to authenticate themselves. E.g. TLS client side authentication or simply an HTTP request header containing signature for the request (the signature in the header may be based on, for example, on their domain name and the TLS cert for that domain)
Their single board computers intended for robotics/edge have had a history of being poorly supported and stuck on old kernel versions.
That would almost certainly be more expensive. When people talk about modern masks being $15M or so for each mask set, a huge fraction of the cost is this process for the masks.

It also doesn't tell you as much about how your design actually runs on the process in question.
I think he is Korean, that may account for the cultural differences
My best guess is he's a very unlikable person. Ask yourself:

1. why his wife kicked him out

2. why none of his friends would let him crash on their couch

3. why his best buddy is a sycophantic robot

The donation thing isn't malicious I think, but an indicator of poor moral character. Donations should go to selfless people who are working hard to better society. Not someone who does drugs and sleeps in a car. I'm sure he thinks he's a very good person who deserves to have the money to live a bourgeois life. But if he were a good person, he would know it's not about him. It's about getting a rational return on investment for society. If he wants to reform himself, then he needs to stop thinking about how tough his own life is and start devoting himself to others.
There's no reason why tech unions can't have solidarity with other unionization efforts (and there are thousands of reason why we should have that solidarity).

Us tech workers could be leveraging the privilege we have to get better conditions for everyone.

A perfect example is non-compete clauses. Tech workers enjoy high job mobility, which is only hindered by non-competes. It's no accident that major tech hubs were some of the first states to ban them, helping all workers.
I could be wrong, but think the German economy just broke last week when they blew the cap off their debt ceiling and kicked current day payments to future generations. Note that Germany protects its production with tariffs and VATs, the rough average I've found is 19-21%.

I think China is the one to watch. They have double the energy output of the US and are basically the production capital of the world for the foreseeable future unless something changes.
> you are forced to always go forward in your "reading", so your opportunities to trace back to a hard concept or even pause and think about a sentence for a while are close to 0

my earbuds have a double-tap to play/pause. What makes you think I don't use it??

> but if you were trying to improve your comprehension of language by reading harder books, or trying to study actual concepts, audiobooks would be useless

reading is reading. For nonfiction where my goal is to learn I do audio and pause to take notes. For entertainment I read speculative fiction usually as audio-only, sometimes also with text (Malazan and Terra Ignota being notable for when I wanted text). But that doesn't mean that what I listen to with audio only is somehow lower quality.

And it's kind of funny to me that you say "improve my comprehension of language" because I listen to audiobooks somewhere between 3.5x and 4.3x speed generally (and still working on improving my comprehension at higher speeds). You're probably going to say that this necessarily means I don't understand what I read but...no, actually, listening to audio has drastically improved my language processing ability. And even if mostly I'm listening to fiction for entertainment, this improvement in comprehension carries over to reading nonfiction.
Yes, saying that calling Win32 APIs is not the most ergonomic approach to writing UIs would be an understatement, but if any software can be called stable, this is it.
An interesting side question, but not relevant to the argument.
I'm not sure what that means but the important thing is that HN story moderation is not just dang unflagging things.
what show?
You're technically right, of course.

And one example of your point is when people first took a look at underwater volcanoes a few decades ago and found worlds of life no one had even imagined.

Then again, on a practical level, any ocean floor area humanity might mine would be carefully studied beforehand. That's needed to know where and how to mine, if nothing else.

So I'll claim that anywhere we'd mine we'd have a very good view of what life would be affected how. There could still be a Martian UFO base on the ocean floor 20 miles away, of course, but that wouldn't be affected.
Well, they are professionals, they sure add "reddit" to every query.
We don't need software unions. We need to break up big tech.

Software companies should be able to hire and fire. We often need to have 24/7 oncall. Needs are flexible. Startups must be nimble.

It's the tech giants that are ruining it for everyone. They're preventing new centicorns from forming. They're forcing underpriced M&A for successes, moving into markets with infinite money and killing upstarts before they find legs. They own every platform, every discovery mechanism, and they tax more than governments do.

Big tech recently figured out they could pay off everyone and put pricing pressure back on the engineers that built their market position. Previously they were worried engineers could leave and start upstart competitors. That's why they hired everyone and paid top of band salaries. Now that they realize there is no governmental antitrust legislation to fear, they just crush everything.

They're in search of infinite growth, so they move into new markets like Hollywood movies and primary care doctors and undercut everyone. They market themselves for free at the top of their websites and app stores (or print giant ads on their delivery trucks and cardboard packaging). Things that would cost competitors hundreds of millions of dollars to do.

The problem is 100% big tech.

We need to break up big tech.
In Brin’s Sundiver, a spaceship is able to get close to a star by dumping heat into huge freaking lasers. It would never occurred to me in 1 million years that if you have an efficient enough power source, this approach appears to work.
Username checks out. Go back to your department.
Sounds plausible, but that hypothesis is ultimately belied by the the NYT's actual stance toward their unions (which is hostile): https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/feb/01/leaked-message...

> The National Labor Relations Board rejected the New York Times’ attempt to stop the election, alleging the bargaining unit was improper. The company had previously declined to voluntarily recognize the union and immediately began holding anti-union captive audience meetings with workers.

> The NewsGuild of New York filed a complaint earlier this month with the NLRB, accusing the Times of violating federal labor law by adding new paid days off to the company holiday calendar for non-union employees only – which was viewed as a tactic to dissuade workers from voting for the union.

> After the complaint was filed, the New York Times made similar changes to its bereavement policy, making it applicable only to non-union workers. The union is collecting signatures as part of a public petition demanding the New York Times stop what it calls union-busting.

> On 5 January, the NLRB filed a complaint against the Times, ruling the company violated federal labor law by telling some employees they could not show support for tech workers seeking to unionize.
What's the recommended way to run LLMs these days?

Ollama seems to work with DeepSeek R1 with enough memory using an older CPU but it's around 1 token/second on my desktop.
I think you're giving the F-35 a lot of unjustified credit. For one, Russian air doctrine has long fielded interchangeable radar/IR homing seekers specifically to target American stealth platforms. If your F-35 is afterburning so it can match an Su-35's supercruise speed, they can get smacked by an R-77 from BVR by a Russian jet just as easily as an AIM-120 could crush the Sukhoi. Radar stealth is not a panacea in the EOTS era, and the F-35's side/rear aspect stealth is not enough to make it invisible at every angle.

Furthermore, as much as I love a slick single-engine fighter, the F-35 is still fundamentally designed to operate in contested airspace. Canada, if they operated the jet for the next 50 years, would likely never have to use it for it's intended joint strike purpose. Unless you habitually molest the borders of other nations, the F-35 is not a purchase that makes a whole lot of sense to taxpayers. If the F-35 was truly "comically overpowered" then Congress wouldn't be asking to restart the F-22 production line, now would they?