A web crawler reads page content, extracts content and URLs, places them into an index, and then follows links in that index to further build the index and content corpus. Google and others have special crawlers that execute JavaScript to crawl content delivered dynamically.
Crawlers do not use the browser back button or browser history. So the only way Google could observe such problems is by observing live human browsing behavior.
Also, we know from exhibits in the U.S. DOJ trial that Google does use Chrome browsing behavior as a signal in search ranking. It’s not a hypothetical.
> Crawlers do not use the browser back button or browser history.
Couldn't you instrument the crawler's browser engine to observe whether (while crawling) the page does any behaviors that would result in back button hijacking? No back buttons have to be clicked.
You just have to watch whether the mousetrap is set. Since you know how mousetraps work, you don't have to grab the cheese.
So maybe someone can open a new sandwich shop and accomplish the same thing without screwing everybody else in the process. Not only that, Lewiston probably doesn’t have a glut of data center talent seeking employment —I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that not a single person living in Lewiston when a project like that was approved would be employed there.
The data center jobs are middle class. With progressive taxation, those 30 middle class jobs generate about 100 average people's worth of revenue. Presumably Lewiston has schools which could use the funds.
And presumably everybody in Lewiston already has lunch somewhere, so a new sandwich shop that was successful would put another lunch spot out of business, for a net zero jobs.
Edit: the larger point here is that jobs, particularly skilled jobs, don't grow on trees (much like money). New technologies and new jobs replace old technologies and old jobs. If you put a ban on new technologies and new jobs, you'll just have more unemployed people.
Nobody that lives in Lewiston will get those jobs, and the people that get those jobs will almost certainly live in more upscale places nearby.
Tack a new building that size onto Bath Ironworks? That’s a huge boon. Heck even an Amazon warehouse would be an improvement. But a data center? For the people in Lewiston, it would be far more of a negative than a positive — and that’s the way it works in this country. We value money over people. If private equity, venture capitalists or huge corporations want something that you don’t want, you lose. Getting a policy win is a rarity and I’d be surprised if it didn’t get successfully challenged in court.
You forgot to include an argument in your comment. I cited specific positive impacts (tax revenue) but you just talked about negative impact in the abstract, without citing anything specific, and then went on a rant about how the world works.
Not if it drives up energy prices and makes other businesses that employ more people less competitive. Not saying that is the case but it’s certainly not a given
replace "mcdonalds" with "specialty health foods" or "flower shop" or "independent book store" or whatever and my points remains unchanged: job numbers arent an argument in favor of datacenters, they are an argument against them.
Only if you don't have a working content blocker on that device which you should have. Using web devices without content blockers is just as bad for your health as sunbathing on the local garbage dump. Just get a content blocker and protect yourself from the filth. If you happen to use a device which does not allow effective content blocking - something from the fruit factory or something totally googly - you might want to consider getting something which is more aligned with your needs and less with those of the aforementioned companies.
That's the point though. TVs like from TFA are preventing use when air gapped. As more manufacturers go this route, there will be fewer tvs that will allow that to work
I want to thank everyone who hates work, is mentally checked out of their jobs and quiet quitting etc.
It makes it much easier for me to distinguish myself as a hard worker who cares about the business being successful. It also helps me keep my job during layoffs because I can assure you the managers have noticed.
When you are old and have lots of formative experiences that are not work-based, we can shake hands and mutually appreciate each other's motives and respective outcomes.
I am arguably a successful employee in a tech-focused role. I enjoy my job and others seem to feel I'm good at what I do.
That said: I am NOT at all interested in identifying myself in social situations by my job. When someone asks what I do, I respond that I work in tech. I am not interested in giving more details nor talking in-depth about what I do to others I have just met.
Why? Because that's not at all what makes me...me. I am far more interested in what I do outside of work (reading...a lot, listening to music, spending as much time w/my family as possible, traveling, spending time at my lake home, etc). That is what I work to do; enjoy my life.
I realize this is an uncommon opinion, but I find it SO VERY ODD that folks are OBSESSED about their jobs and make it a central point of their existence to those outside of their specific industry. I do NOT care what someone does for their day-to-day; it's unlikely it will have any impact on me or my friendship with them. I want to know what they bring to the table in our current or potential social situation and the fact that they make PowerPoint presentations for whomever to look at, ask a few questions answered in the presentation's appendix, and never think about again doesn't do anything to further any of that.
I’d much rather know and learn about someone’s passion for woodworking, hill walking, flower arranging, whatever they enjoy doing in their free time, rather than having to talk about their (or my!) work.
Yeah! IMHO "What are you into / what do you care about or do for fun?" should replace "What do you do? [ie, what's your profession / where do you work]" as the default ice-breaker. More interesting, less reductive or competitive.
So you are saying that your job does not have any impact on your personality, despite you are there for 8+h a day?
The environment you are in for hours (even if its great, you are forced) does not shapre who you are?
And regarding social interactions: Its no difference for you interacting with people from your mind-liked crowd in opposion to someone who runs a gun-shop-chain? For sure, a constructed example, but Id say there is for sure some difference when acting with the different groups?
> So you are saying that your job does not have any impact on your personality, despite you are there for 8+h a day
(Not OP) It's not a core part of it, no. I'm a person who likes solving problems and has an attention to detail. If I see that something is wrong I have a desire to fix it regardless of it's my responsibility or not. This could be finding an outdated piece of documentation at work or finding a piece of litter on the street.
These traits make me an effective software engineer (up to the senior level, then I have to fight against those parts of my personality and focus on specific high-impact things if I want to succeed at Staff+), but they are a part of who I am totally independent from my career.
Software engineering is a field that I am good at and that pays exceptionally well, but I could be happy utilizing these traits in any number of careers. Were I financially independent, my dream career would probably be something closer to the people who design and build elaborate contraptions for stage shows such as Cirque du Soleil.
I like asking both, but these days a lot of the "what do you do for fun" answers are just consumption hobbies (e.g. I watch X show on Netflix) that people use to switch off after a long day of work. It's easier to think of interesting follow up questions about someone's work than about these kinds of hobbies. Even if (especially if) the work is something completely different from what I'm doing.
As the sister comment said: "Not if they work outside of tech…"
And not even then, in many cases. I know exactly what I do, but having to explain that to anyone, including people in tech, is difficult.
And, you know, it's not interesting to talk about. Talking about that is fine at the job, that's what we do. I have no interest in talking about that when I'm not working. Instead I want to talk about other things. Hobbies, activities, music, books, whatever. Enquring about someone's job will not lead to that at all.
> It also helps me keep my job during layoffs because I can assure you the managers have noticed.
If you believe the managers who interact with you have any say in who gets laid off, then your understanding of how business works isn't nearly as good as you seem to believe it is.
Something tells me you haven't been laid off before. I think the overconfidence you're displaying here will be shattered if that were to happen. I hope it doesn't happen to you, but if it does I hope you remember that you are not your job.
I think it has a lot to do with the size of the organization. If you're at a relatively small company, it's not that hard to identify and retain the top performers.
If you're at a faceless megacorp, that's a different story.
You can be laid off at small companies too. For example, a company may be running out of runway and it's looking increasingly likely the next round of funding will not materialize in time. It needs to control expenses and extend runway an extra 6 months, but everyone's a "top-performer". Who gets laid off? It's likely going to be those adding features (e.g. product folks), not those maintaining the business (accounting, devops). We can get into whether it's a good idea to kick off the death spiral for a company in that way, but my point is that no one is immune to layoffs, not at any scale, except maybe the founders.
> worker who cares about the business being successful
In most cases, this is a sucker mentality that makes you vulnerable to abusive employers. You will stress yourself out making your boss richer. They won't care or make reciprocal gestures. They'd be happy to replace you should you become inconvenient.
It’s not about stressing yourself out; that’s something you can ultimately control (though admittedly, many people are bad at separating the two) but more about _how good you are at putting on a show_ of giving a shit.
There is a non zero chance that the company I work for pivots into some weird crypto niche (low, but we’re already fintech-y). If that happens, I’m out, but no way in hell am I gonna pivot my work personality overnight because of a business decision made by the company’s board and investors.
If I need to put on a happy face for my boss to keep my job, then I’m gonna do it because I can’t afford not to at the moment. That’s not to say there is no line, but being a generally positive person in the workplace is a role I’m fine with playing. It costs me very little personally and opens a lot of doors because let’s face it, nobody likes working with a loathsome human being, even if they’re right.
Am I a sucker? Maybe by your definition, but I don’t feel like one currently.
I've known people who survived multiple rounds of layoffs, not because they were "distinguished", but because they were the cheapest. Meanwhile, their more talented counterparts got the ax for being too expensive. Simple as that.
> It also helps me keep my job during layoffs because I can assure you the managers have noticed.
I can assure you that when they are laying off to cut costs, which is most of the time, what they notice is A) the old/expensive ones who can be let go without any major disruptions and B) the "expendables" such as contractors or those they have a personal dislike of - the latter usually has not much to do with hard work and a lot more to do with perception. Category A is to meet cost targets while category B can also help with number targets.
If you think your hard work alone will save you, I pray that life spares you that rude shock.
It does matter because it's your network that gets you your next job and colleagues remember who was doing a good job and helping meet goals and those who didn't.
I have no faith that this is satire since America is full of people who underestimate the impact of luck and privilege in the course of their life in favor of a view that everything is due to their own personal efforts and the suffering of others is obviously due to their personal defects. These people will relentlessly defend any actions by the owner class without realizing that they themselves are not in that class and never will be. They say things like this a lot.
I mostly agree with the parent post. There certainly are roles where the entire scope of the job is to convert Jira tickets to code and nothing else and nobody will blame you for being a checked out 9-5er in such places but that isn't the audience of HN. Most here are software engineers who get fairly broad latitude to exercise judgment and expertise/education in furtherance of business goals and that's they get the FAANG-sized paycheck and RSUs/stock grants for. And you better believe colleagues in those roles notice who is just doing the minimum and who is helping to achieve goals.
You only care about “business goals” under a certain age, I’d say 35-ish, afterwards, if you hadn’t realized by that point that it’s just a paycheck and nothing more then no mindfulness trickery not any “let’s-experience-things”-consoomerism is going to fill the spiritual void inside of you.
Could be 35-ish of age, like in my case, could be later, could be earlier, but at some point that realization will have to come otherwise you’ll remain an empty corpse throughout the rest of it all.
You care for business goals because that's what you're being paid to do. The "nuh-uh, I'm being paid to code and that's it" are the ones who wonder why their career stalled early.
Nobody's saying you should care about business goals personally; that would indeed be dumb.
We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines and ignoring our requests to stop. You can't do this here, no matter how wrong another comment is or you feel it is.
The assumption here is that the people who maintain something in a painstaking manner did not intend people to take it and do whatever they want with it in accordance with its license?
It seems to be a common view on HN that licenses and conditional access to websites should be ignored (i.e. WRT ad-blockers), but also that licenses on Open-Source Software repositories should be respected (i.e. WRT LLM training). I believe that holding these contradictory views is common, but the conflict would need to be resolved to come to a conclusion on how to proceed with LLM training.
Replication is not the same as reproduction; I can replicate an API without violating someone's license or copyright (which I would by reproducing their work).
Developers are permitted to learn from open source code with restrictive copyrights, and apply those lessons to developing other software which does not comply with the copyright of their 'example'.
As an aside, I do believe that LLM trainers are ignoring and violating many licenses, but open-source software is not a clear example of a violation.
Depends on how you define "learn": usually, a company wanting to rebuild and publish something under a different license prohibits their developers from having ever looked at original code, to avoid the risk of copying over exact snippets out of their memory accidentally.
Copyright protects only arbitrarily non-trivial parts of the original being reproduced, but that means that you have to be careful with learning from copyrighted material. Programming books will have direct clauses allowing snippet reuse, but not for teaching purposes.
> Sure, but developers are permitted to learn from open source code with restrictive copyrights, and apply those lessons to developing other software which does not comply with the copyright of their 'example'.
This was a different argument. And there is no contradiction to separate LLMs and people.
> As an aside, I do believe that LLM trainers are ignoring and violating many licenses, but open-source software is not a clear example of a violation.
You seem to be conflating copyright with access rights. Two very different things. Regardless of your feelings on either, there is no contradiction in holding different views on them.
Well no, it’s about legally gating the ability to copy so the original author doesn’t have to compete in the same market to sell his own book with every other bloke with a printing press and a copy of the book. Everything else is an addendum.
Don’t confuse the social justification with the actual purpose of copyright law just because it’s written into the US Constitution that way. America didn’t invent copyright law.
Where and when? In cases where LLM coding assistants reproduce copyleft code in someone's work assignment? The responsibility in those would be on the user, not on AI.
Are you doing a full search of every GPL licensed repository every time you use an LLM to ensure that it isn't giving you GPL licensed code? That doesn't seem reasonable
That's because licenses are an abstract complexity tacked on to a simple material reality in order "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts".
Just like many cultural rules, they keep growing in complexity until they reach a phase change where they become ignored because they have become too complicated.
OSS licenses haven't grown in complexity all that much in the past forty or so years. They're being ignored more now because it's become easier to ignore them, not because it's become harder to abide by them.
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