lph

> Why would I do it?

Because the investors want you to [1]. Companies are using this as an excuse to cut unprofitable projects (e.g., Alexa). They over-hired before interest rates went up, when borrowing money was essentially free.

> This doesn’t really make sense to me from a game theory POV

Assume company leadership only cares about short-term stock price, and recompute your game theory POV. The outcome is exactly what's happening right now.

[1] https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/google-layoffs-investor-told...

Most of the tech companies having layoffs don't "have to" have layoffs. They're doing it to depress worker compensation across the whole sector. It's a shameless money grab at the expense of their employees.

The author of the letter details how salary contraction would work: "Alphabet should limit stock-based compensation given the depressed share price."

So, cut back on RSU grants.

Tesla's attitude and approach to self-driving technology has been and continues to be outright negligent. There's no way I'm trusting "full self-driving" which clearly cannot live up to its name. It feels like P.T. Barnum is trying to sell me a car. If you ignore that aspect, Tesla's only advantage is its electric technology, which conventional automakers are quickly reaching parity on. Meanwhile, Tesla has never reached parity in build quality or finishes. Which leaves you with a mediocre, expensive car.

The most appealing thing about buying a Tesla, to me, is not having to deal with a normal car dealership.

I've experienced what you describe with Anki also. Moreover, I've felt there needs to be a model of the user's current acuity, because it's highly variable. If I make one error, then yeah, apply the SRS algorithm to that card. But if I get 50% more errors than expected, maybe I'm just exhausted and the session should take that into account. I used to use Anki to study Chinese characters on the way home from work, and after a long hard day with poor sleep the night before, I hit the learning wall a lot faster than usual.

tl;dr a bonus effect of regular Anki practice is you can detect when you're in a stupor

It's astonishing how much benefit of the doubt Elon Musk gets from his cult of personality. Whether or not he's smart, the things he's doing at Twitter are /glaringly/ not smart from a business perspective: He's driven away advertisers, alienated users, crippled system resilience by firing so many engineers, and set the stage for dozens of lawsuits that will run the gamut from employment law to SEC oversight to EU compliance. Twitter is burning, and it's increasingly hard to see how genius Elon Musk is going to salvage it when he keeps throwing gasoline on the fire.

If you were presented this whole debacle in an anonymized format, without Elon Musk's name attached, how would you judge these actions?

Indeed they do, the "City of Everett". You can walk around inside. Boeing used it as a test bed for various experiments. The Museum of Flight is really a gem.

Boeing used to offer tours of the 747 factory. It's immense. I wonder if they're spinning up a different manufacturing line in that building?

Seamless queries that span different storage layers is a pretty big deal. This is like having a table with new data in RDS and old data in Athena.

The potential downside is unpredictable query performance. For example, suppose you have a query that calculates daily statistics from your time series data. The query takes 1 second to execute when you run it for yesterday's data, but 1 minute to run for a day six months in the past, because you've inadvertently shifted your work onto the slower storage layer.

...and for bonus points, play that soundtrack as a background for the AI Herzog-Zizek infinite conversation [1]. It is glorious.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33437296

> I had no time to port the music driver, so I had a band that Art Data hired to redo the music so all I needed to do is call a streaming audio function to play the music. This turned out to be an excellent call because while the graphics were lackluster, the music got rave reviews.

Wow, no kidding. The music is terrific.

[1] DOOM 3DO soundtrack https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjEx292Ph8M

I admire your commitment to this discussion :)

In the Three Body Trilogy, the hyper-advanced aliens use projectiles accelerated to very near the speed of light. The premise is that there's enough energy in these that their impact is an extinction-level event for the planet they hit.

There's a fun thread on Quora[1] about so-called "relativistic kinetic kill vehicles", with the top comment making the good point that a small projectile moving very fast might just punch a clean hole in the planet and keep going, thus not transferring most of its energy.

[1] https://www.quora.com/What-are-Relativistic-Kinetic-Kill-Veh...

Maybe the disconnect is the word "godlike". A truly godlike power wouldn't care, because they're beyond threat. But imagine something more like the cold war: Powers capable of mutual destruction, but not godlike.

In the aftermath of World War II, John von Neumann advocated a preemptive nuclear first strike on the Soviet Union before they could develop their own nuclear weapons. It's monstrous, but it's the same cold logic that the DFH proposes: Destroy others before they have a possibility of destroying you.

FAANG jobs stack rank you against people working 60+ hours a week who are desperate to keep their visas. You might not be technically required to work those long hours, but if you want to keep your job, you have to, unless you're an absolute rock star. It's not "work ethic" driving those long hours. It's fear.

The hyper-capitalist notion that anyone who only wants to work 40 hours a week lacks work ethic is perverse. Jeff Bezos, for example, is proud of his Original Thought that there is "no such thing as work-life balance".

Yes. The Ask MetaFilter section of the site has a deep bank of questions with high-quality answers. Google used to weight these heavily in its search results, so Google directed a lot of potential new users to the site and accounted for a lot of ad revenue.

At some point in the mid-teens, a Google algorithm change de-prioritized MetaFilter, with catastrophic effect on the site's income.

I guess "don't suck" is relative, but my AirPods failed after about a year. It's a coin toss now whether their microphone will work or not, rendering them unreliable and worse than useless for the work Zoom meetings I bought them for. Maybe I'm old-fashioned for expecting any piece of technology to last longer than a year.

I made the mistake of clicking that link on my phone without an ad-blocker, and woooooo boy... far-right fascist ads front and center. Sigh.

Pro tip: If you absolutely must buy the junk being sold by MOFFBUZW and other randomly generated drop-shipper brands, the exact same product is usually available on AliExpress for 10% the price.

Google made an algorithm change a few years back that knocked ask.metafilter.com answers way down in search results. The resulting drop in ad revenue was disastrous for metafilter, which runs with a small staff on a tight budget. Kind of bitter to remember considering the dismal quality of search results today.

Most recent program: I wanted time-lapse photos of some potted plants I'm trying to grow. So I stuck QR codes on the pots and take a picture of each one each day with my phone. That goes to Google Photos, and a cron job scans new photos, recognizes the QR code, and copies the photos into directories for each plant with filenames that sort chronologically. Most of the plants died. I am a better programmer than gardener.

Most used program: I keep a journal of practical daily happenings in Emacs org-mode, organized hierarchically by year/month/day. It was too much hassle to add new entries (I'm lazy), so now I have a utility that inserts journal entries in the correct place from the command line, e.g., "add-journal 'talked with roofers to get estimate'". It's turned into an ad-hoc database for recording things like my weight, also, which gets parsed and turned into a graph.

Mito looks very cool! Looking forward to trying it.

The blending of spreadsheets and notebooks seems inevitable. One trend notebook-as-program. I've heard several variations of this: "The data scientists give us a notebook, and our automation runs the notebook to do <ML thing> on <our internal data sets>". It's clunky to use a format initially intended for interactive visual use for headless automation, but there's a practical wisdom to sticking with whatever format the data scientists prefer. Twenty years ago, I saw the same sort of thing with engineers and spreadsheets.

The one thing notebooks lose, though, is data flow computing. That's a major strength of spreadsheets, and the imperative execution of notebook cells seems like a step backwards. Although I'm sure somebody has bolted some kind of inter-cell dependency execution onto Jupyter by this point.

So tired of the culture war infecting every corner of public discourse. This article: One culture war guy criticizes another culture war guy. Nothing to do with tech.

Why is it on Hacker News?

No, the teams weren't trying to exclude women. Not at all. They were representative of the company and the entire industry. There are very few women in tech.

So then the question is why are very few women in tech? If you really dive into this, it's a chicken-and-egg problem: The fact that so few women are in tech makes the whole scene into sort of a frat house, which is often not a welcoming or kind environment to women, so women avoid it. A feedback loop. And one way you can try to combat that is by encouraging entry into the field. Et voilà: "Girls who code".

I disagree, and here's why: Andrew Yang is ignoring the elephant in the room. It's not just that the concerns I brought up are another factor, it's that they are by far the dominant factor in why young men are dropping out and discontent. At least in my opinion.

To use another analogy: it's like going to the ER for a sucking chest wound and being told you should reduce your cholesterol. They're not wrong, but this is probably not the most pressing concern.

I have two elementary-aged children, a boy and a girl. They fit the pattern you describe to a T, and I think most teachers' experience would agree.

So anecdotally, the theory that (in general) boys need more nudging than girls from someone in their life in order to be successful rings true. But what would account for a modern change? Are there fewer people pushing, now? Are boys more resistant to it now, or maybe more distracted? Are expectations of boys different now than they were in the past?

"No country, however rich, can afford the waste of its human resources. Demoralization caused by vast unemployment is our greatest extravagance. Morally, it is the greatest menace to our social order."

-FDR

> hosted a men’s IT society at work

Maybe, just maybe, the point of those events for women has something to do with the fact that everything else in the tech world is a de-facto boys' club.

My current team at work: 6 men. Previous team at a different company: 27 men, 3 women. The team before that: 5 men. The team before that: 10 men, 2 women.

I guess we can debate "marginalized", but women are unquestionably a minority in tech.

(I am also a man, fwiw)

Andrew Yang makes some good points in this piece, particularly about positive masculinity and role models. Whether fair or not, the perception that the left is hostile to men has driven recruitment for the far right, and that merits some reflection.

But he's also really facile about underlying economic causes. It's easy to blame problems on "our culture has been broken by the wokes!", but many of the problems of young men are not unique to them. Fewer women are entering college, also. Women are dropping out of the workforce, also. More young women are living with their parents, also. Is that because they lacked strong masculine role models?

Or is it because the rising costs of college, housing, healthcare, and living have made the traditional path much less attainable? Absent fathers didn't do that. These are the same patterns you see in any country with a shrinking economy; it's just a shock to Americans who feel they were promised better.

(In summary: Maybe Andrew Yang should spend more time talking to Bernie Sanders)

Lots of stolen cars are used for joyriding or other crimes and then abandoned. The "recovered" statistic includes a lot of "your car was found six weeks later, trashed, in an industrial parking lot".

It's a good idea. The flaw is in thinking USPS is even slightly interested in innovating. They're not.

But then we also have a notary public system, which is already in the business of verifying identification for official purposes. That could do it too.

"The judge responded by disallowing the zoomed-in footage unless the prosecution could prove that it wasn’t manipulated, and only giving them 20 minutes to find and produce an expert witness from Apple, which was obviously impossible. "

20 minutes to find an expert?

All of this hinges on whether or not Apple really is using AI (like super-resolution) for pinch and zoom. If they are, this is a totally valid objection.

But I've never heard that iPad pinch-and-zoom does this. It would be surprising if it's more than plain old interpolation.

Not to mention the defense lawyer clearly doesn't understand what the hell he's talking about, which doesn't exactly engender confidence in the judge taking this complaint seriously: "iPads, which are made by Apple, have artificial intelligence in them that allow things to be viewed through three dimensions and logarithms"

OH NO. LOGARITHMS!